Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

something along those lines, gyac

anyway i get tired of posting things on this board and worrying that someone is going to reframe what i say in a somewhat disingenuous way that'll make me look like an asshole.

or putting words/thoughts in my mouth. whatever it's fine. it's online culture. i should accept it at this point. i'm a veteran now.

i think the problem with this thread, for me, is that you need a certain amount of vulnerability and trust to be able to work through some of this shit, and the truth is i kind of barely know people here, so i think i'm going to stop posting in this thread

my thinking on this topic is kind of messy and informed by all different strains of queer theory and post-marxism and my own life experiences and my friends' and it's just sort of a confusing journey and i definitely feel like a certain amount of risk-taking is involved, but i don't want to stumble through that publicly and inadvertently give the impression that it think X instead of Y, or make certain posters feel unheard or un-valued

<3 same

I like your post, Omar. At a certain point in my 20s, I realized that I was increasingly listening to and preferring music made by women. Partly that was just availability — in the '90s, there started to be a lot more rock/indie/hip-hop by women. For the last several decades, while I can list plenty of music-by-white-guys I like and listen to, my favorites in pretty much any genre have been by women and/or nonwhite men. Like, all of my Pazz Jop ballots in that period were mostly non-white-dudes. I've thought about this some — like, "Am I woke poser? Am I overcorrecting for my mostly-white-dudes teenage listening habits?" But I'm really just listening to what I like, what I find interesting. (I mean, the shit I got from a lot of male friends as an early Taylor Swift champion. Of course, a lot of them have since come around.)

I think in a lot of ways I got tired of hearing from/about straight white dudes. I find us kind of tiresome!

I credit my dad a lot for that too. Although his record collection still skewed white-guy, he loved girl groups — we always had the Shirelles on — and a lot of women folk and country artists. Tons of Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, etc.

i just don't think anything i said in my post deserved being called icky, patronizing, facile NPR...i don't think women are here to make men be better. i'm not trying to artificially center anyone's voices. it's just a personal take, unedited. sorry but it just sort of bummed me out. it felt like being targeted for a takedown to score points. maybe it's a straw breaking a back after years of pandemic hell and friends and family dying crashing down on me, or knowing what i do actually feel, but there you have it.

"i center __ voices by listening to __" is just kind of a facile NPR-brain operation

Yes and no? On one hand, sure, taste and politics often don't align. But also I think a thoughtful and deliberate appreciator/consumer of arts, music, literature — which describes most of ilx — will push beyond boundaries of things they know and voices they're familiar with. That's part of the fun of it, right? It's how you find new things, or new-to-you things.

I think straight dudes in particular absolutely should listen to and seek out art by people who aren't straight dudes. (As should everybody seek out perspectives beyond their own, but extra important for the privileged demographics.)

I think the aesthetics question is complicated. Many of my favorite musicians are women, and this has been true for as long as I’ve been an active music listener, but I am not a fan of most of Taylor Swift’s music, as one example. The way that liking/disliking something has been weaponized into ideological signalling is really unfortunate in a lot of ways— not liking or liking a certain artist with a certain subjectivity (gender, orientation, race) can have little to do with bias, or it can have a lot to do with bias. But this zero-sum way such aesthetic differences are treated can make it seem as if it always has to do with bias, and frankly, that doesn’t really make sense.

sorry for weird itals there

I can imagine you stressing the point with a cig in hand.

For sure. Not liking Taylor Swift or any particular artist is always going to be primarily about personal taste, which is shaped by many things (including but hardly exclusively various kinds of biases). But based mostly on anecdotal data — what I know of other people's listening habits — I think a lot of music-listening dudes mostly listen to music by dudes. A lot of guys will have their counterexamples that they'll offer if you point out how male-dominated their listening is — they love Lucinda Williams, or Lauryn Hill, or Loretta Lynn, or Liz Phair. But their listening habits are still like 90-95 percent male.

So, yeah, it's not prescriptive — you don't have to listen to or like any given artist. I just think a lot of guys (not itt or on ilx in general mind) intentionally or unintentionally limit their listening by both genre and gender.

(lol apparently in my example guys will mostly listen to women whose names start with L)

i also know men who only listen to women whose names start with "L" a weird but true phenomenon.

seriously i wasn't trying to be anything other than expressive of my stabs at self-improvement, sorry for the sensitivity i'm just having a particularly bad week.

