According to Pitchfork:

A man singing from a woman’s perspective was never going to be embraced wholly by the feminist punk community—even if that man was Ian MacKaye, an artist of rare social empathy, raging about the aggressive objectification of women’s bodies. “Why can’t I walk down a street free of suggestion?/Is my body the only trait in the eyes of men?” demanded MacKaye over a staccato guitar stomp reminiscent of clacking stiletto heels. Soon, he wasn’t just angrily cosplaying as the harassed women he knew; he was condemning the inert masses of his gender. “We blame her for being there/But we are all guilty,” he raged, indicting himself.

Some leaders of the ’80s D.C. punk groundswell remained unimpressed by his good intentions; some heard “a self-righteous white boy appropriating a girls’ issue,” as the riot grrrl history Girls to the Front suggests. Others heard the song as supportive; Kathleen Hanna later said, “I have issues with Ian MacKaye—who I love—singing as if he was a woman. But that song changed my life, because it was the first time I ever heard a man singing about something that was predominantly a woman’s issue.”

Whether or not it was MacKaye’s narrative to sing, his words remain the tentpole for male feminism in punk, and cracked a discussion of oppression as men’s burden to lift. Other men would follow suit—Propagandhi in “Fuck Machine,” Nirvana in “Rape Me,” Green Day in “She”—and “Suggestion” opened those floodgates. –Stacey Anderson