Ladies! Have you ever entertained the desire… to rock the fuck out???
Well, too bad. The dudes, they do not support you in this ambition! Some of them! (“But some of us DOOOOOOOO” — The Comment Section.) And, in this very special LADYPALOOZA edition (yes, it’s the worst title for a Theme Post Party ever. And I’m going to be typing it, it looks like, for AT LEAST TWO WEEKS NOW. I will have plenty of opportunities to regret this decision, is what I’m saying) of Sexist Beatdown, we discuss why that might be the case!
Yes, the legendary duo of Amanda Hess of the Sexist and I — the Indigo Girls of blogging! — will posit several reasons why The Dudes look to exclude or ignore The Ladies in the field of musical accomplishment. Our hypotheses involve (a) wedgies, (b) sexism, and (c) the fact that a lot of indie rock dudes are just basically the same guys that go to Ren Faire., but in different outfits. (So, again: Wedgies.) Also, we reveal the song that first delineated the Tiger Beatdown Method Conflict Management. SPOILER: It’s this one.
ILLUSTRATION: Oh, like you are surprised.
SADY: Well, good morning! Are you prepared… TO ROCK??? I myself am underprepared to rock. But, for those about to rock: I do, in fact, salute them!
AMANDA: Same here! I have to admit that I’m perhaps not the best lady to be standing up for the rights of ladies to rock, because I actually really suck at playing music. The question is whether this is on account of my being a lady or not? Discuss.
SADY: Well: Here is the thing. When I was a wee young pre-blogger, of about the age of eleven or twelve, I discovered a variety of music! Such as the Juliana Hatfield (DON’T YOU JUDGE ME) and the PJ Harvey. And I was like, “ladies who are in bands get to yell about things that are personally offensive or troubling for them! A lot! Surely, this is my career path.”
AMANDA: Hahah. Almost!
SADY: Yes! So I got a guitar, and I told all of the boys in school with Kurt Cobain haircuts that if they wanted to help me learn this “guitar,” we could be in a band together.
AMANDA: Sounds reasonable.
SADY: And then one of them, the cutest one, the one that I liked best, told me why I was not getting any positive responses. He sat me down, and he said: “The thing is, we don’t play girl music.” And now I am a blogger, and still cannot play guitar, although my brother can, because I gave it to him, THE END. So, like: The question of ladies in music is one I like to think about, because (a) FUCK YOU TYLER FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE KURT COBAIN HAIRCUT YOU WEREN’T THAT CUTE, and (b) I feel like, as a venue for angry or self-obsessed or confrontational expression, people have a VESTED INTEREST in barring ladies from the field of rock music, really!
AMANDA: I see the same sad sexism in a lot of different subcultures, and I think women are often drawn to these spaces because they’re outside of the mainstream – because the mainstream marginalizes them, but perhaps in a different way than it does sensitive rocking Kurt Cobain haircut boys.
SADY: Agreed!
AMANDA: So on the one hand, you’d think the subculture would be totally interested in accepting women – how rejecting of mainstream values is that! – but on the other hand, the subculture is also about building a culture around the primacy of the sensitive rocking Kurt Cobain haircut boy’s particular flavor of marginalization, and when women come in with some other shit to talk about it tends to threaten that dynamic.
SADY: Right. I mean, not to re-iterate an old cliche, but: The guitar is a tried-and-true way, not only for Wussy Guy to become Charismatically Sensitive Guy, but for men to sort of build hierarchies outside of the gym class where they are all getting wedgies. And I think women are drawn to rock or indie rock or whatever the kids with the cool haircuts are doing these days – and I’m not even trying to exclude other genres, this is just the genre in which I have the most experience – because, they think, “a-ha! Outsiders! As a lady, I am kind of BY DEFAULT an outsider, in that I am not a dude!” But the dudes are like, “you don’t get it. We WERE outsiders. But we built a WHOLE NEW INSIDE, for us specifically, so that we wouldn’t have to be outsiders any more. And now you are not invited.”
AMANDA: Exactly. But the same thing happens time and time again, which is that women are used in a very mainstream way in these subcultures, as a) prizes to show just how powerful the subculture has become, because these weird boys fuck all the hot girls now, b) uncool people that must be excluded in order to maintain the outsider vibe or c) tokens.