It's like in Superman comics how all the women he was attracted to had the initials LL. The ladylike allure.

it also seems strange to me that you're equating masculinity with "aggressive" music and femininity with approachable/freeing/pop music.

as a female musician I also take issue with this! Making music is a way to channel my aggression, and I often prefer other aggressive music. This is not to make this an attack on omar or his post ... just that his post brought up other essentializing issues w/r/t music genre/aesthetic and marginalized identities, such as this ... I liked the "manic pixie" line in yr post, budo... it reminds me of all the cis-dudes who love Joni Mitchell idk.

not liking or liking a certain artist with a certain subjectivity (gender, orientation, race) can have little to do with bias, or it can have a lot to do with bias.

also table otm

to clarify what i really did mean, it was more along the lines of what the societal expectations can be for what music one is supposed to listen to, often incorrect assumptions about expectations, how one feels tied to them, and how it's less about what music is in fact freeing but more about how having no boundaries can be freeing. i guess it was just stated terribly but i'd just appreciate the benefit of the doubt.

put that way I think it's pretty inarguable. as we all know, the ilm archives are rife with posts where aggro male posters say stuff like "how can grown men listen to this teen girl dreck"

“I liked Abba before it was acceptable.*” is a very charming boast :)

Oh I totally get that!

put that way I think it's pretty inarguable. as we all know, the ilm archives are rife with posts where aggro male posters say stuff like "how can grown men listen to this teen girl dreck"

Nowhere are these middle-aged/aging men asked why the hell they blast AC/DC and Zep as if they were 17 on their way to a kegger.

lol seriously. only mature gentlemen can appreciate the nuances of "Big Balls"

can anyone recommend some teen girl dreck that a person who really likes "overdose" can enjoy

maybe worth explicitly saying that the anti teen girl stuff is rooted in both misogyny and homophobia. apologies if someone already noted that!

which "overdose" crut? there's a few songs with that name

a couple years ago there was an app that examined your spotify streaming habits by gender. it turned out that i listened to mostly women -- it was something like 70 - 30. not sure if that is still true, but at the time i took it as reassurance that i am a good person who doesn't need to do any more self-reflection, unlike all of you bozos. do better.

can anyone recommend some teen girl dreck that a person who really likes "overdose" can enjoy

― c u (crüt),

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqAOB143KqY

I've never heard a note of slipknot, but they always seemed to attract a more gender-balanced audience than I would expect.
Are there bands that surprised anyone else that way, maybe even just in regional differences in fanbases?

I remember being surprised by the surprisingly gender balanced Insane Clown Posse fandom.

i kinda do like AC/DC but one could probably drive around listening to "Sex Farm" by Spinal Tap and be equally as moved.

i think charting one's personal music journey is pretty interesting, it's just important to always be on that journey and not stagnate. growing up in a rural, exclusively white, very conservative area, i spent so many years just kind of taking in all the shit that was fed me. i eventually just happened to meet others who guided me in other directions, and also had a couple life-changing experiences, culturally speaking. before and after that i wasn't immune to the shitty opinions, holding some and probably embracing some. but i don't think the culture we expose ourselves to is incapable of changing us for the better, and that can often be as simple as art, if we open ourselves up to it. for some, it might be the only way we are able to hear other voices. especially if we have been raised in an area far from those other cultures. i always hope to be better. mostly i'm concerned w/raising my son to be a good person, as far as all that goes. i want him to be better than me. no doubt he already is.

women are more likely to enjoy masculine coded music than men are to enjoy feminine coded music.

most male artists i can think of, even extremely macho and misogynistic ones, have a significant number of women fans

not really on board with the AC/DC dismissal ott tbrr

budo jeru, i like you well enough (maybe it's because you were one of the people who regularly responded to my rolling music thread lol) and i get why... i mean one of the things i think about a lot is shame, the way it's essentializing in the way guilt isn't. thinking and responding is good! your response to omar was... it was pretty harshly critical, i think, in a pretty direct way. there's this idea that i used to kind of buy into of "brutal honesty", and i don't think honesty is improved by brutality.

there's also, like... i mean maybe i want to make music for the purpose of guiding men to "do better"! i don't make music but one of the reasons i do post here, at least, is because i think it's important for men to hear other perspectives that might possibly give them the opportunity for personal growth.

speaking personally the issue of gender in music did affect me. when i was in college i listened to tori amos for a bit but stopped because i felt like i didn't have the right to do that, that by listening to her music i was appropriating "women's experiences". which in retrospect is ridiculous, but that's what i believed, for a long time.

listening to women isn't the be-all and end-all of allyship but i do think it's important, letting women speak for women's experiences, understanding that women have knowledge and experience from their experiences that men don't, that cis men kind of can't. that doesn't mean, like i thought when i was younger, that women are this fundamentally incomprehensible thing to men. that belief, i think, my holding that belief did perpetuate patriarchy.

looking at it now, it seems so simple and obvious, these things that i struggled so hard to understand when i was trying to be a "good man". i just want to be listened to, taken seriously, for people who don't have my experiences to understand that maybe i know something they don't, that what they think about trans people _shouldn't_ carry equal weight to the way i articulate my lived experience as a trans person. it's so hard, to put that trust into someone who's not like you, who doesn't have the same interests and values as you. and men do have a choice whether or not to do that. _i_ had a choice whether or not to do that. women, people who live as women, gender minorities, don't. because men have power that women don't, i _do_ have to rely on them to act in my best interest, to act as allies. men do, a lot of men do. not all men. a lot of men do, and i try not to think about how conditional it all is, how they could at any time decide _not_ to act as allies and they'd face no consequences for that at all. we'd face the consequences. not them.

anyway. it's important for men to listen to women. i believe that. what women any particular man listens to, you know, there are a lot of different women who have a lot of different things to say. we're not all equal by any means. don't listen to lauren boebert, for the love of god, please. but there are a lot of women who have good things to say.

oh, and omar, i didn't take what you said _at all_ in the same way budo did. i thought it was a good post!

most male artists i can think of, even extremely macho and misogynistic ones, have a significant number of women fans

i'm not sure I would cosign this. it's gotten a lot better in recent years but, for the most part, I still see 80-90% male crowds at the smaller club metal and stoner rock shows I see.

