Ten years in the making, Dr Rosemary Lucy Hill’s book Gender, Metal and the Media (Palgrave, 2016) draws on extensive fieldwork with female fans to illuminate their gendered experience of the genre.
The book insightfully pinpoints a series of places where sexism shapes
and underwrites heavy metal culture. Mechanisms for maintaining sexism in metal
include:
·
Pursuing
laddish banter in magazines (and thus maintaining heteronormativity and white
masculinity as the assumed norm);
·
Visually
objectifying female musicians and fans (and judging them accordingly);
·
Accepting
or endorsing gendered, sexually harassing behavior (eg. baring breasts at live
gigs);
·
Assuming
metal does not involve issues of gender because men are primarily interested in
the music;
·
Ignoring
women as fans and musicians;
·
Encouraging
exscription (the idea that male scene participants have written women out of their culture);
·
Questioning
the credibility of women as musicians and music experts;
·
Assuming
women have chosen to not become musicians (rather than seeking barriers);
·
Requiring
female musicians to be especially good players before being accepted;
·
Assuming
that womens’ listening pleasure cannot be both musical and sensual or erotic at
the same time;
·
Assuming
women are sexually attracted to stars rather than interested in music (and,
equally, denying the worth of female lust as a legitimate fannish pleasure);
·
Trivializing
any subjects or objects coded feminine (pop music, romance, women’s clothing);
·
Tacitly
encouraging women to downplay their femininity;·
·
Allowing
women to sidestep gender only if they accede to male norms;
·
Locating
gender difference and femininity as a kind of intrusion;
·
Defining
away sexism;
·
Using
a defense of the genre to deflect questions of sexism;
·
Using
downplaying any experiences of harrassment as 'fun,' and portraying harrassers as jokers who did not pose a threat;
·
Assuming
gender equality as a way to silence criticism;
·
Personalizing
issues effecting women and deflecting them into individual victimhood;
However, in listening to women's experiences, Gender,
Metal and the Media goes beyond critiquing the genre for
its sexism. After all, society itself is sexist, so it would be
illogical to assume any genre would step outside that (without it being
its express purpose, as it was with riot grrrl). Instead the book
explains how women find pleasure in the music. It assumes that women
love heavy metal to start with, and their experiences differ due to
gendered upbringings and sexist representations and experiences.
Dr Hill kindly agreed
to an interview…
* * *
You spoke to almost
twenty white women across a range of age groups who lived in British cities
between 2008 and 2011, recruiting them through snowball sampling and conducting
in-depth interviews to discuss their experience of metal culture. Can you pass
on any advice about fieldwork and methodology that you picked up from that
experience, particularly in the context of working on fandom and gender?
That’s a good starter question. I actually found the interviews
the most satisfying part of the research. However, this was the first time I’d
done interviews and I was very shy about approaching people. I know now
(several research projects later) that there is no easy way to find people and
to get them to answer your emails or turn up when they say they will! The key
is being polite, persistent and accommodating. Keep following up on emails and
messages (well, after the third without a reply you should probably leave it).
And not to take things personally – people have all sorts of other things going
on in their lives and probably think you’ve got tonnes of other people to speak
to. I hope that’s helpful advice for novice interviewers.
When it comes to specifically interviewing about things people
are really invested in, things they are fans of, you can generally expect
people to be really easy to talk to. People love talking about what they love!
But if they are part of what I call in the book an ‘imaginary community’ or
what some people might call a subculture, then participants might be a bit
defensive. Metal is still seen as an inferior form of culture and metal fans do
somewhat delight in our outsider status. This is something to be aware of. I
made sure my participants knew that I loved metal too, because it is easier to
speak more freely with someone who shares the same reference points. But even
then, metal is such a vast genre that we weren’t always aware of the same
things. The defensiveness thing … that’s not to say that people are lying about
their experiences, but that they might use particular discursive techniques to
construct their image of the community or the bands they love.
The definition of metal fan also played a part when I was trying
to recruit participants. Metal is male dominated and as you’ve outlined there
are numerous actions and ideas at play that work to keep it that way. This
means that asking to speak to ‘metal fans’ might well have put some women off
speaking to me – because they didn’t see themselves as fitting into the
definition of a fan. That definition within metal is riven through with a need
for a large quantity of subcultural capital (to quote Thornton). So when women
are constantly being challenged about their musical knowledge this is to assess
whether they are ‘real fans’. To get to speak to more women, I also called for
women who loved bands mentioned in Kerrang! magazine (which
was my shortcut definition of metal – and not one without questions to be asked
of it!). If one therefore sets out to speak to ‘fans’ of band, sports team,
film genre or whatever, then, it really pays off to pay attention to the
gendered definitions of ‘fan’ that are at play locally within that fannish
community.