SADY: Right. I mean, who doesn’t like St. Vincent? Or Neko Case? Or that girl from Rilo Kiley who was in the Fred Savage video game movie?
AMANDA: Well, if you don’t like them, at least you think they are hot.
SADY: Yes! For also, who has not visited a publication of review for music, and seen the reviewer dedicate a substantial amount of time that could have been spent talking about music to, instead, talking about the lady’s sexual charisma and appearance, and/or the comment section devolving into a mass vote as to whether or not the male commentariat would Hit It? But when it is time to talk about these women musically, folks get shifty and bored and start derailing the conversation so that they can get into a conversation about folks who are doing this “better” and also happen to be dudes.
AMANDA: Yeah, it’s sad. And it’s not in any way confined to the world of music. You can find the same patterns with pot, and with comics, and with goth, and sometimes in the gay community (D.C. has like one lesbian bar and a jillion gay bars, and gay men are much more visible, perhaps because they don’t even require the girlfriends), and can I tell you about the awful things I’ve heard about what happens to some women who are into Ren Faire stuff? GROPE-CENTRAL, for when the male and female nerds congregate for their yearly olde-tyme fantasy shindig, the misogyny, it is also olde-tyme.
SADY: Oh, man! And, yes: I think we even did a Ye Olde Sexist Beatdowne, about this, in Oldyn Tymes! My experience of lady-nerds is that they tend to be huge and fairly hardcore feminists. And I was like, “that’s funny, I never thought of feminism as a particularly nerdy thing,” but then I realized (a) I was on the Internet, and (b) male nerd subculture tends to be like INTENSE in its misogyny! Lady-nerds seriously grab on to feminism like it is a buoy and they are drowning, because it is! And they sort of are! And women in music sometimes do the same thing, see: Riot Grrrl, duh. Formed in reaction to dudes with floppy Kurt Cobain haircuts, at least one of whom was ACTUALLY KURT COBAIN. (Though he was a huge feminist, God bless.)
AMANDA: Yeah. It’s not that I don’t appreciate and understand men who are alternative in appearance or interest or values or whatever needing a space that’s outside the mainstream that’s their own.
SADY: Maybe they could all become Male Studies Majors?
AMANDA: BUT. I wonder if some of the disconnect here is in these guys thinking that their asymmetrical haircut or interest in Magic: The Gathering is like the most intensely othering experience that a human can have? And are unaware that there are some other people around who may have that experience of being othered no matter which subculture they attempt to access.
SADY: Right. Exactly. And, on that note, I think we’ve been talking about how women are viewed as Objects of the Male Gaze, or how they try to fit in to male-dominated subcultures. BUT, I think we should also note that women in rock music have been some of the most enduring models for female rebellion? Like, as in many cases, I find that the solution for not liking the scene you are in is to (a) make your own scene, which is (b) comprised of girls. Which is why we keep talking about Riot Grrrl in 2010. Or ladies who were never really IN a scene, like PJ, or Liz Phair, who wrote an entire album about how sick she was of the dudes in her scene, or Tori Amos, who was like, “well, I can’t play your fancy guitars, gentlemen, but I did take some piano lessons!” And the extent to which the ethos of Tiger Beatdown is informed by the PJ Harvey song “50 Foot Queenie” is NOT TO BE UNDERESTIMATED. Hey: I’m the king of the world. You wanna hear my song?
AMANDA: Haha. IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW
SADY: Yes, no matter what PJ Harvey had to get through to become PJ Harvey, she did in fact record the sound of herself playing guitar really loud and screaming the phrase “YOU BEND OVAH, CASANOVA” and thus, I think, became a model for A Certain Variety of Conflict Management for many a lady person.
24 Comments
@thedeviante: I got a lot of the “be perfect or don’t bother” shit from my father, too – and he’s still half mad at me that I decided to study art against his “advice”, because it was what I really wanted to do, and then I’ve just managed to be a mediocre artist. I don’t know if there’s sexism there, either.
