Starstruck #1: Missy Dabice

The Mannequin Pussy vocalist and director on atheism, nature and female artists.

Starstruck is an interview series with artists about their spiritual lives, sources of inspiration and connection to what makes them feel alive. First up is Missy Dabice, a director and the lead singer and guitarist of the punk rock band, Mannequin Pussy. Their latest album, I Got Heaven, is about lust, religion and freedom. 

Tell me about your upbringing as it concerns anything spiritual. Was that a part of your life? 

My mom is someone who has a strong open mind and open heart to spirituality and her own connection to the divine and things she can’t see. She believes very strongly in spirits and energy and she prays every day and I think she has her own relationship to God that really shaped her and who she is. She’s probably the first person I ever knew in my life who used words ‘divine timing’ and ‘fate’ and ‘if it’s meant for you, it will happen, and if it’s not, it won’t.’ That obviously had an influence on me and the way I go through the world.

Were you surrounded with cultural atheism outside of your family unit? 

I don’t think I was too aware of atheism until I had my own interest in philosophy and learning more about theology and different religions, how they all tend to overlap and have very similar origin stories. For a while I was tantalised by atheism, the idea that there was nothing on the other side of the veil but as I’ve grown older, I’ve strongly grown out of that. That was a short-lived belief that I had, that I held to at a time when I felt it was more contrarian and edgy to live in a rejection of the things that I was taught, rather than allowing my own experiences to inform something that simply takes time to understand. Now I feel that atheism is like vaping to me. It’s just so lame. 

I agree—it feels totally unrealistic too, almost deluded. Was that stage when you were a teenager or a little older? 

Late teens, early 20s. When I graduated out of the bubble I grew up in and I realised what an oppressive weapon religion can be, I felt like in order to stand in opposition to that you had to be an atheist or something. But eventually I understood that you don’t need to choose a team so strongly—this isn’t sports. We’re not really on teams. This is a very personal journey that one has. 

Letting your own experience dictate your beliefs really resonates with me because I remember being in church viscerally put off by religion, almost terrified and disgusted, but knew there was something else going on that I didn’t understand. Yet on top of that not understanding why people were just accepting things they couldn’t see.

Yeah, blind faith is a very foreign concept to me—I would never blindly follow anything. My own experiences have to dictate something, something cannot be dictated to me by a higher authority. We’re introduced to religion with the idea that some man is watching you all the time. And judging you. It’s a very strange thing to introduce to the budding awareness of a young girl. 

I wrote an essay, ‘On Feeling Godless,’ which circles that idea of if God sees everything, why does he let weird traumatising things happen to women? And how can I then be expected to accept God’s authority over me? Tell me about a major turning point on your journey to getting to the philosophy that you're holding now. 

I remember being about 12 and my younger sister telling me that she didn't believe in God and it really shocked me. She would have been about 10. I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? God is the easiest thing to believe in because it’s the thing that you’re told to believe in your entire life growing up. I was genuinely concerned for her. But then as I grew up I realized that actually her saying that was a powerful experience to be shown that not you don’t have to have the same spiritual or religious beliefs as another person and have that be the very thing that ties you to them. I don’t actually know where she is now with religion, we haven’t talked about it too much.

As a kid I was really aware of how strange and magical all of this is. Not that it needs a creator or a God with a capital G, or one God. I’m really into the idea of polytheism. I like the idea that there’s all these different entities and energies who are interacting or not at all with our lives. But it’s fantasy to me. 

I really remember that from being a kid, too. I walked around in nature in all seasons just fully in love with the light and the trees and the leaves. In love. True awe. So open to that and as an adult I closed slightly.

Same. Nature is this thing that’s about as close to the divine as we get sometimes. Being so aware of our surroundings that we see the beauty all around us. The thing that blows my mind the most is opening up a piece of fruit and being like, ‘Wow it looks like my pussy.’ It’s so wild, the patterns of it all. 

I was researching for this feature about the Nervous System a couple of months ago and couldn’t believe how much it looks like a tree with its root system. 

Our body is a reflection of nature and nature is a reflection of our body and it just seems so divinely put together. I can’t explain it and I don’t need an explanation to see it as just beautiful. I don’t need to explain everything. 

I used to need proof so badly when it came to my spiritual life. But then you hit a barrier where you just can’t get far enough and it’s not actually that fun to need concrete proof of every theory. 

Yeah, I used to be that way—before I was aching for some sort of proof. But maybe that’s because I really wanted to disprove something. And I strongly disagree so much with the way that religion is used again as an oppressive tool. So I feel like the way that it pokes at people, you want to poke at it. 

When you’re writing music and lyrics, how much is coming from you and how much is coming from something greater than you? 

It’s coming from something bigger. I have no idea where these ideas come from. You’re writing and then you’ve just poured out all these lyrics that you know it ‘comes’ from you, but I also feel like I’m a vessel for something else. I’m being visited by an idea that just has to come into being and it’s my role to be this interpreter. 

And you have to get yourself into the right space to interpret.

Oh yeah, the only way that you can create is by pushing away all the distractions around you. I should preface this by saying I really think all people are meant to be creative in some ways. We just live in a society that really tries to stamp out individuality, creativity, in the pursuit of people being more capitalist driven. But the only difference between artists and people is that artists step away and take time to reflect and pause and then diligently work. 

Being in my 30s as a woman is truly forcing me to reflect on how important that is to me and what sacrifices will need to be made. 

