Seren Beer dissects gender inequality and toxic masculinity in today’s music industry.

Content Warning: This article contains accounts of recreational drug use, violence, misogyny/sexism, gender inequality, nudity, sexual references, allusion to animal cruelty. 

Once upon a time, in a world much like our own, there stood a dingy dive bar, much like one we all know.

In this familiar venue lived a peculiar sound engineer. One that was ridiculed and feared by men from across the scene.

With invisible skin and transparent hair, stories of the sound tech seemed brisk and rare.

They had a loud voice, yet no man could hear. Maybe somebody cut off their ears. 

Or perhaps these men only listen to their dick. And won’t open their eyes to the sound engineer with tits. 

Men are cocks. The music scene is currently filled with cock-sucking, male ego, and toxic masculinity. We see this behaviour most similarly in chicken-pens; one riled up Cockerel who won’t allow anyone else to speak. Whilst women make up only 12% of the sound engineer population, only 19% of the highest earning musicians are female. Our Rooster-like fathers forever ruined any chance of equal gender dynamics in this cock-fight. No wonder women became invisible, hidden under piles of feathers from Rooster men clucking at each other, beaks erect and piercing, talons like punches from another coked-up hardstyle bedroom DJ. We turn to Bristol as one of the most diverse, multicultural and vibrant cities. A city that would allow chickens on the 41 bus if somebody claimed that ‘farm animals should have transport rights too.” God, it is so wonderfully inclusive. Until we visit another EDM venue, with the same types of Roosters behind the decks. Big Cocks… I’d like to call them; (in relation to violent male ego and unreflective of their phallic magnitude). Big Cocks refers to any scenario where a woman has been made to feel unsafe, unincluded, or belittled by a bachelor flock of cock-orientated arrogance within the music industry. 

What people don’t realise is that women in the industry are forced to create these “women only spaces” because pre-existing systems have always been dominated by male voices, intimidating personalities and undeniable accounts of swinging penis. Since the negligence of the Muses, the monstration of the Sirens and the demonisation of the Witch Song, the Woman has become estranged from music technology under the poisonous Male Gaze. It’s devastating, really, to be that woman or, at least, a woman watching women stand alone at the edge of a “mixed” musical space and be forced to mourn a death of her creativity as our unfriendly Roosters must alarm the barn and venue with his own booming cockerel call. By organising these “retaliation” groups of non-male permeability, we separate the gender gap further and allow socially upheaved behaviour to fester within now curated male-only spaces. We appoint labels like “safety” to non-male communities, and consider male or mixed spaces as points of potential harassment; bludgeoning the already wounded binary before we have had time to cultivate ideas of social salvation. If we want women to feel protected within the music industry, we need to infiltrate these institutions en masse and continue to create life and sustenance through the thick of it all. 

In a land of phallocentric forests; unknowing to the womb

Stood a tall and bulbous daffodil 

Teetering, unripe, edging its bloom

As the morning star arose, the wax moon bid farewell

The petals of our flower opened, and subsequently fell. 

And from the dying blossoms, a small maiden awoke

Our familiar sound tech heroine unfurls

Assessing her surroundings, she finds herself in an anecdote

Her tiny hands and tiny mouth deliver a plot-worthy sense of dread

Shrunken and afraid of the moral journey ahead

She downs from her stalk, standing firmly on the ground

Dressed in drags and terrified 

Looking up at the tall world around. 

A sudden quaking rattle shakes the Earth beneath

And a giant naked man appears, wandering flesh and meat

Eyeing the tiny girl, he seemed dumbfounded and dazed

He had never met a woman, his body reacting fast

An erection (of his spirits) is being raised 

The man sweeps up the girl, who forgets to be afraid

She huffs, and sighs, knowing her wits will keep her safe

A low, groaning drone of sound fills the brim of their ears

Melodic messes of baritone and bass

This Gulliverean cult were in sopranic arrears 

Dozens of men crowded, equipped with song and dance

Bewildered at the petite girl, her voice like a Siren’s trance

These men unencumbered by the touch of femininity

They dance with no hips, no swing or feel

Playing instruments by rubbing, blowing and fisting bits of trees

When she awoke, the girl could write novels on this man-culture, language and society

Yet, she forgot this world, upon realising how phallic-shaped her guitar seemed to be.

I was handed the task of writing an essay about ‘women in the music industry’, but every question I ask my peers tumbles back to the role of men. We should have outgrown these shoes by now, or are we not being nourished by our fathers enough to mature anymore? Will they tell the same folktales to their sons about warriors and hunters, forgetting the women and the mothers and their daughters? Did they leave us enough wood to make more guitars to tell these stories? Or are they plastered and painted, marketed to young girls for double the price to cover the ‘pink tax’ and to create false ideas of feminine profitability. Now, of course, it is not all men, but it is every woman who has faced discrimination in the industry of some kind. We learn about second-hand bullying, social exclusion, and bystanding by the time we’ve left infancy… but now we are adults, I don’t think casual harassment means these boys have a crush on me. 

On a final closing note, a positive one at that, a message to all the women I have the pleasure of supporting; I urge you to be louder, take up more space. Give these misogynistic voices no room to breathe, imitate our mythical Banshee, if they tell you to step aside, then scream and scream and scream. Steal the industry back for our modern Muses, the eternal mothers of Music and equality.