“Sorry if this sounds pissy, but it makes me cranky when people who have a certain privilege that intersects with their oppression seem to think that the oppression means they don’t ever oppress others”
I’m really sorry if I gave that impression. I never wanted to argue that there wasn’t gay privilege in the LGBT community, but just that to me it seemed not to map directly onto the kinds of cases being discussed in the article. I’m aware that that privilege did nonetheless creep into what I said, and so I’m trying to take people’s comments on board.
One of the kinds of things I meant would be brought out by your example of the magazine actually: the difference between music subcultures and the LGBT subculture is that you could have a gay men’s magazine, a lesbian magazine or an LGBT magazine (like The Advocate), but you couldn’t have a magazine that explicitly identified itself as being for male musicians (even if it was effectively just for them). There seems to me to be a legitimacy in having specifically and explicitly gay, lesbian etc. spaces as well as the overarching LGBT spaces (which I agree are dominated disproportionately by priviled groups).
They say that every oppressed group tends to pick a more oppressed group to act out their feelings on, to rag on and, uhm, well, oppress; white cismale geeks, being generally below white cismale not-geeks on the social scale
Farore, I question how valid even this much is? When I taught school after college, it started to seem like the bullies were reasonably often the bullied, i.e. getting raised with something close to child abuse at home. Granted this was young children, but I can’t say I’d be startled if it held up over time.
So I guess I just can’t get worked up about how traumatic it is to, you know, not get voted in for prom king. You may not be at the top of the chain within the confines of high school, but eh, you don’t know what’s going on at home for the other dudes. And high school? Four fucking years of your life, and it’s over. Maybe I’m savagely oblivious because I was in the artsy crowd that was in betweenish tiers because, fuck you, we dress better than everyone else? But an absence of prom kingdoms just does not read convincingly to me as intractable marginalization.
@Samantha B It could be argued that a lot of bullying is just policing of gender conformity, so if not all out oppressive, it is related to oppressive systems (sexism, transphobia, homophobia).
@SamanthaB: From my experience before I located geeky friends, the main problem of geekiness is less bullying and more loneliness. No one else cares about your passions, everyone kind of thinks you’re weird, you kind of think everyone else is either boring or incomprehensible. There were days when I was younger where I would literally not talk to anyone all day and no one would notice.
When you spend your formative years (not just high school, but elementary and /especially/ middle school)friendless, it tends to cause effects on your personality the rest of your life. This, I think, tends to cause a lot of the cancers of geekdom (jerkishness, lack of social skills, insecurity, NiceGuyism, reflexive hatred of “the mainstream”).
Again, not exactly /comparable/ oppressions– once you go to a sufficiently large or weird school or the real world, it’s all over except for the personality problems. But still sucks.
@Andy G Yeah, I’m of the opinion that it’s not a perfect comparison (how could it be?) but it has some parallels.
Hah, yes. Manchester has the biggest gay party zone in England (outside of London?) and has a total of 2 lesbian bars out of about 40-50. This is not to say that lesbians would be turned away from most of the bars but they certainly cater almost completely to the shirtless man-dancey clientèle (and them only-why do people think that gay equals one specific strand of gay subculture only? Also, not all gay people like remixed Kylie Minogue songs, PLEASE TAKE NOTE every gay bar I have ever been to.) This is a bit shit for us lesbians and is pretty representative of gay visibility as a whole. I have theories (although they are just that;) gay men seem to have achieved a kind of acceptance that lesbians haven’t. Being a gay man is still dangerous-people are still being attacked and killed because of it so I’m not saying it’s a rose garden of acceptance. However, gay men seem to be taken far more seriously than lesbians and their sexuality is rarely question, mocked or derided in the same way. (It still is! But differently.) Female homosexuality is a cock-free zone, therefore it’s not real sexuality. Which of course leads to to the usual cliche of “but…but how do you guys have SEX?” If I had a penny for every time someone has said to me I just haven’t found the right guy/a good dicking would sort me out I’d have…about £1.50. People find male homosexuality threatening and female homosexuality is just a sexy joke. In a framework of women having no sexual autonomy/being merely reactive/the almighty wang being emblemic of all sex ever this makes perfect sense.
