Creativity Quote by Lydia Lunch

Lydia Lunch isn’t offering a theory of feminism so much as drawing a battle line around creative freedom. Coming out of New York’s no-wave scene, she’s spent a career turning confrontation into an aesthetic: sex, violence, power, and hypocrisy dragged into the light with zero interest in being “redeemable.” In that world, liberation isn’t a slogan; it’s the right to say the unsayable without asking permission. So when she talks about “censors under a different name,” she’s not just critiquing feminism. She’s attacking any movement that, in her view, hardens from insurgency into gatekeeping.

The intent is provocation, but it’s also a warning about internal policing. Lunch frames “many of those people” as a faction, not the whole project, yet the bluntness is the point: she’s spotlighting a shift from dismantling patriarchal control to, allegedly, managing speech and desire through moral surveillance. The subtext is personal and generational. A punk-era feminist imaginary promised women agency, messiness, and rage; contemporary activism, she implies, sometimes translates that rage into rule-making, purity tests, and reputational punishment.

Context matters: post-#MeToo debates about due process, “cancel culture,” and who gets to define harm have made censorship a loaded accusation. Lunch weaponizes that load. The irony is that she’s using a feminist vocabulary of power to reject what she sees as feminism’s newest power grab. Whether you agree, the line works because it refuses neutrality: it forces the reader to ask who gets protected by public shaming, and who gets disciplined when liberation starts to sound like compliance.