Bitch Magazine's theme this month is Masculinity, and there's a really fantastic article by Juliana Tringali about how rock music came to be dominated by men, and female musicians who subvert that. Anyone who read Mouse Words regularly knows that this is a subject of much fascination for me.
Tringali tracks the early days of rock music, where men were mostly the musicians but there was a heavily female audience (think the Beatles' early days) to when rock music became "intelligent" and therefore women had to be shoved to the margins even further to maintain the illusion. Of course, things got weirder and weirder until the heyday of cock rock in the 80s with the hair metal bands, where women's main role was to be wet and roll around in music videos.
Tringali mentions that there was a decline in the number of women at rock shows, most of which have to do with the music and lyrics and criticism of it all taking an implicitly or even explicitly anti-woman stance, and she mentions in passing that the shows themselves became hostile places for women to enter. This is a detail that stuck with me--I've maintained for a long time that the theory that rape is a form of social control is well-proven when a woman walks into a mainstream, cock rock show. Most of the time, it's just a matter of time at these shows before someone molests you. Because of this, going to a mainstream show is a sort of fishbowl for watching women's coping strategies for getting by in a male-dominated enviroment.
Groupies are the most obvious example of the lengths women will go to get even a shadowy form of access to a scene they love. It's degrading to be used as a sex object like that, but it is also a status symbol--in a no-girls-allowed space, the groupie gets to stay. Just so long as she knows her place, of course. I think that's why in the end that movie "Almost Famous" had so much resonance in it--in midst of a larger look at the music scene in the 70s, Crowe slipped in a critique of the way that women were badly used with the scene where a groupie is sold off for a 6-pack.
Of course, in the indie rock/punk scene, women got in the other way, by getting a little feminist, picking up guitars and standing up to bullies who wanted us to go away. As a result, these shows are much, much safer for female fans, even if there's not a "girl band" playing. It's really quite heartening, especially when you realize that the men of the scene have, as a general rule, embraced the influx of women, and will even stand up to other men who think that it's still the era of Guns 'n' Roses and get to grabbing and harassing.
I’m not so sure the punk/indie scene was/is all that kind to women. Maybe it’s better now, but my experience, which began in the mid-90’s as a guitar player in a St. Louis punk band with all women members, left something to be desired. The other musicians in the scene were, happily, pretty gender-blind, but the general club-going populace was a nightmare. Our audiences were overwhelmingly male, and although we played fully clothed, many of them seemed unable to distinguish us from strippers. “Show us your tits” was more or less the constant refrain.
Booking agents were also fucktards. Whenever a touring band with even one girl in it came through town, whether or not we were a good fit, they’d call us to open, a situation we came to refer to as “vagina booking.” The corollary: we’d try to get on a bill, only to be told “we’ve already got a girl band on this bill; we’ll call you when Sleater-Kinney comes to town.”
I postulate that this us-and-them attitude stems from the fact that the rock’n’roll ethos of rebellion and balls-out aggression is, to the average male rock fan, unreconcilable with the popular myth of femininity. The youthful lad often suffers from an essentialism that prevents him from seeing a woman as anything but the opposite of himself, a fetish object so bafflingly freaky that he has to write mid-tempo ballads about it. A guitar boy doing a pelvic thrust on stage might be seen as sensual, but a guitar girl doing it is a whore.
Later, when I was the only woman in a 4-piece garage band of hot-shit sex-god guy players, no one was as shocked as I when all these vagina issues magically disappeared. Possibly my existence as a musician, rather than as a chick, was validated at last, presumably by the fact that my hot-shit male bandmates ostensibly treated me as an equal. Or possibly people just figured that 3 dudes cancelled out 1 girl.
I don't doubt that it still sucks, though Austin's scene is a lot better I think than most. But things have improved--groupies are not an issue at most shows I go to, though I still see them at the occasional mainstream show.
Unfortunately, cock rock is making an "ironic" (yeah right) return with hipster cred. I'm ignoring it as hard as I can, and eventually it'll burn out. In the meantime, I think women have a permanent place but we just have to mindful or we could lose ground.
Part of the problem—as noted by myself and all my female rawk geek friends—is that so many "girl bands" just plain suck. I mean, is The Donnas really the best we can manage to get some cultural attention?