Gender, Metal and the Media

Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music

Rosemary Lucy Hill

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137554413
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

This book is a timely examination of the tension between being a rock music fan and being a woman. From the media representation of women rock fans as groupies to the widely held belief that hard rock and metal is masculine music, being a music fan is an experience shaped by gender. Through a lively discussion of the idealised imaginary community created in the media and interviews with women fans in the UK, Rosemary Lucy Hill grapples with the controversial topics of groupies, sexism and male dominance in metal. She challenges the claim that the genre is inherently masculine, arguing that musical pleasure is much more sophisticated than simplistic enjoyments of aggression, violence and virtuosity. Listening to women's experiences, she maintains, enables new thinking about hard rock and metal music, and about what it is like to be a women fan in a sexist environment.

© The Author(s) 2016

Rosemary Lucy HillGender, Metal and the MediaPop Music, Culture and Identity10.1057/978-1-137-55441-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Gender, Metal and the Media: An Introduction

Rosemary Lucy Hill¹

(1)

School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

End Abstract

Music is a gendered experience. Rock is assumed to be transcendent of the everyday world, with universal, timeless themes that appeal to everyone (Kruse 2002). Yet, even as rock critics have peddled this myth, they have underpinned their ideology with the sexist claim that women are incapable of understanding the music as an art form. In this context, what ‘universal’ actually means is ‘relevant to men’. However, understandings of how people engage with rock music are implicitly gendered. As Green (1997) and Kruse (2002) make clear, music does not exist outside of the social: it is shaped by our lived experiences and heard in our social contexts. Gender is a crucial part of that shaping, yet gender is typically only seen as relevant to women; men’s experiences are seen as general and universal (Wittig 1992). These sexist beliefs mean that understandings of musical engagement are skewed towards men’s experiences, with women’s added in for a bit of spice in order to cover the ‘gender aspect’. This book takes the position that all musical experiences are shaped by gender and that the differing social positions of women and men greatly determine those experiences. Sexism creates different climates for men and women in which they seek to enjoy music. And it is a crucial factor in both women’s and men’s participation in hard rock and metal culture.

Hard rock and metal looks masculine. It is full of glaring, massive, warrior-like men in black. Metal songs are about war, gore and rape. Women are sidelined in this male-dominated and hypermasculine genre. Rarely performing as musicians, they appear in music videos, song lyrics and popular representations as groupies, girlfriends and gorgons. Here’s Seb Hunter describing the metal attitude towards women:

Ask a male Heavy Metal fan if he believes there’s a place within its walls for women, and more often than not he’ll scrunch up his face and reply, “Yes. On her knees with my cock in her mouth”. (Hunter 2004, 238)

Hunter is describing a particular version of metal (late 80’s/early 90’s glam) and his interpretation of that scene (though not necessarily his own views). However, academic research in media, sociology and cultural studies has come to roughly the same conclusion. Metal uses women to create a fantasy world for men (Walser 1993) and uses violently misogynistic imagery in artwork and lyrics (Kahn-Harris 2007; Overell 2010; Vasan 2011; Griffin 2012). Amongst this sexism and the ubiquitously male band line-ups there would seem to be no place for women in the genre.

But, even if extremely underrepresented amongst musicians, women do participate in hard rock and metal, predominantly as fans: around one-third of metal fans are estimated to be women (Purcell 2003). Recent research shows that their experiences are different to those of men in the genre. They are subject to a barrage of questions from male fans to prove the authenticity of their fandom (Nordström and Herz 2013), sidelined by male fans at rock and metal events (Kahn-Harris 2007) and feel they must tolerate male metal fans’ sexist attitudes towards their femininity; some choose to wear masculine dress rather than allowing themselves to appear sexually available (Vasan 2010, 2011).

Why then, would women choose to be involved in hard rock and metal?

This paradoxical conundrum has personal import for me: I love hard rock and metal, but I am also a feminist. How can I square these two important parts of my identity? What role is there for me in metal, as a fan, as an aspiring musician, as a woman committed to bettering the lives of women?

Growing up, my brother and I were rock fans, but it seemed easier for him. His friends shared his taste in music, he never had to qualify whether he really liked Metallica, and he never felt excluded by the rock magazines we read. Those magazines rarely felt as if they were speaking to me: women existed outside the pages of the magazines as punchlines of jokes that aimed to unify the audience as heterosexual, male readers engaged in a battle of the sexes. They assumed that women either did not like the music or were involved in the culture because they were attracted to the musicians. I felt this injustice deeply and worked hard to represent my fandom as one that was as good as any male fan’s. I spoke of my fandom in terms of the music itself, and although I felt attracted to some of the musicians, I denied having these feelings. And then I saw that the way to really show that I was an authentic fan was to become a rock musician, which I did. Becoming a musician meant stepping out of the role of fan, and that also felt like I was leaving my femininity behind. However, in practice, aiming for the higher-status role of musician meant that my femininity was not forgotten. Instead, I had to work even harder to diminish any girlishness and to be ‘one of the guys’. At least I was not a groupie, I thought to myself.

For me, growing up also meant growing feminist sensibilities. And there rock was a stumbling block, for much of the music I loved was made by men—women were conspicuously absent—and many of the singers sang unpleasant things about women. How could I accept this? Was it, as Norma Coates wonders, ‘false consciousness’ (Coates 1997, 51)? No, it was not as simple as that. I loved the music, and I could not entirely hear my own subjugation in it. Summing up and dismissing the genre as misogynist left out the way in which the music made me feel powerful. In fact, like Ellen Willis (2014), I felt that the music gave me strength to fight sexism when I encountered it. How could this understanding of rock ‘n’ roll be reconciled with assessments that see it as sexist? And didn’t these perspectives reduce all rock music to a single monolithic sound and fail to consider the differences between bands’ attitudes and politics, their images, their lyrics and music?

