Submitted for your discussion: Women and Emo

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Someone in The Other Place noted with disapproval the absence of women on the bill at the Reading Festival this year, (compared to women and mixed-gender bands from, say, a decade ago) and discussion quickly devolved into one aobut sexism in music.

I don't follow emo at all, but based simply on my scanning of music mags, the web, etc., it suddenly struck me that one reason for the lack of women is probably the fact that emo bands are so popular now, and every one of the bands that jump to mind are all-male. Is this just my ignorance of the scene? Or am I correct in somehow thinking that emo is a VERY male music?

Comments

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I wonder if this is a classic example of a specifically male-gendered 'appropriation' of traits and behaviours (e.g. being 'emotional') more often attributed to women. I put 'appropriation' in scare-quotes to suggest that since these traits don't belong to anyone in the first place, this is more like a colonising of a discursive space into which women have already been restricted. A parallel example is the way male 'romantic' writing pushes out the predominantly female-authored sentimental poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. But those women were already adapting and using and playing with modes of feeling attributed to them in the immensely popular novels of Rousseau, Fielding etc. rather than reflecting some 'natural' fact. But this suggests that the correlation between male band and female audience need not be some terrible piece of oppression (although it excludes women as performers, women are unlikely to be internalising the 'women are evil' message, and more likely to identify with the male performer than the object of his disgust, esp. since the 'emo' artist is masquerading as a woman THIS IS ALL A BIG GUESS!), and that since rock inherits romantic values wholesale, it's merely a more refined example of a predominat trait. And given that hardcore (I guess but don't know) and indie (for sure), out of which emo seems to come, seem to me really misogynist (I've discussed this elsewhere -- 'I can't get a date because I'm shy and sensitive' becomes 'why won't you date me you bitch!') I'm hardly surprised that this is the case with emo.

I have read the Hopper essay. If I get a chance I'll look it up on my shelf and report back.

[cis.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

'Why don't you date me, you bitch?' also implying the very dishonesty I mention above.

[cis.livejournal.com]

What's dishonest, there? Surely that's more human! A song in which someone lies to themself is surely as emotionally honest as a song in which someone expresses what it going on - more honest, even, because it represents a human emotional state which is flawed and confused and self-deluding rather than someone who's detached enough to see things in a sensible light.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

The indie kid in me sez: "If you really were shy and sensitive, it would never occur to you to think 'Why won't you date me you bitch?' You are just another jock/cool kid playing at something and usurping MY position as 'shy and sensitive.' And I, unlike you, don't have any other alternatives."

[cis.livejournal.com]

to which the emo kid responds: "oh, you're shy and sensitive all the time, are you? never angry, always resigned, getting meeker by the minute - you've never resented someone you had a crush on, only mooned poetically and perfectly over them from an appropriate distance, keeping your thoughts pure and loverlike? You're a paragon? You're not real."

[cis.livejournal.com]

I think it really does see petulance as emotional truth, is the thing! very adolescent, very self-righteous, very somehow 'american' (in that open-about-your-feelings-and-damn-the-consequences way). It's been said before, but the emo kids aren't the jocks but the inheritors to the korn kids, I think. (when i was in school i was v conscious of being the only 'indie' in a group that listened largely to rock and thence nu-/metal.)