This is of course an extremely UK-centric point of view and says nothing about corrective rape of lesbians in other countries or the whole cornucopia of horrors unleashed on the gay community elsewhere, something I have no experience of but makes me curl up in horror.
@CL;”gay men often seem to come before trans folk, and especially trans women. (Why yes, I *am* still bitter about my basic civil rights being used as a football/bargaining chip for a symbolic vote that was only important for the fundraisers back home. Fuck you, HRC.)”
I was talking to my ladyfriend about things along these lines pretty recently, about how it frustrates me that a lot of left wing causes/marginalised folks don’t seem to want to come together in mutual support but splinter and other each other. I did a band day with an lgbt youth group and there was a young girl of about 16 there who instantly got bullied and marginalised by the other members when she told them she wanted to transition. She was fucking up their cosy little dynamic-we just want to fuck our own gender, we don’t want to CHANGE it! Why would you do that? You’re making us look bad! No one will accept us if we ally ourselves with you! (I guess they thought the T in LGBT stood for toffee or something.)
This happens a lot. We’ve fought hard to be accepted to the limited capacity that we are. Therefore, we want to keep that shred of privilege. Therefore, people even more marginalised than us can’t join. This extrapolates to many, many marginalised groups.
@The Deviant E; “We still have to fight for this shit? Women’s Rights, Black Rights, Gay Rights” (paraphrased). Only on second look it is TOTALLY NOT FUNNY, because there were fucking check marks next to “Black Rights” and “Women’s Rights”. That right there, is how to actively push women (and people of color) out of the movement, and how specifically white gay (cis)guys do it.”
Pretty much your whole post is bang-on and ties in with the left-wing-splintering-othering I was writing about before. It made me think of a picture I saw today that sadly I can’t find now, taken at an anti-facist rally with a white dude standing at the front holding a sign saying “Hitler was pretty gay.” Fuck you, sign-holding dude.
All of this seems completely tangential to the main post. Whoops!
@Ozymandias,
From my experience before I located geeky friends, the main problem of geekiness is less bullying and more loneliness. No one else cares about your passions, everyone kind of thinks you’re weird, you kind of think everyone else is either boring or incomprehensible.
Oh well, then, welcome to my life, although I can’t say I’m very familiar with the staples of geek culture.
@JFC, you certainly have a point about bullying as gender policing. I would still ask to what degree high school students are the points of origination of this policing. The idea that the high school bullies aren’t policed themselves via the same oppressive systems strikes me as not completely convincing, but maybe I’m being too generous here? I guess I just do believe that minors should be prosecuted, even in the abstract sense, as minors.
Commenting to say that “FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE KURT COBAIN HAIRCUT” is entering my lexicon immediately.
You two truly rock.
And speaking of intersections between nerd culture and music culture, how about women in electronica? Almost non-existent, despite all those who started playing piano instead of guitar. Ok, you’ve got your Regina Spektors playing electro-pop, but I cannot think of any notable women creating dance/techno/drum and bass/dubstep/trip-hop/breakbeat/house sounds. There’s Gillian Gilbert from New Order back in the day, and Wendy Carlos, who was Walter when she first started releasing electronic music in the early 70s.
So while the rock chick has a pretty well-established lineage (go PJ), there isn’t such a thing as an “electronica chick”. This makes me sad.
@SamanthaB: I think you misunderstood me a little bit there. I wasn’t saying that /I/ think geeks are an oppressed group; I was saying that /geeks/ tend to think of themselves as on oppressed group, which they use to validate and justify a lot of unsavory behaviours.
And yeah, abused becoming abusers is a great example of what I’m talking about. Unexamined combinations of privilege and oppression often just lead to more oppression.
@Trix: I’m never quite sure what genre people mean when they say ‘electronica’, but under the generalized umbrella of synth and poppy-techno sounds: there seem to be quite a lot of ladies, actually? They just tend not to be tokenized as much as ‘rock chicks’, I don’t think. There’s Alice in Videoland; Nicole Elmer; Mutamassik; Apache 61; Le Tigre; Psapp; Add N to (X); Analog Tara; Empress; Freezepop; Superstar Princess; Wendy Carlos; Nocturnal Emissions; Constance Demby; Anja Schneider; Ellen Allien….