I don't want to derail this thread with silly stuff, but ftr I have nothing against AC/DC and I hell I still enjoy LZ (D'yer Maker was playing while I was in the pet store earlier and I was into it). I was just agreeing with Alfred that there are obvious double standards

not really on board with the AC/DC dismissal ott tbrr

― Tracer Hand

I'm not (nor of Def Leppard!) -- I'm tired of validating dudes blasting adolescent boys rock in their F-150s while dissing female music.

good post Kate as usual ty

I am so grateful my mom e.g. subscribed to Ms magazine from the get-go, I grew up in the 70's understanding the sarcasm and point of the "No Comment" page

then ofc my dad was a disaster, so although I had a strong understanding of feminism from a young age (thanks also to Crass in all seriousness), I didn't have very many good male role models but am immensely thankful for the ones I did have (mostly via the gamer/RPG world, ironically)

women are more likely to enjoy masculine coded music than men are to enjoy feminine coded music.

I'd say likely to "listen to" rather than "enjoy" because we have to listen to things first before we even know if we enjoy them — and for most of the recorded music era, the majority of what anyone had available to listen to has been music made by men. That has changed in the last few decades and the landscape is so fractured now that I don't even know how you'd calculate whether a "majority" of recorded music is still produced by men. My guess is probably? But at least we've stopped proclaiming "Year of the Woman" every couple years like it's a novel thing for women to record music.

But yeah, the point about gendered listening habits I think is still true — women are more likely than men to listen to women artists, and also women are more likely to listen to male artists than men are to listen to female artists. (See also Hollywood, where up until last week or whatever it was gospel that women would go to movies about men but not vice versa.)

All of which is the product of a male-dominated society and culture, obviously, the patriarchy at work. Is it changing among younger generations? It would be nice to think so but I get the feeling that teenage boys still mostly listen to male-made music.

xp Alfred - some of them drive Chevys to be fair

i appreciate it, Kate. i did leave some thoughts half-finished in there, it's hard to not make a post like mine sound maybe a bit clumsy in its sentiments, but i was giving it a sincere go.

btw i side-barred with budo and we're cool.

women are more likely to enjoy masculine coded music than men are to enjoy feminine coded music.

― treeship.

i'll take it further and say that a lot of gender coding in music is bullshit! this whole thing about metal being a masculine genre. god, i know so many trans women who just fucking love metal. trans women who _make_ metal. victory over the sun. liturgy. feminazgul. so much more i don't even know about. and hell, i love metal! not to the extent that some of the women i know do, not to the extent where i listen to metal and only metal. i have to be in the mood for it. for me, i think a lot of the reason more women don't listen to metal is, like, the pervasive misogyny in metal culture. i can understand not wanting to be involved in a subculture where you have to deal with all that hostility and prejudice against you.

sleeve, it's interesting, because my mom _wasn't_ a good feminist role model. she was that model of feminist that said "women can do anything men can do!". so i thought of women as being just like men, and i thought that women should be held to the same standards as men (i.e. men's standards). this was, again, not a terribly helpful belief for me to have.

Thinking about the difference in how "boy bands" and "girl groups" have typically been presented. Boy bands are understood as straightforward objects of female (and queer) desire, and we assume they will draw mostly female fans. But girl groups aren't a mirror image of that. They have always been presented as sexual objects, sure, and harassed and leered at etc. But Destiny's Child did not have mostly male fans, or play to venues packed with panting goggle-eyed boys. It would be viewed as unmasculine to have a locker filled with pictures of a girl group rather than Tool or whatever. (I know, kids don't have lockers anymore anyway.)

I guess it's because girls are supposed to look up to male figures, but boys aren't supposed to be in that kind of subservient role thirsting for attention from powerful women.

women should be seen and not heard

Just these numbers alone do not bode well for any progress to be claimed on the popular end.
https://pudding.cool/2023/07/songwriters/

re: metal misogyny, where does slipknot fit in? their fan getups seem somewhat gender-neutral (as opposed to ICP's juggalo/jugglette motifs)

Oof yeah that Pudding breakdown is brutal.

yeah wow

I suppose I'm not surprised, but that is a very effective presentation of data

not really on board with the AC/DC dismissal ott tbrr

every discussion has to ultimately fall back on 70s hard rock vs. 00s teen pop, it's just a cross ilx has to bear

no one dismissed AC/DC though!

fwiw my old boss at the weed farm is the drummer in AC//DShe, the all-female cover band. They’re phenomenal live