Album Review: Women's Rights by Childbirth

“Feminists don’t have a sense of humor,” smirked pianist-polymath and lifelong activist Nellie McKay on her 2009 song “Mother of Pearl,” a line that her cult knew was facetious. Two years prior, Vanity Fair had published a Christopher Hitchens article called “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” which garnered so much hate mail that the publication created the email address hitchbitch@vf. com just to funnel angry replies.

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If Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were twenty-somethings who decided to put together a punk band, the results might have been something like Childbirth, which says a great deal about how funny Childbirth can be, as well as how cleverly they articulate their witty but very real messages about feminism and contemporary culture. Childbirth are clearly not a joke, but they may well be the funniest punk band to emerge in ages, and just as their debut EP It's a Girl! delivered bits of comic genius like "I Only Fucked You as a Joke," "Will You Be My Mom?," and "How Do Girls Even Do It?," their first full-length, Women's Rights, manages to rock hard and generate plenty of solid laughs along the way with numbers like "Tech Bro" (a paean to having a coder boyfriend who will explain feminism to you), "Siri, Open Tinder" (about the perils of online dating), "Since When Are You Gay?" (in which our protagonist's straight friend starts dating women), "Cool Mom" ("She lets me drink alcohol!. .

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Julia Shapiro (Chastity Belt), Bree McKenna (Tacocat), and Stacy Peck (Pony Time) open their album screaming "Childbirth!" and "Women's rights!". Peck pounds her drum kit while Shapiro draws out each phrase, McKenna joining in on the latter. It's a puzzling forty seconds, and at first the track feels either unnecessary or like a joke. But if it is a joke, it feels both vital and too close to home when you consider that 241 representatives of the GOP recently voted to defund Planned Parenthood.

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