Your book questions
the assumption that “rock is bad for women” (p.120) by suggesting that the
genre is more than “an arena for hypermasculine posturing” (p.121). Let’s start
with an over-simplification: if heavy metal is often perceived as a repository
of sexist attitudes and behaviours, why do so many women enjoy participating in
metal culture? Are they trading off their own empowerment, and in effect
disempowering themselves?
Let’s start by thinking about the heterogeneity of metal – there
are a bazillion subgenres and there are myriad ideas about what metal should be
like. This means that there is plenty of room for women to listen to music that
does not obviously use misogyny in its aesthetic. I spoke to women who sought
out this kind of metal. I also spoke to women who sought out metal that
actively resisted sexism, for instance that which was made by feminists and our
allies, like My Chemical Romance.
We also need to remember that sexism is the water in which we
swim. Misogyny is so prevalent and normalised that we don’t notice it all the
time (and believe me it is exhausting when we are paying attention to it).
Therefore some women I spoke to just didn’t see it or misrecognised it as
something else (like chivalry or natural differences) and were not aware of how
it shaped the culture. And then there were others who didn’t listen to lyrics,
didn’t go to many gigs and didn’t therefore come face to face with sexism.
But also, when we are surrounded by sexist attitudes and
cultural representations, how do we cope with them when we love the cultural
artefact? If you love the riffs but hate the lyrics what do you do? Women are
expected to take a stand against this - you suggest women are complicit in our
own oppression, but are not men who listen to this music also complicit? Should
they not also be asking questions of themselves about being complicit in sexist
music even if they think of themselves as feminist allies? I would argue that
we should all, regardless of gender identity, be asking these questions of
ourselves. But then, not all women are feminists so to ask them to engage in
feminist thinking around their musical tastes may be going too far.
There are, after all, other things that metal offers women that
are nothing to do with sexism: the heavy music, the anger and hatred, the
horror imagery, the difference of metal femininity from mainstream femininity
etc. If we live in a sexist world then making one choice which has some sexism
with it as opposed to another choice which has some sexism with it perhaps
shows that sexism is something we live with, rather than being empowered in one
sphere and disempowered in another.
After the 1950s,
anxiety around female music fans suggested they were breaking a taboo by
sexually desiring male music makers and – more importantly – publically
expressing that desire. (A reason, in part, I think, for anxieties about fandom
itself.) In metal, there is a second breaking of taboo, because one of the
emotions expressed by music in the genre is, arguably, anger… Is there a role
for politicalization of anger in relation to the concerns you discuss in the
book?
Absolutely.
In the book you cite
examples of people who believe metal and feminism were antithetical, yet you
identify as a metal fan and a feminist, citing, for example, when you went
across Europe to see The Darkness. Can you say a bit more about whether those
two things really are so separate and how they come together for you as a fan?
Ellen Willis writes of how timid music made her feel timid,
whilst punk felt to her like a challenge to confront her own oppression as a
woman and provided her with tools to express her anger.
This is really about how our political anger can find expression
in music, even if that music isn't directly about the thing we are angry about.
Music that accompanies our rage can give us the strength to express ourselves
more freely, by making anger okay. And this is especially important for women
since we are taught that anger does not become us. This is why women making
metal and feminist metal is so valuable, because it provides a cultural
representation of angry women that can help to shift our ideas about what kinds
of emotion are acceptable for women. After all, lots of us are angry about lots
of things!
One thing I struggled
a bit with as I read the book was the question of performance. I agreed with
you that metal has frequently been a place where sexism – often the sort that
permeates the wider culture – has shaped experience. What I was struggling with
was that rather than simply being a place where “the rules are written by
straight, white men,” to me, metal culture in the last few decades – vast and
varied as it is – actually seems to allow white males to pantomime and parody a
very traditional, macho form of masculinity: to take it to absurd lengths. In
that sense, I think that metal might mark a certain kind of nostalgia for the
end of traditional masculinity: theatrical warriors wielding axes in a context
of the decline of secondary industry, the rise of the tertiary economy, the
‘feminization’ of male work roles, and the rise of female liberation, feminism
and post-feminism. Through its “perceived hypermasculinity” (118) the genre
might then be seen as asserting a kind of rebelliousness, indirectly reflecting
anxiety about masculinity, encapsulating both residual and progressive
elements.