Of course, a lot of these are from Germany or Sweden or Norway or that general… area. I do agree that there is a decided invisibility issue regarding American female techno/electronica artists, but the whole genre tends more towards international than maybe some other genres do.
What’s this about geek sexism? What’s this? WHY IT’S THE STORY OF MY LIFE, IT IS! Oh Sady, Amanda, you’re so incredibly awesome!
I’m a huuuuuuge geek. This sort of “geek girls are hawt but don’t invite them to your D&D game they suck, now let me mansplain to you about your favorite anime and get huffy when you correct the facts, also there are no girls on the Internet” wank has been constant background noise from the moment I started seeking out other geeky folk to get geeky with.
By the way, all you “I like nerdy girls cuz they’re hot”, people? GO FUCK YOURSELVES. A damn significant portion of you, if not all of you, like hot girls who are ‘nerdy’, or who put on the pretense of being nerdy. There are loads and loads of less-than-hot nerdy girls who are pretty much considered not to exist… or are considered fair game to be mocked and trashed, because they haven’t met the patriarchal beauty standard. I am one of those. I am NERDY AS FUCK, and there ain’t no one fallin’ to their knees and gettin’ all irrational over me, cuz I’m fat and have odd hair distribution. My tits are not wanted, and I have been told to GTFO.
I’m blessed to have ditched the worst and most toxic folk that I used to know. I have awesome geek friends now, men and women alike. My boyfriend may have gone all moony-eyed at me when I went off on an enormous video gamey nerdrant this one time, but he appreciates me as a person and not some sort of status symbol. We’re a mature bunch, and I might have said that probably helps us out, but OH MY GAWD after reading Katherine’s post about her husband’s shitty, shitty gaming group, I want to turn into a giant lizard and breathe radioactive fire all over the nearest goddamn city. THAT SHIT DON’T FLY AROUND HERE, PEOPLE. That is the crappiest bunch of crap I’ve seen in a long time. Holy hell. I’ve got nothing left but profanity.
@Farore, I didn’t assume that we were that far apart; I meant to just kind of expand on what you were saying per my own experience. Apologies for any impression otherwise.
On the electronica page, yeah, I dunno about what qualifies either, but I’m a massive fan of old school Brigitte Fontaine, Chorus Reverendus, and the ladies of Ze Records scene, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Caroline Loeb, and Cristina. More recently: Beth Gibbons, Miss Kittin, Chicks on Speed, Yuka Honda, and Warrior Queen? And the Knife who fabulously had, as a protest to male music biz dominance, two Guerilla Girls pick up the group’s Grammy. If you are a purist, I think you are going to have a harder time, but definitely there are shiny bright brilliant female deities outside of the rock domain.
Samantha b. wrote:
They mostly get it from their male elders; Fathers, older brothers, uncles, bigger kids around the neighborhood, etc.
Wow. This post explains… my entire life, pretty much. When you’re a ladygeek it is SO HARD to find people you can be around who won’t put you down because you’re not good enough for some reason. Apparently the only reason women like sci-fi is because of the dudes (really, even the gay ladies? Somehow I think the reasoning may be faulty there). We can’t play guitar, or video games, or DnD. We’re not good at science or maths. We can’t be good at these things because we’re female. Except I AM good at those things so then I’m ‘not a real girl’ and either get treated as some kind of fucking novelty object or like an ‘honorary dude’ which really means having to listen to misogynist crap all the time.
And then some stupid goddamn guy tries to get it on with you because “Girls never do this stuff but you do and that makes you different and cool”. Well who is responsible for women not being part of your snarky t-shirt subculture of choice, hmm? That does not make ladies want to sleep with you, Mr Indie Rock. Excluding them and making them feel like they’re less than you will actually make them want to smash up your shitty guitars instead.
