Wit & Attitude Quote by Lydia Lunch

Lydia Lunch doesn’t romanticize femininity here; she treats it like a volatile instrument. Calling the “female format” a “beautiful one in which to function” sounds almost like praise until she snaps it back with “foolhardy as it may be.” That swerve is the point: in Lunch’s world, being read as female is both power and hazard, an aesthetic charge and a social liability. Beauty is not a soft landing; it’s a high-risk surface you move across knowing it can betray you.

The word “format” is tellingly clinical, like a template or interface. She’s not describing some essential, natural womanhood; she’s describing a structure she operates within, and maybe against. It’s body-as-platform, gender-as-setup: an arrangement that grants access to attention while also inviting punishment, projection, and control. The subtext is a refusal to be either victim or muse. She’ll take the leverage without agreeing to the terms.

Then comes the Lunch doctrine: “I change my image all the time.” Image isn’t authenticity’s enemy; it’s her method of staying unpinnable. In punk and no wave contexts, that restlessness reads as survival and strategy - the quickest way to short-circuit the audience’s hunger to define you, to domesticate you, to turn “female” into a genre with rules. “Whatever suits me at the moment” isn’t fickleness; it’s sovereignty. She’s claiming the right to self-mythologize in real time, even if the cost of that freedom is being called unstable, performative, or worse.