War On Women Are Infiltrating the Punk Rock Dude-Fest

It’s just after 6:30 at night, and Shawna Potter is sitting in a van outside of Lee’s Palace, a graffiti-strewn theater-turned-punk-club blocks away from the University of Toronto. She should be well into sound check at the moment—the rest of her band, War On Women, strum guitars and thud drums inside—but Potter isn’t hassled. This is the second night in a row the band will climb the Lee’s Palace stage and unleash their Baltimore-bred brand of thrash punk. The sound guy, Potter says, knows the deal by now.

Potter and the War On Women crew are two days into an east coast tour with Propagandhi and RVIVR, three bands that land scattershot on the spectrum of political punk—from Propagandhi’s broad-brush attack on the world’s wrongs, to RVIVR’s embrace of the personal as politics. It’s a fine fit for the band, Potter says. They feel comfortable with their tourmates, which helps buttress tour experiences that can sometimes be pockmarked with macho misbehavior or outright chauvinism—even at punk shows, where the audience is generally expected to be tuned into the message of the band they’re seeing.

For War On Women, that message is clear: The kind of chauvinism they at times encounter at their shows is a symptom of lingering inequality in every corner of society, so feminism and the fight for gender equality remains crucial.

They’re not alone. Over the past handful of years, a wave of hardcore bands have catapulted from local scenes to bigger labels and best-of lists all while wearing their political leanings firmly on their sleeves. At the moment, many of those bands speak with a common voice.

Look: Gender is clearly not genre. The fact that one or more members of a band are women does not mean that band is a “riot grrrl” band or that its female membership affects the band's sound or message whatsoever. And bands with women members who do sing about feminism and personal politics deserve to be able to do so without being pigeonholed or labeled one kind of band or another.

Now then, this much is true: The list of punk bands with women membership that have gained notoriety in indie music circles is extensive and growing. Perfect Pussy’s fuzzy, brazen hardcore pierced the Billboard charts in the days after releasing the critically-acclaimed and deeply political Say Yes To Love earlier this year. Deep Fantasy, the new album from Vancouver feminist punks White Lung, premiered to glowing reviews and album-of-the-week accolades. DC dance punks Priests released their debut EP, Bodies and Control and Money and Power, on tastemaking indie Don Giovanni Records earlier this year. So many other bands, from Downtown Boys to Shady Hawkins to Girlpool and so on, populate the burgeoning punk underground.

While all very different, in the bands’ collective Venn diagram, personal politics, and more specifically feminism, lies at the center. For now, it’s enough to say that these bands exist, they all deliver songs and lyrics depicting common experiences, and that that message is important both to punk and to culture in general.

War On Women has found their own success of late, signing to punk staple Bridge Nine and tracking a new album that should come out later this year. Noisey caught up with Potter before she again took the stage in Toronto.

Noisey: I’m always fascinated by a band’s lineage, or their perception of the bands that laid the groundwork for what they do, in their music and messaging. Who do you see as the bands that laid the groundwork for War On Women?
Shawna Potter: It would be wrong not to acknowledge the influence riot grrrl had on all of us, even though that risks people doing a direct comparison, which I think is kind of silly. So then the DC punk scene in the 80s and 90s, being willing to stand up for something—of course that’s a part of it. But then there’s the other side where we all just love a good riff, you know? Like early thrash stuff. What we hadn’t seen enough of or where we thought there was room for us was in how to marry those two things—that those could exist, that you could be a bunch of chicks in a band and still be playing heavy, fast, fun music.

It was pretty conscious that this was the kind of band we wanted to start—the politics of it, and it being loud and heavy—but we didn’t know much more other than that. We just started writing to see what would happen. Then Improvised Weapons came about, basically.

I am interested in how it came to be. You say the politics were intentional. The name War On Women is essentially as direct and political as a punk band name can get. And it’s gendered, insofar as it’s referring to a specific thing happening to a specific gender. How did the band arrive at that name?
I think in hardcore feminist circles, that was a term that was already being used. But we started writing songs and getting together at rehearsals before the term “war on women” blew up as much as it did. In the last big election cycle, it became something that mainstream media would mention. So, it just made sense. Even though people can sometimes consider something like street harassment to be a really surface or inconsequential issue, like it’s not that big of a deal, to call our band War On Women and talk about all of the things we talk about is to present the idea that all of these things add up to a bigger picture. We’re trying to point to the idea that there’s this larger thing at work, and it is a war on women, and every little thing that happens is a part of that. Maybe not everyone experiences every facet, and everyone’s experiences are different. In different countries, continents, languages, cultures, it’s going to play out differently. But that doesn’t mean its not there, and we’re not all connected.