I think the worst example of this I’ve ever encountered was when I was gaming IN MY OWN HOUSE. A friend of my boyfriend decided it was hilarious to give his character a ‘sexism’ flaw, knowing full well that I was the only woman in the room, playing the only female character (who was only female because I was sick of the freak-outs that happened every time I played a male character and others hit on said character without paying attention to the fact that he was, well, a he. Homophobia bonus points!). Seriously uncomfortable, and I refused to game with those people again. Luckily my boyfriend was like “Dudes that is not cool” but he shouldn’t have to say that in his own house where our rules apply. Anyway, I’m fortunate enough that one of my best friends asked me -specifically me! Excitement! Smugness!- to game with a group he was putting together. This group happens to be half female, and I feel a whole lot more comfortable with that. It’s not necessarily the proportion of women, but that I’m not alone.
Actually, the whole post here (and the comments too) reminded me of that: I’m not alone. I don’t know how old everyone is here (and I’m new to commenting here) so maybe I’m a little behind everyone else, but aged 22 it’s only now that I’m finding all these other people who understand.
Also (brackets)
@Farore – I specifically mentioned electro-pop as where there was a female presence, but none in the subgenres I mentioned.
As for discussing US artists, well, I don’t know about that. I know about NZ, UK, SA and Australian artists, and no, there are no prominent female non-poppy electronica musicians of note there either.
As for the more poppy artists mentioned, I wouldn’t call them “deities”. Yes, they’re there, but not THERE in the way that female rock musicians or singer/songwriters are.
This thread is probably dead, but I just came across something perfectly appropriate for it.
I was listening to _Tori Amos Live At Montreux_, which I just got, and thinking apropos of this thread that she was not at all hesitant about being loud.
Then I noticed this comment in the liner notes, “You have to convey an approach, ‘This is my stage, this is mine, not yours motherfucker, and you will know it is mine within two seconds of me walking on.'”
Words for tiger beatdown to live by.
Samantha b. wrote:
They mostly get it from their male elders; Fathers, older brothers, uncles, bigger kids around the neighborhood, etc.
@ Sarita way up in comment #14, I must second your request for a Women Who Rock That You Might Not Have Heard Of thread.
Toshi Reagon
Samantha b. wrote:
They mostly get it from their male elders; Fathers, older brothers, uncles, bigger kids around the neighborhood, etc.
Samantha b. wrote:
They mostly get it from their male elders; Fathers, older brothers, uncles, bigger kids around the neighborhood, etc.
Wow. This post explains… my entire life, pretty much. When you’re a ladygeek it is SO HARD to find people you can be around who won’t put you down because you’re not good enough for some reason. Apparently the only reason women like sci-fi is because of the dudes (really, even the gay ladies? Somehow I think the reasoning may be faulty there). We can’t play guitar, or video games, or DnD. We’re not good at science or maths. We can’t be good at these things because we’re female. Except I AM good at those things so then I’m ‘not a real girl’ and either get treated as some kind of fucking novelty object or like an ‘honorary dude’ which really means having to listen to misogynist crap all the time.
And then some stupid goddamn guy tries to get it on with you because “Girls never do this stuff but you do and that makes you different and cool”. Well who is responsible for women not being part of your snarky t-shirt subculture of choice, hmm? That does not make ladies want to sleep with you, Mr Indie Rock. Excluding them and making them feel like they’re less than you will actually make them want to smash up your shitty guitars instead.
I think the worst example of this I’ve ever encountered was when I was gaming IN MY OWN HOUSE. A friend of my boyfriend decided it was hilarious to give his character a ‘sexism’ flaw, knowing full well that I was the only woman in the room, playing the only female character (who was only female because I was sick of the freak-outs that happened every time I played a male character and others hit on said character without paying attention to the fact that he was, well, a he. Homophobia bonus points!). Seriously uncomfortable, and I refused to game with those people again. Luckily my boyfriend was like “Dudes that is not cool” but he shouldn’t have to say that in his own house where our rules apply. Anyway, I’m fortunate enough that one of my best friends asked me -specifically me! Excitement! Smugness!- to game with a group he was putting together. This group happens to be half female, and I feel a whole lot more comfortable with that. It’s not necessarily the proportion of women, but that I’m not alone.
Actually, the whole post here (and the comments too) reminded me of that: I’m not alone. I don’t know how old everyone is here (and I’m new to commenting here) so maybe I’m a little behind everyone else, but aged 22 it’s only now that I’m finding all these other people who understand.
