Music industry sexism

August 26, 2015 10:57 AM

"Gals/other marginalized folks: what was your 1st brush (in music industry, journalism, scene) w/ idea that you didn't 'count'?" This tweet from Jessica Hopper kicked off a thread that lasted 2 days, with over 400 stories being shared. Storify of the full thread. Trigger warning for sexism, harrassment, rape.
posted by naju (40 comments total)

(I misspoke - it's not a storify of the *full* thread, since replies have been removed)
posted by naju at 11:05 AM on August 26, 2015

@Jesshopp's feed today sch a great reminder that imposter syndrome isn't psychological weakness but a rational reaction to a pervasive norm

Whoa. On point.

I have a Facebook friend/acquaintance (old journalism school classmate) who is a female music journalist and also tends to often post and speak out about street harassment and related phenomena, to the point where it's sort of become "her thing" on social media (she once mentioned that people were starting to send her articles about street harassment all "Thought of you!", which... thanks?). I want to show her this and ask her what she thinks, but I'm also a little afraid of what I'll find out.
posted by sunset in snow country at 11:24 AM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

I recognize a couple of people I'm Twitter friends with on that list. Just reading those reminds me of how I was never taken seriously in any music scene when I was a teenager, even when I started a very short-lived band. Dudes were all about the Riot Grrrl scene but instead of being part of the solution, they were often part of the problem (all the while actively denying their participation was part of the problem).
posted by Kitteh at 11:28 AM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Jairus Khan put this on my radar yesterday. I thought: oh, I should post this to metafilter, then started reading all of the insane nonsense that women put up with and I wound up pulling my shirt up over my head for a few hours and ignoring the world
posted by boo_radley at 11:39 AM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

i went from this tab to this tweet from kitty and it seems related.
posted by nadawi at 11:47 AM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

THIS. And this. Forever.

Being a wild-eyed, super-devoted, long-distance-traveling, front-row-all-night-every-night crazy indie rock fan who also happened to be [GASP] female was such a load of bullshit that I just... don't do it anymore. Walking backstage, buying records, trying to do an interview, expounding upon how much I love a specific band: OK, but who are you fucking? Or who are you trying to fuck?

I used to tell people that indie rock was everything to me, but as it turns out, it doesn't mean shit, and life is so much better without all the rockism and dick-measuring that abound in that particular fandom. Very few men were willing to treat me like a fully-fledged human unless there were other women around to bear witness or back me up. My enthusiasm was all but exclusively translated as being dtf, nothing more, nothing less. And I was always "one of the guys" riiiiiiiight up until they made it painfully clear that I'd never been any such thing.

Like how I busted my ass for half a decade as the #1 fan for some dumb band -- when they started to get a bit of mainstream attention, I was asked to be interviewed about them for national television... and the only question the interviewer asked me was whether I wanted to sleep with the singer. Zing.

So now I only listen to rap music made by women, and the shows are mostly attended by women, too. No rockism, no dick-measuring, just a bunch of us buying each other drinks and talking shit. Good riddance to everything else.
posted by divined by radio at 11:51 AM on August 26, 2015 [29 favorites]

Shirley Manson from Garbage had a Facebook post on this topic not long ago
posted by ServSci at 12:05 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

I've never been into any music scene, but this reminds me of the thread a few days ago about how women are pushed out of games. And I'm also seeing this through the lens of my brief foray into tech, and teaching myself HTML and designing my own websites as a kid, until I was told, unsubtly, that it was not for girls. How many hobbies, interests, art forms, passions (to say nothing of careers) have women been pushed out of this way? Literature. Painting. It never ends.
posted by sunset in snow country at 12:11 PM on August 26, 2015 [9 favorites]

This reminds me of this piece by MeFi's Own Juliet Banana (FPP) about harassment she faced at a punk venue in Austin. I don't know how many more times women need to say the same thing about every single scene they're in before the message starts to sink in.
posted by Phire at 12:18 PM on August 26, 2015 [9 favorites]

Ugh there's just nowhere to go to avoid this stuff. It's everywhere, in every single industry, because you are a woman and this is your lot in life. The tweet from this guy was another depressing illustration that half the world has no idea the other half goes through this crap on a near daily basis.