Who do you hope your audience is?
Bands that I like write songs about stuff that I have no idea about until I bought the record because I liked the riff or whatever. In the least pretentious way I can say this: Of course I hope that someone picks up on something in our songs and it makes them think about something in a different way. But in saying that, I hope that I do that too when I listen to Propagandhi’s new record. That’s the beauty of any kind of art form: hopefully to shed a light on something and get an idea across to people who might otherwise not have heard it.

So I don’t think we have an ideal audience in mind. We want to write songs for ourselves, for sure. We want to write songs that we like. But I like the idea of giving more women permission to like heavy music, to give them an option that isn’t obviously trying to exclude them. Because that’s a real thing. Some people are just turned off by heavy music, because it’s not just heavy, it’s the whole package of being aggro, macho, and for men. It comes across that way very often, especially in a live, DIY kind of setting. And it can turn people off. So we want to give women an option for heavy music, and talk about things that they relate to. And then anyone who already likes heavy music, we’re hoping that they like us too. Maybe they pick up on something. Maybe our feminist messages sneak into their brains and we turn them all into male allies.

Do you think punk is still a boy’s club?
I do, but not just because it’s punk. Most things, the world, is still sort of a boy’s club. It’s not as if its punk’s fault, or it's specific to punk. It’s something that we have to work on in any community that we’re a part of, or in any scene that we care about. We have to work to make it more inclusive of women and LGBTQ folks. To me, the true meaning of punk is to go against the social norm and what is determined acceptable by the mainstream. With that definition, there’s nothing more punk than a trans woman, or a genderqueer person singing about stuff that matters to them.

I hope in that spirit we can certainly be a part of it. But there are so many groups across the country creating these awesome things and creating these really progressive, inclusive spaces. Now, maybe no one will put any money behind it, but it’s there. The amazing thing about the time we live in is that you can find almost anything, in any community, online at least. So hopefully the idea that this is possible, that you can start a band and create this scene for yourself and it doesn’t have to be just a dude-fest is drawing more people in and more people feel they can be a part of it.

I mean, it’s refreshing! I’ve been playing in bands for like 15 years, and I’m still surprised when a scene is so awesome and inclusive. It just makes me so happy.

On that note, is it heartening to go on tour with bands like RVIVR and Propagandhi?
It is nice. You still have to maybe deal with someone in the audience who doesn’t quite get it, or is drunk and making “funny” jokes where if you knew them maybe you would laugh, but you don’t so you’re just like: I don’t know what your deal is, you’re being weird. You’re used to that, and that’s going to happen, because it’s life, it’s reality. But it’s really nice to not have to worry about the bands you’re touring with saying something weird or having some weird opinion about women’s rights, or reproductive health, or LGBTQ people. I don’t have to worry about RVIVR and Propagandhi. All of these band get it. We’re all on the same team, and that’s refreshing. It makes it so easy. And they’re all super nice! Can I tell you how fucking nice these two bands are? It’s ridiculous.

Over the last few years there has been this procession of bands that have a lot of similar messaging essentially around feminism and gender equality. Do you see commonality in these bands? Do you feel any sort of kinship towards these bands and that particular message?
I feel very lucky and happy and grateful that people are paying attention to more than one band with women in it. My thoughts are more about the media and the way that people are covering these bands and allowing for more than one band with a woman in it to be on a top-100 list or whatever. I think that says something, that hopefully we can get past the age of: Oh, we already have a band with a woman in it playing that night, so no more. Or: Only female bands can play on a bill together. You know? I mean, talk about gender as genre!

How did you end up joining the Bridge Nine roster?
I think from the get-go, we thought Bridge Nine would be the perfect place for us, as far as the bands they have; they do have female artists and female-fronted bands. They’re not afraid of that. And I think they’re great about supporting their bands and putting ads out and letting people know that their bands exist.

We’re actually friends with the folks from Lemuria. We heard nothing but good things from them about their experience on Bridge Nine. So, you know, I just sent our record and a few demos to a few labels, and they were one of the labels who responded with: Yeah, we are interested, let’s talk some more.

The wonderful, incredible, amazing thing is that they had never seen us live when we signed.

Wow. That’s uncommon.
It is uncommon, and that’s why we’re so stoked that we’re playing in their town, in Boston, on this tour. It couldn’t be more perfect timing. We get to actually go down to Bridge Nine and meet everybody, and they get to see us, which is really rad. But yeah, it just seemed like a good fit, and that we could support each other. They’re all about the message, so we’re just really excited.

War On Women is currently on tour with RVIVR and Propagandhi.

Ron Knox is on Twitter @ronmknoxDC

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