Also (brackets)
Wow. Very interesting thread. I am a female musician – I play keyboards and sing for a living, and I started playing professionally in the mid-70s, when there were hardly any pro women players around that I knew of. I spent a lot of years feeling like I had to ‘prove’ myself to be included in the male-dominated music world. What really pissed me off was that there was an assumption of incompetence that I had to overcome each and every time I played in a new situation. If a male player that no one knew were to get up on stage to jam or play, the assumption would be of a certain level of competence, and it would be up to the guy to live up to it or not, but a female player was assumed to be underqualified or token until proved differently. After a while I took a certain pride in busting those expectations, but it still rankled. And, as the only female in most bands that I played in, I was definitely marginalized early on – I wasn’t going to be invited to check out the hot chicks from the stage with the rest of the guys. I had to develop a foul mouth to keep from being marginalized by the faux ‘respect’ from even the guys who were trying to be nice and not curse in front of the ladies. And don’t even get me started on shopping in a music store. I was always ignored because it was assumed that I was somebody’s girlfriend instead of a potential money-spending customer. No one would take the time to show me different keyboards or court my business in any way – I just had to come in with the cash and say, “I’ll take this.” It was easier than trying to get a salesman’s attention.
To be fair, things have changed a lot since my early days, and now there are a lot of great women players for young girls to look to, but there still is a gap, especially where playing leads or solos is concerned. My son’s high school jazz band had the same number of girls in it as mine did in 1976 – two – and neither of them would play solos. I have wondered why that is that a lot of girls are not improvisers or lead players, but the Deviant E mentioned something that makes sense – I think that women may be afraid of making mistakes or not being perfect.
When you start to solo, you have to make mistakes and play bad notes, and they aren’t written out for you in advance, so you’re going to sound bad at first. Women players may not feel the freedom to make those mistakes in public, because those mistakes will reflect more strongly on the assumption of incompetence that we still start with after all this time.
I now teach at a contemporary music school in Hollywood, teaching voice, keyboards and computer recording, and the next ‘glass ceiling’ that I see is the production/engineering/technical end of music. That is where a lot of the power is, and I try to encourage my female students to get involved in that aspect of music. The number of women producers and engineers now is about at the ratio of the numbers of women players when I first started – you can find them but they are still a very small percentage of the overall number.
And, on a different angle, the up side for me about being old and fat is that when people hire me, they hire me because I’m really good at what I do, and not because they want to fuck me. When women musicians are hired on an an appearance basis and their skills are not up to par with their male peers, it reinforces that stereotype of ‘women can’t really play like men can.’ It’s hard on all of us – when women are not held to a professional standard, they are disrespected. I’ve seen many instances of ‘all-girl’ bands being put together, and laughed at behind their backs because of their lack of skill – as if that’s the best that women can do. So I really emphasize to my women students the importance of getting your shit together musically and technically, so that you are in charge of every aspect of your music career, and not at the mercy of others, and can relate to other musicians on the same professional level.
I never played with women until about 20 years into my career, but the first time I played in a really great all-female band, I joined them not because they were women, but because they kicked natural ass. It took 20 years for me to experience the kind of camaraderie that men in an all-male band have. Now, I enjoy playing in all different situations – male, female, and mixed, and get something from each kind of configuration. But I sure did have to struggle a long time to lose the frustration of being treated as a second-class citizen musically when I was as good or better than the standard. Things are changing, and I’m trying to be part of that change, by mentoring as many female players as I can.
here is what i don’t get and what i do not care for: the increasing number of all-male, or all-but-one-male, bands with the word “girls” or “women” in them. see: the women, vivian girls, dum dum girls, girls, brazilian girls, clorox girls, etc.
it pisses me off, but i’m not sure why. any thoughts?
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[…] Over at Tiger Beatdown, Sady and Amanda take on rock and roll, relating the sexism in rock subcultures to other subcultures and “outsider” groups: AMANDA: I see the same sad sexism in a lot of different subcultures, and I think women are often drawn to these spaces because they’re outside of the mainstream – because the mainstream marginalizes them, but perhaps in a different way than it does sensitive rocking Kurt Cobain haircut boys. […]