And the self-doubt in some of these stories from women is heartbreaking. "I thought it was just because I was young/inexperienced/maybe doing something wrong/etc" - nope. It's because those men are dicks.
posted by erratic meatsack at 12:22 PM on August 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

I was one of those young people who wore my musical tastes on my sleeve (and everywhere else). I read music magazines and newsletters and ordered music I hadn't heard yet from catalogs, and I went to shows all the time, frequently on my own because most of my friends weren't that interested.

It never seemed to occur to most people that these things might signal legitimate interests, rather than an interest in a boy who was legitimately interested.

And just about every single time I'd bring a boy with me to introduce him to something I was into, people would assume he'd dragged me there instead of the other way around.

So many gross old men, too, telling me I would be more attractive if I let my hair grow out and wore pretty clothes, like they never even questioned that I was trying to attract repulsive conservative assholes my dad's age, and was just really really bad at it.

I am fifty years old now, and I haven't been to a non-seating assigned type concert in a really long time, but someone I know had an extra three-day ticket, so I'm lone wolfing Riot Fest this weekend.

I am going to impress so many boys.
posted by ernielundquist at 12:32 PM on August 26, 2015 [12 favorites]

Grimes was also talking about this a fair amount this summer. She was having problems finishing her album and was inundated with offers of "help", all of which would take away authorship / were assuming that she didn't produce her own stuff.

I've never made an album, but she was saying that her male colleagues never got this treatment.
posted by sauril at 12:37 PM on August 26, 2015

I love (well, "love") that there are multiple women in that storify specifically mentioning being in 5th or 6th grade and having boys quiz them on Green Day, because that is PRECISELY how I would answer this question, too. What is it about middle school boys and Green Day?
posted by everybody had matching towels at 12:38 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Whew, I'm glad this account isn't directly linked to real-life me, I can finally tell the story.

It was when my piano professor informed me that she wanted to promote me to her husband (the top piano professor at our school of music). I just needed to accept that he slept with all of his women students. She started explaining how their marriage incorporated it, how inspiring it was for all involved regarding music, they'd never had any issues, etc.

I quit piano.

I only had issues with known assholes in jazz groups. On the whole I was treated well in them.

Still, I noticed that all of the professional musicians who visited us with stories of success were men. Of the few women who visited, and our woman professors (apart from the piano prof), several took time to share private warnings that, as a woman, a great deal of courage and ideally a very supportive spouse was needed if I wanted to continue.

I did not become a professional musician. FWIW, I had been the only piano performance applicant accepted in my year. There were years they accepted no one – policy was only to choose applicants they believed could actually become pros. (The piano program's bread and butter was training music education and composition students.)
posted by MarionnetteFilleDeChaussette at 12:40 PM on August 26, 2015 [22 favorites]

I just needed to accept that he slept with all of his women students.

HOLY SHIT THAT'S GROSS.

sorry for yelling but HOLY FUCKING SHIT
posted by Phire at 12:58 PM on August 26, 2015 [19 favorites]

This is probably not going to be a popular observation, but I have received the "sit down little girl" treatment from both men and women. Among the guys, it's usually an older man who's had years of treating women that way, and isn't happy taking lip from some uppity girl. Among women, it seems to be someone in a position of authority, and it's like they see me as a threat and want to make sure no-one usurps their hard-won place.

I'm not trying to diminish the poor treatment of women, I'm just saying it's not necessarily always men that engage in this. Sometimes it's women co-opting the language of men.
posted by LN at 1:00 PM on August 26, 2015

if women didn't push the patriarchy along it wouldn't still be going. women breaking whatever glass ceiling and pulling the ladder up behind them isn't that controversial of an observation. it's born from the same sort of stuff we're discussing in this thread, like you mention - there's a perception that multiple women can't succeed in a space considered male dominated. if we can get men to stop gate checking and abusing women out of these spaces, the women in these spaces will be less likely to view other women as a threat. this is also a great reason for us women to always fight against "i'm not like the other girls/i'm one of the guys!" bullshit both within ourselves and from other women.
posted by nadawi at 1:06 PM on August 26, 2015 [36 favorites]

I don't think reasonable people can deny that women can be guilty of misogyny too. The patriarchy isn't just "the sum of all men," it's a stupid broken pathology that infects everyone in it to some degree or another.

