Honey Badger Scouts to Arm Our Daughters against Patriarchy and Fascism

It’s time for a new scouting organization.

“I’ve got it: Honey Badger Scouts,” says my indomitable friend Becca. We’re watching our kids run around on the playground before school while brainstorming a hypothetical rebrand for Girl Scouts in the wake of the 2016 election.

The Cub Scouts had just opened up membership to girls—not, we ventured, because of some newfound commitment to inclusivity. Membership was rumored to be low, so they’d been doing recruitment in school lunchrooms. My girl had come home sporting a Cub Scouts-branded snap bracelet, telling me she wanted to join. Which got me thinking about Girl Scouts, and about the value in this day and age of girl-only spaces, widely defined.

“Honey Badger Scouts?”

“Yeah, honey badgers. Sounds like they’d be cute, but they’re fierce as hell,” Becca says with a conspiratorial glimmer.

I remember the meme going around a while back—“honey badger don’t care.” Honey Badger Scouts. Why not.

One sends kids to scouting organizations to prepare them for life. Surely our daughters needed training in fierceness now.

The Guinness Book of World Records refers to the honey badger as the most fearless animal in the animal kingdom. Their environmental adaptations classes them as an animal of Least Concern rather than a threatened species. Known for their toughness, their skin is thick. Neither bee stings, nor porcupine quills, nor bites from their enemies penetrate. Honey badgers are known to repel larger predators, including lions.

Honey Badger Scouts made sense as the next phase in our daughters’ feminist education. No reason there couldn’t be room in there for self-identifying boys who wanted to do masculinity differently, too. My husband and I had failed to shield our children from our venting as we lived through the first Trump campaign, so they had learned the meaning of the terms “sexual harassment” and “sexual assault” while still learning to read.

I start daydreaming about the badges these Honey Badger Scouts could earn.

Instead of the badge called House Elf, Honey Badger Scouts would have one for Running for the House of Representatives.

Instead of the badge for Room Makeover, there would be one for How to Recolonize on a New Planet.

There’d be a badge for Recognizing the Signs That Your Government Is Turning Fascist.

Honey Badger Scouts would arm kids for the traditional battles while encouraging social re-engineering. Maybe there’d be another troop called Gaga Scouts, inspired by what theorist Jack Halberstam calls “going gaga”: “a politics of free-falling, wild thinking, and imaginative reinvention best exemplified by children under the age of eight, women over the age of forty-five, and the vast armies of the marginalized, the abandoned, and the unproductive.”1

In the reinvented organization, women over the age of forty-five would lead children under the age of eight to prepare them for the world.

Kids in these troops would enjoy crafting and eat snakes for breakfast. They’d learn how to write code and decode patriarchy. They’d be schooled in recognizing differences as strengths and in grappling with how to be inclusive. These troops would adapt the best that previous feminisms had to offer and leave behind the worst of gender training—and colonialism—as had been imagined by Girl Scouts founder Juliette Low and reinvent the rest by themselves.

That night while making dinner, I listen to NPR summarize the day’s news: Another sunny day in Patriarchy. As I heat up the oven to boil water for pasta, I imagine these fierce and crafty and wild thinking scouts loosening their grip on the normative and coming up with their own definitions as their generation is already doing, in fact, right before our eyes.

I text Becca that night: “I’m in.”

Honey Badger Scouts: Adventuring boldly into the unpredictable future, leading their grown-ups in ways we can’t yet imagine because their experience growing up will be so different, one prays, from ours.