Hey everyone, I know it's been forever and I'm really sorry for that. I hope I'll get back on track very soon and post regularly again. Anyway, I had to write an article for my journalism class and I decided on this topic. Feel free to leave comments so we can discuss!
This isn’t an issue people usually think about, but that doesn’t make it less of a problem to deal with. In the process of writing this article, I received experiences and opinions from girls all over the world who were or still are degraded and judged for their taste in music.
“Last summer, I went to an Awolnation concert with two female friends and there were four guys who just walked around specifically asking girls if they even knew the band members’ names,” Laura told me.
Of course one could argue that she should just shrug it off because they were strangers, but then Caelan told me about how her own brother regularly tells her that her taste in music is “revolting and disgusting”, hence it makes her feel like she’s revolting and disgusting as well. It seems like there are no boundaries for people, mostly men in this case, to put down girls for something they don’t really have much control over. Music is such a wide form of art, and we connect to certain genres because we can either identify with the artists themselves or with the music they create. None of the girls I talked to actually made the conscious choice to like the artists they do and yet they have to defend themselves on a daily basis. Nicola has to justify her taste even more than usual because she enjoys kpop which is an Asian type of boybands and girlbands. She has to handle questions like “why do you like it it’s not English”, or “so you only fancy Asian boys then?”
People even go that far to tell her that she can’t like this type of music because she doesn’t know what they’re saying. This shouldn’t even be considered to be a criteria to like music in the first place and yet it appears to be one.
One might still think that it’s not that bad because they’re usually just teenage boys who still need to make up their minds about how equality works, but that’s were Syd and her story come in.
“I do the music in the gym for when we run, and I’ve had several times when my gym teacher who’s a guy has said some really sexist stuff. This one time my CD was in the middle of playing when suddenly he took it out and said that he’s tired of this girl music and that we need stuff for real men who’ll actually put in some work.”
Teachers are authorities, they’re supposed to be role models to a certain extent, so if this is what boys get taught we shouldn’t be surprised that the way to equality is still so long.
To get a different perspective on this issue, I asked a teenage boy for his opinion. Kelvin is a 16-year old British boy and claiming that his response surprised me would be an understatement.
“It’s so weird to me, it’s so alien to me that people can be against a whole genre of music in general, and then to have to second guess a person just because they like it. Not necessarily girls and not necessarily by boys, just anyone to anyone,“ Kelvin explains, “but girls are constantly degraded for pretty much everything they do, as we all know whether we admit it or not. Clothes, hair, make-up, general appearance, mannerisms, how they act and pretty much everything else in their general being and existence so it’s unsurprising that they are judged, degraded and insulted for the music they like. If they like pop music, rock music, punk music, it’s all the same.” He goes on by giving examples for the genres mentioned above: “It’s like ‘pop music? It’s probably because of the looks, and the boys and all the girls are fake and none of them can sing and its all autotune. Rock music? Yeah, you’re just pretending so you can be adventurous and fit in with us and pretend you’re deep and meaningful go back to your precious boybands and boys.”
While reading this, you might think that he’s exaggerating, but unfortunately he’s not. This is exactly the reaction we get whenever we talk about the music we like; I’ve experienced this myself more than enough. Laura seconds this by mentioning how usually boys think she’s a cool girl, but as soon as she mentions that she likes One Direction, they start reconfiguring the world in their head because there’s no way a cool girl could ever like a boyband.
Kelvin goes on by trying to explain why boys actually do measure a girl’s validity by her taste in music, but both him and me come to the conclusion that it can only be their idea of the popular genre ruining music itself and giving it a bad name. They probably think pop music causes a loss of integrity in the name of the Arts.
After all, music is an art that still struggles a lot with any kind of social issues and sexism is just one of them. There are still way too many people who are either unconscious of this issue or don’t bother changing it because they’re not directly involved. We’re so used to it by now that it barely catches our attention and it really shouldn’t be this way.