Plus: Women can be assholes, too. Like, not just damaged souls whose self-esteem is beaten down or something, but actual, regular assholes independent of all that.
posted by ernielundquist at 1:08 PM on August 26, 2015 [11 favorites]

there's a perception that multiple women can't succeed in a space considered male dominated

Yeah, this. There is a big, pervasive notion that there is only room for "the girl" and I'm sure I'm not the only woman here who has been pushed out of a space because a new girl came into the space and the men decided she was more worthwhile. And I blamed her for that instead of the dudes for a long time! It's shitty and awful and pits women against each other to be the one that get allowed through the gates instead of working together to dismantle the gates themselves.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 1:14 PM on August 26, 2015 [15 favorites]

Wow nadawi i... wouldn't expect that comment from you.

I'm a long time local music guy. I've played in bands, DJed, produced, ran sound/set up and transported PA shit, done logistics, booked, created recurring events at venues that got relatively successful, etc.

I've written about this sort of thing on here before. And in my experience from the male side(while being friends with quite a few of the minority of women in the scene(s)) was that almost every shitty comment came from a dude, and that the women who were around were generally greatful and excited to have more women around.

Am i saying i never heard weird gate checking authenticity-questioning comments from women? No. But dudes relish in this. They'd go to the bar nextdoor and get beers just to excitedly talk shit about different women in bands being fakes, or how they didn't really write their stuff/whatever else and are just being supported by their boyfriend or one of the guys in the band or they could only do this with their daddies/parents money or whatever.

The women i've seen doing this were basically never the promoters, venue runners/staff, people involved in the bigger bands being opened for, or other women in positions of power. It was basically always the friends of the band, or women already in the friend group of longtime fans. Generally the people in power saw the system was fucked and avoided that shit.

Idk, the entire "women do it to women!" discussion is worthwhile, but very very quickly gets in to the kind of #notallmen that awful people wank to because it loses focus on the fact that this shitty behavior is almost entirely propagated by men. It's a fairly personal issue too, as i've seen it burn out and drive out some women whose work i loved, and who were awesome people i was becoming friends with before i even really could. This was mostly in electronic music and DJing which is a special extra level of awful backwards nerdery and misogyny(in my opinion), but really just everywhere. And even in the places i thought would be better than that, like LGBT clubs or relatively underground weird venues and recurring events that often booked LGBT spaces or underground spots.

I guess it just seems weird to me because the majority of the people turning the crank are men. If women stopped turning it, it would keep turning. It would be blatantly obvious it was just dudes doing it, but they wouldn't all look at eachother and go "oh my GOD!!", they'd just keep whinging about how feeemales get an unfair portion of the attention and only get ahead by using their magical vajayjay powers to woo men who can lift them up. Those guys aren't going to stop believing that garbage overnight.
posted by emptythought at 1:26 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

Wow nadawi i... wouldn't expect that comment from you.

...did you misread my comment? i was admitting that yes women can do this to other women in all sorts of settings but it's up to men to stop it because they're the biggest offenders and generally the impetus for some women to parrot this behavior. acknowledging that women participate in misogyny sometimes is in no way some sort of #notallmen gambit.
posted by nadawi at 1:30 PM on August 26, 2015 [13 favorites]

I don't think the two of you are disagreeing.
posted by phearlez at 1:31 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

yeah i also don't read us as disagreeing which is why i'm confused by the finger wagging.
posted by nadawi at 1:32 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Perhaps if women didn't push the patriarchy along it wouldn't still be going was read as all women, or even more than a few women. Which is not what I assumed, but I guess I could see it? But that there are some women who will enable patriarchy for their own personal ends or because they have internalized nonsense doesn't seem to be in question.

I guess I can see doubting whether that enabling going away would be enough to keep patriarchy from continuing but that's kind of a "is Hulk stronger than Superman" sort of question IMNSHO. There will always be some conspirators/turncoats in any oppression. It's just human nature, even before you account for the pervasive cultural gaslighting that enlists some women into being agents of their own oppression.
posted by phearlez at 1:38 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I would think he meant to call out LN.
posted by naju at 1:39 PM on August 26, 2015

Jeez, that Storify link -- I think the last time I said "Eew!" so many times while reading something was looking through one of those Jello + meat recipe books from the 60s and 70s.
posted by lord_wolf at 1:46 PM on August 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

I would think he meant to call out LN.

