sheer spite press

This updated second version of Thou Shalt Not Talk about the White Boys’ Club is 60 half-sized pages, over three times as long as the original, and includes expanded essays on topics like failed opportunities for white punks to work against white supremacy, the duality of excessive consumption or sobriety, the hierarchy of acceptable anger in punk, the effects of satire used in lyrics and band imagery, femmephobia and (internalized) misogyny, punk as an utopian ideal of white and male carelessness and ignorance, labeling critiques of shock value as “PC culture,” desirability politics, and mosh pit etiquette.

This zine aims to:

• Investigate unwritten rules of punk and how they (not so) subtly reinforce hierarchies that we do / don’t benefit from
• Identify the avenues we explore(d) to get involved in punk and how they are not accidental or coincidental
• Teach the reader media literacy skills by being critical of punk music that simultaneously embodies leftist politics and reinforces oppressive narratives
• Create a dialogue with and among punks who are both privileged and marginalized on various social axes
• Provide working ideas of ways that punk can be improved on a subgenre-wide level