I was actually thinking about this the other day while I was brushing my teeth, that it’s so strange to me that for whatever reason, growing up, there’s been this insinuation that women are not artists, that it’s more what men do. Men are the famous artists and musicians and whatever, but quite literally, what creates life? Obviously, it’s a very biological view of it, but it’s strange that for so long women have been told that they’re meant to be nurturing but not creative when our very bodies and essence we are creative vessels we quite literally have the capability to create life, not every female body obviously, but it’s so inherent in us and yet it’s been stamped out by oppressive forces. It’s really exciting right now though—I feel, especially within the music industry, what are the boys even doing? If I was a man in pop, I would be terrified. The artists that have people transfixed right now are just all these incredible female artists. 

When I interviewed you before for this most recent album cycle, you talked about having been a serial monogamist and opting out of that. Since then, something has happened within the collective consciousness of women whereby women are publicly talking about choosing themselves and their careers over searching for a relationship or being in an unsatisfying one. And fully using the word ‘celibate,’ which I think is interesting. 

Yes, I have also noticed this, and I’m someone who very much believes in the collective consciousness. We all have awakenings that tend to happen on a similar timeline. Around the time that our album came out I started seeing so many women talk about that same realisation of, ‘Oh, I have been in a relationship for my entire youth so far and what has it really brought me? How have I developed as a person? How is my life taking flight? Am I actually doing the things that I want to do? Or am I just doing the things that I’m expected to do?’ The women I’m seeing talk about these things are into their 30s now too, and have this sense of perspective. I saw Julia Fox say, ‘Why would I lay down with a man who wouldn’t stand up for me?’ It’s beautifully said, and so succinct, and she was talking more specifically about how men show up for women’s rights when they’re being taken away with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and trying to—again—demonise the female experience and demonise trans people. If we want men to love us, they have to stand up for us in a way that’s culturally different than they have before. 

It’s exciting and also validating to have other women around me who are having these similar experiences. And I’ve grown more in the last three years than I have in my entire life. And I truly think that choosing to mostly be alone has been a tremendous part of that because I’ve had no distractions. Now though I would say I’m at a point where I feel ready. I wanna open my heart back up again. I’ve been very closed off and now I’m feeling good. It won’t continue forever, but it definitely had to start.

I remember that you said on our call that you’d been in all these relationships and ‘for fucking what?’ The way you said it gave me chills and genuinely pushed me to reassess my own patterns in relationship this year.

And there’s such a template for the way that relationships are presented to us, that they only look a certain way, and that they have to be in the pursuit of these very specific markers of life. It puts really tremendous pressure, I think, on modern relationships, especially if you’re ultra-modern and you have a different experience of what it is that you want and you have a different timeline in your own mind of what you could potentially want. A lot of women have been forced into motherhood who never wanted to be mothers in the first place and that’s how you continue ancestral trauma. 

That’s in my ~maternal lineage for sure. 

My grandma got married at 16 or 17, had a kid by 19, because it was expected of her, but she didn’t have real maternal instincts. If she had been alive now, I don’t think she would have chosen any of those things for herself. She would have been an independent entity. And I think that’s part of the reason why she was very proud of me and excited for me, because she was like, ‘Oh, she’s taking her own path. She’s doing what I would have done.’ 

That’s so nice. I wanted to ask you about your shows and whether the euphoria and connectedness of performing to a crowd has any spiritual connotations for you? 

It’s a hard question to answer now because we’ve been on tour for so long I just feel completely empty and something I’m learning right now is how do I learn how to fill myself back up on tour because I’m not getting it from the shows. I really hit a wall a few weeks ago where I feel so uncomfortable being seen. In terms of the feedback I get from people that go to our shows, they feel it’s a spiritual experience of catharsis so I feel I’m a conduit for people’s rage and catharsis and I feel a bit like a priestess who is in control of the experience. But it’s taken me a long time to realise that I’m emptying myself to pour into them and I don’t know yet how to fill myself back up. I met with an energy healer a few days ago because I’m trying to figure out how to heal myself and she’s this intuitive slash medium and she said, ‘You might require five hours of peace a day.’ How do you get that in this economy? How do I find five hours of peace? Under capitalism? 

I think what I’m learning is that it’s close to impossible to rejuvenate myself while I’m still on tour. I’ve tried a lot of things and the only thing that works is home. So that is a little disconcerting. I’m in a fantasy place where I’m thinking about my apartment and what it would be like to have a garden and real domestic stuff. I just want to cook a meal for myself so badly. Performance is just so labour-intensive that I need to get better at making time to focus on the act of creating again. Because I think ultimately, that’s what artists do: they have to commit to the act of creation and find ways to inspire themselves, even when in the repetitive motions of touring. 

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Missy’s Holy Trinity:

Getting dressed for herself

There is something about getting into the character of myself that really lifts me up and makes me feel more energised. 

Solo time

Not alone time where you are thinking about what other people are doing or where you’re brain rot scrolling. Alone time where you actually are finding ways to be comfortable sitting with yourself and listening to your own body and mind. I really find that that’s when my most exciting ideas come to me is when I’ve pulled back from everyone and I’m not engaging. 

Learning how to cook

It’s just so powerful to learn how to cook a meal for yourself or someone else. It does something for your soul and your own nutrition on every level, if you know how to take care of yourself. Learning how to cook is also very creative. Recipes are like songs. You have to practise them a few times until you really understand them. And then they’re just in you forever.