I need to drink coffee before i use the internet
posted by emptythought at 1:53 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Holy SHIT, this is the story of my life. STORY. OFMYLIFE.

My seething, bitter resentment upon being "replaced" -- because, of course, there could only ever be one (1) woman in a given subset of a scene -- grew into a mile-wide stripe of internalized misogyny that has taken so many years to tease out, recognize, and extinguish. And I'm still working on it. Every day. Every day!

These days I am 100,000% ride or die for women as a class and have arrived at a point in my life where I want to spend all of my time exclusively in their company. I'm just so tired of dudes. But a decade ago, misogyny had its tentacles in every corner of my brain and the kind of people I had invited into my life made me think that harboring a deep and occasionally outright vicious mistrust of women was perfectly normal. Men were the representatives, creators, and arbiters, and they made it clear that getting upset over sexism in the music industry/scene just made everyone think I was a total bummer, so I started to lay down any objections or boundaries I had and tried to make a grab for the brass ring.

At that point, my reactions to encountering another woman in "my" space started to involve either desperately trying to be her friend and being soundly rejected, usually because she knew There Could Would Only Be One and didn't want to taint herself by association, and/or trying to nitpick her entire existence to figure out all the ways in which I should be seen as the clearly superior fan/woman/human. Meanwhile the men would be like, "Oooh, catfight!" or just shrugging and trying to get both of us into bed. So many years of my life spent chasing after their condescending little head pats and sad little puffs of pseudo-approval, amounting to nothing. It was totally fucking exhausting. It is still totally fucking disgusting.
posted by divined by radio at 1:53 PM on August 26, 2015 [19 favorites]

There is also the element of if you are the One Girl Who Gets It, deviations from the group causes your precarious status to fall.

"You only like her because she's a chick!"
"Seriously?! Her? But you're so *cool* why would you like that?"

There's no winning.
posted by teleri025 at 1:56 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

I go to a lot of live music, often for bands I don't know. And this thread is reminding me that a show made me So Happy recently when there were TWO women in one of the bands. Not just one, but two!

And then I felt sad that it's still exciting when a live band includes two female musicians and it's NBD, like they aren't even called a Girl Band, they're just a band that chose good musicians regardless of gender. May that start being the norm! Like, yesterday!
posted by ldthomps at 2:15 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

Guardian article highlighting a few of the women and stories.
posted by naju at 2:16 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

I completely understand why they don't, but I do wish names could be named when people talk about respected producers etc. doing really horrible things.
posted by cell divide at 2:48 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I do wish names could be named when people talk about respected producers etc. doing really horrible things.

Very much concur.
posted by aramaic at 2:53 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

michael buble got named, which was honestly surprising to me.
posted by nadawi at 2:54 PM on August 26, 2015

Yeah, that made me do a double take too. "Corny wholesome singer your mom likes is actually a sexist pig" is a plotline straight out of Empire Records.
posted by naju at 2:58 PM on August 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

i demand buble record a cover of "say no more, mon amour"
posted by nadawi at 3:49 PM on August 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

Yeah, that made me do a double take too. "Corny wholesome singer your mom likes is actually a sexist pig" is a plotline straight out of Empire Records.

It's also probably almost always true.
posted by IAmUnaware at 5:33 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

I've worked a few years near a guitar school and rehearsal space, so I'm really not that surprised some of that was said in another place and time. Recall one time I was buying strings and windowlicking guitars, and heard a couple I knew from sight arguing not in a friendly manner about guitars. After a while, he stormed out shouting, pissed and threatening to drop her and the band. Later I've heard it was between two models, one she researched around to match her purposes, and one the guy thought was the best. One chance to guess who had the best option.
posted by lmfsilva at 6:59 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Happens in burlesque too. God help you if you're brown and outspoken about it.
posted by divabat at 7:54 PM on August 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

This has only happened to me once, mostly because I am shy and don't talk to strangers at shows and the bands are always friendly and accept that I am a fan and just seem to be excited to have fans.

It came from my brother, who is the person who opened my eyes that there was more (and better!) music than what was on the radio, and I remember him saying that I only liked this one band because I thought they were cute. And it was a band he introduced me to! Since then, while he is a total asshole in other ways, at least he isn't in that way and respects that I like music that is good because it is good.
posted by LizBoBiz at 10:16 AM on August 27, 2015