Evidently, as your
book demonstrates, there is still plenty of obvious and less obvious sexism in
there, but doesn’t the gendered performativity of metal also open spaces where
gender can be expressed and negotiated in less sexist ways?
There is a lot of playing with gender going on in metal – it’s
one of the reasons that makes it so much fun. Rammstein spraying an audience
with white foam from a massive fake penis is hilarious and certainly says
something satirical about the hypermasculinised performance of masculinity. We
can definitely think about the performative masculinity of metal – and Amber
Clifford-Napoleone does a really excellent job of this. However, to see metal
as a nostalgia for a pre-feminist time I don’t find particularly convincing.
Walser talks about metal as seeking fantasy worlds without women and I think
there is a lot to be said for that argument (although it’s a big genre so, you
wouldn’t want to make it universally). I think it’s more useful to think about
how gender and age work together. Metal can be read for young male fans as a
youthful rebellion about parental authority and a playing at being a man,
drawing on particular conceptions of what masculinity is (and those traits will
be the most salient in the particular genre that the young male metal fan
loves). What is also happening (and this is an area desperately in need of more
research, but see Paula Rowe’s most excellent book on growing up metal in
Australia ‘Heavy Metal Youth Identities’) is that these boys who fall in love
with metal are often those who feel themselves marginalised at school or in the
family. Their own masculinity may be challenged by other boys around them: thus
metal presents a new version of masculinity alongside collective identity.
Metal can be an ‘armour’ in the face of marginalisation.
In the permissive
society era, rock developed a mythology that celebrated the sexual encounters
between male musicians and their young female fans, in part as a reflection of
the seductive aura of the music, and in part as an expression counter-cultural
ideal of personal liberation through drugs and sexual excess. Tales of Led
Zeppelin’s famous “red snapper” evening offer an archetypal example where the
line between coercion and consent was rather ambiguous. To many, the decadent
behavior of rock stars appeared seedy at the time, and it was parodied in
movies like Performance (Roeg, 1970) and Groupie Girl (Ford,
1970). Looking back, the aura of macho bravura associated with these incidents
has given way to an understanding that some of this culture was about sexual
predators taking advantage of vulnerable fans. Since you wrote the book, there
has been a wave of scandals about the sexual behavior of celebrities,
particularly in the 1970s, but very few of those celebrities have come directly
from the rock world. In light of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and #MeToo movement, is it time to reconsider those earlier years, or would it be a
mistake to read contemporary morality into such historic incidents?
In my view we should be lending a critical eye to such
incidents, yes. Not that this would be anything new: feminists have been making
this criticism since the 1960s, as you suggest (although maybe you are making
reference to more moral critiques of the counterculture?). I’m not sure
‘contemporary morality’ is really the point here. Rather it is about listening
to survivors of sexual violence and taking those claims seriously. That is not
a moral position, but a political position that is prepared to ask hard
questions about masculinity and sexuality.
You spend quite a lot
of the book discussing “the myth that all women fans are groupies” (p. 134),
the way it effects fans’ lives, and the way they negotiate it. In some ways, it
is both sad and surprising that the term still lingers roughly half a century
since it became prominent. It is also striking that the nuances and ironies
that characterized the ‘groupie’ question in the 1970s seem to have
disappeared, in part because society and sexual politics have changed so much.
Germain Greer deliberately described herself as ‘a groupie’ precisely because
men used the term in a derogatory way. Do you think it can ever be reworked or
rescued in ways that might counter assumptions of sexism?
I’m very sympathetic to the attempts at claiming ‘groupie’ as a
positive. And yet reclamation does nothing to counter the gender inequality
which is prevalent throughout the music industry. In rock and metal this means
we hear men’s stories and men’s accounts of love, sex and relationships with
women – but only rarely women’s. I’m deeply bothered by this disparity in who
gets to tell their own story, who gets to make music, who has access to
creative expression.
Reworking ‘groupie’ is only going to be successful, I think, in
a culture in which those women also get to be on the stage rocking out.
Dr Hill, thanks for a
fascinating interview.