These questions, which have not been asked before by metal scholars, are crucially important in understanding how male dominance is reproduced in music cultures and the media’s role in this. It is also vital for understanding how musical experience is never not gendered; in fact, the way we experience music through the media, through our social and public interactions and through our private listenings is shaped by gendered expectations, assumptions and roles. Although not all of our experiences are gendered all of the time (and music can sometimes give women spaces in which to temporarily forget gender), the overall experience of hard rock and metal is different for women and men.

In this book I ask these questions to come to grips with the conundrum of what hard rock and metal means for women fans—its sexisms and contradictions, its pleasures and ambiguities, its highs and its lows. I rise to Sue Wise’s (1984) challenge for feminist music scholars. Wise describes her experience of loving Elvis. For her, he was a friend, a teddy bear, rather than the macho god of the mainstream (patriarchal) media. But feminist readings of Elvis took on this image of The King as a macho, sexist god, and this reading made no sense to her—it contradicted her own experience. Wise’s challenge is that feminists need to both contest male knowledge about rock music and examine how feminist orthodoxy has taken on male knowledges without rethinking them. This challenge opens up new areas for reinterpreting music, fandom and the media. Addressing these areas brings new light to a dark corner in which female fans of hard rock and metal have been dismissed, having been accused of being cahoots with patriarchy. Furthermore, knowledge about rock music has been left in the hands of male writers who are both invested in retaining the status quo and unaware that being a fan is different for women.

Here are some of the assumptions about women and hard rock and metal that were reinforced at the 2009 Heavy Metal and Gender International Congress in Cologne:

1. 1.
   if women are not involved in making hard rock and metal music as musicians it is because they choose not to be, rather than that there are structural problems hindering them;
2. 2.
   metal is asexual because men are involved for the sake of the music, not to meet women—this ignores that metal masculinity can be attractive for some fans, men and women alike. Women and men as desiring subjects are excluded from the discussion;
3. 3.
   metal is inclusive, and so women can be participants as long as they love the music, are prepared to wear the uniform (jeans, black T-shirt), refrain from desiring metal men, and adopt the same value system. In real terms this sounds very much like an assertion that women can participate in metal as long as they are prepared to be more like men.

These orthodoxies are congratulatory of the genre’s open and inclusive attitude—an attitude also prevalent in non-academic discourse about hard rock and metal—even as they reinforce heterosexual masculinity as the norm. Moreover, anyone looking at hard rock and metal magazines and festival line-ups can see that the genre’s musicians are nearly all white men; the genre is obviously not inclusive. It may offer strength and a sense of community to those who feel excluded from more mainstream groups, but the rules of hard rock and metal are inflexible. It remains an exclusive ‘club’, and the rules are written by white, straight men. It precludes the involvement of women, homosexual men and black people.

Increasingly, attention is being paid to women’s experiences, and questions about metal’s Western whiteness are beginning to be asked. Exciting work is being done on race and gender (e.g., Lucas et al. 2011; Dawes 2012; Spracklen 2015), queerness (Clifford-Napoleone 2015b), masculinities (Overell 2010, 2012; Kartheus 2015) and women’s experiences (Vasan 2011; Riches 2011, 2014, 2015; Nordström and Herz 2013) in the hard rock and metal context. The music media remains one area that needs further investigation (but see Brill 2008; Spracklen 2010; Hagen 2014). The media have a part to play in creating a sense of metal community and in reproducing the community’s gendered notions which exclude women from full participation (Hill 2014a). Furthermore, the music media’s representation of women fans as groupies—adoring and defending of, and ever-available to musicians—is not only a misrepresentation (because most women fans are not groupies), it is damaging. For women it deprives them of role models in their musical aspirations, and it limits the ability to express their fandom. It also places them in danger of sexual exploitation. Understanding how women feel about and reflect upon this representation, and how they negotiate its impact, is therefore vitally important.

One important question to ask is, what is so wrong with being attracted to musicians anyway? Kant’s (2010 [1790]) emphasis on disinterestedness as a crucial element of the aesthetic experience of beauty underpins dominant values in hard rock and metal culture, as it does in all rock’s claims to be ‘art’ (Regev 1994). Kant’s theory has been critiqued as blind to socially learned responses to culture and reifying of a particular middle and upper class experience (Bourdieu 2010). It is also dismissive of sexual and somatic responses. The diminution of this sort of musical appreciation results in a smaller and less nuanced understanding of our fandoms. Susan Fast’s (1999) work on Led Zeppelin is informative on this point. Just as Wise counters typical understandings of Elvis by reflecting on her feelings about The King, so Fast challenges most readings of Led Zeppelin. She examines her own passion for their music alongside a large number of survey responses from fans, close readings of the band’s visual imagery, and analysis of the music in order to parry journalistic accounts, and Frith and McRobbie’s (1990 [1978]) conceptualisation of the band as ‘simply’ masculine. The conclusions Fast draws are staggering because they complicate notions of what the band and their music mean for the fans. She problematises those ideas about listening and musical engagement that are narrowly defined by gender. Rather than challenging suggestions that women fans do not pay serious attention to the music, Fast engages closely with the different kinds of relationships that women and men fans have with the object of their fandom. It signals that there is someth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Gender, Metal and the Media: An Introduction
• 2. Hard Rock and Metal as an Imaginary Community
• 3. The Media and the Imaginary Community
• 4. Women Fans and the Myth of the Groupie
• 5. Listening to Hard Rock and Metal Music
• 6. Metal and Sexism
• 7. The Gendered Experience of Music
• Backmatter