Girls and Electronic Music

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An interesting tangent near the end of this thread that never really developed further.

At the risk of being reductionistic, are there traits inherent to music like Squarepusher and Autechre that are unappealing to women? In other words, why do electronic shows tend to turn into dudefests? And when I say "electronic", I guess I'm referring more to IDM (hate using that, but it may be the best choice) than stuff like Tiesto and Paul Van Dyk.

Or does the perception that the room will likely be overwhelmingly full of men have something to do it, as suggested by this exchange?

yeah NYC was pitch black as well. it also boasted the highest male-to-female ratio i've ever seen at a show.

rajeev (rajeev)

haha you obviously weren't at the squarepusher show in boston - I was shocked.
I have to admit, this definitely puts me off going to some shows if Im not feeling particularly motivated to begin with.

vanessa novaeris (novaeris)

Speaking from limited experience, as most of my female friends aren't into electronic music at all, my girlfriend enjoys Autechre and Aphex Twin a lot, but she tends to most appreciate the more ambient, melodic, non-spastic tracks. And she loves virtually all Boards of Canada. But listening to the more Drill-n-Bass AFX and Draft/Confield era AE is out of the question.

― Z S, Friday, 30 March 2007 17:50 (nineteen years ago)

You get the same thing in every genre of music. As long as the performers aren't female, if the music can fairly be described as challenging, difficult, esoteric, unsettling, harsh, punishing, violent, brutal, or even just "macho", the audience will tend to swing towards dudes. Especially if the music isn't primarily danceable or melodic or lyrically relateable. All-guy extreme metal, noise noise, crazy free jazz, hardcore punk, IDM, drone, improv, weird shit, etc. Same thing. Exceptions made for hot dudes in band.

― Pye Poudre, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:00 (nineteen years ago)

bullshit

― bell_labs, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:03 (nineteen years ago)

But plenty of my female friends are into "challenging, difficult, and esoteric" visual art, novels, and poetry, so I don't really buy that for that reason alone they wouldn't be into the same kind of music.

― Z S, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:08 (nineteen years ago)

And when I say "electronic", I guess I'm referring more to IDM (hate using that, but it may be the best choice) than stuff like Tiesto and Paul Van Dyk.

you are from the united states and i claim my €3.75

anyway, ive never been to an idm show but there were HORDES of indie girls at the last nathan fake gig i attended

― fies, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:15 (nineteen years ago)

I was thinking that I don't know many girls who like drum & bass, for ex., but then again I don't know many dudes who do either, and I also remembered this woman at my last office who was into really noisy mainstream d&b. She and her boyfriend would smoke up and dj that shit in their living room a lot.

― Jordan, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:23 (nineteen years ago)

Basically not a lot of people like noisy & obnoxious music because it is noisy & obnoxious.

― Jordan, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:23 (nineteen years ago)

real men listen to rock, amirite?

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:23 (nineteen years ago)

bell:

Okay, bullshit. But gimme something. I know what I'm saying isn't gonna win friends, and I know it isn't 100% true (or even probably 80% true). But I've been going to harsh/weird/macho shows for decades. And from what I've seen, as long as the band is all male, and not especially attractive or hip, the audience often (NOT ALWAYS) becomes nearly all male.

And I, too, have lots of female friends that go for "challenging" music.

― Pye Poudre, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:27 (nineteen years ago)

Why do more men than women write MASSIVE, impenetrable, made-up-language, world killing, unified theory novels? Finnegan's Wake, Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow. Maybe there's something about that kind of intellectual pretention/hubris that's more attractive to men than to women, and maybe there's a musical analog.

Maybe not.

― Pye Poudre, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:31 (nineteen years ago)

hmmm there were a ton of chicks at the Autechre show i went to a couple years ago.

― latebloomer, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:32 (nineteen years ago)

i kind of doubt you have any female friends

― bell_labs, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:33 (nineteen years ago)

that was x-post

― bell_labs, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:33 (nineteen years ago)

Virginia Woolf, yo.

― sexyDancer, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:33 (nineteen years ago)

i thought about making a comment about the 'female friends' thing but decided it was too mean

― deej, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:36 (nineteen years ago)

― max, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:37 (nineteen years ago)

yeah, i tend to think of drum & bass as pretty aggressive and a "guy" thing, but there were actually MORE girls/women at Ultra at the D&B stage than there were guys.

i think the fact that there will be a sausagefest of geeky, socially inept boys at an aphex/autechre/squrepusher show may have more to do with women not wanting to go than the music itself

― rentboy, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:37 (nineteen years ago)

The dance scene that I probably have the closest affinity with is the breakcore/jungle/drill'n'bass/whatfuckingever one in Bristol, which is pretty relentlessly fast and loud and distorted and obnoxious, and there are usually a pretty decent and refreshing (if not 50:50) ratio of women at raves there. I think it might benefit from a general feeling of collectivism and inclusiveness, with big groups of friends going raving with the same attitude as going to a house party

― DJ Mencap, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:38 (nineteen years ago)

really depends on the scene. at noise shows in providence nearly half the audience is women.

― Edward III, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:39 (nineteen years ago)

why does women never want to idm

― pretzel walrus, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:40 (nineteen years ago)

the only ppl i've met irl that like drum n bass are couples. Always couples.

― deej, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:40 (nineteen years ago)

wimmen don't be smart like us men

― Edward III, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:40 (nineteen years ago)

haha

― Jordan, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:41 (nineteen years ago)

xpost

― Jordan, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:41 (nineteen years ago)

"honey, we go together like drum & bass"

― Jordan, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:43 (nineteen years ago)

i know this is really obvious, but women have the exact same hearing as cats and loud high-pitched noises make them run and paw yarn. whereas men hear like monkeys. loud noises make them want to throw and eat shit. or is it dogs? dogs or monkeys, i forget.

― scott seward, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:43 (nineteen years ago)

The last time I went to see an in-constume analog-synth spazz-noise hyper-speed prog band the woman I was with crossed her arms toward the beginning and said "ugh, boys."

I don't necessarily agree with the thread premise, limiting this to styles, and especially not limiting it to anything so incredibly broad as "electronic music" -- but I'd say that there are subsections of every genre whose general feel stems from a very geeked-out boyish fiddling-with-machines experience that is largely a male thing. (I.e., there are certain widespread differences in like male vs. female tween experience, and any music that draws on one or the other is naturally going to skew its audience.)

I can see how certain types of IDM play into that particular quality, but I don't think it's at all unique to IDM, to electronic music, to anything.

― nabisco, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:44 (nineteen years ago)

Bell: Come on. I'll take the hits, but give me something. You get lots of girls at noise shows in certain areas. Areas where there are big, popular noise scenes with plenty of female movers and shakers. Most everywhere else, noise shows are sausage central. And isolated counter-examples don't help. I readily admit that what I'm talking about is by no means 100% true. It's just a general observation based on decades of show-going.

If you think what I'm saying is wrong, lay out why. Not just an example or two, but a history and a theory that proves I'm full of shit. I'm genuinely curious, as this is something that I've thought about from time to time for quite a while now.

― Pye Poudre, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:45 (nineteen years ago)

P.S. the spazzy synth-prog band I refer to above was definitely pushing those "14-year-old geek in bedroom 'look I wrote a computer program that makes my AppleIIe PRINT "POOP" over and over'" buttons.

― nabisco, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:46 (nineteen years ago)

Nabisco OTM. This is exactly what I'm saying. And you get exactly the same thing in the world of giant, self-consciously "difficult", I'm-so-smart novels. Not that that has anything to do with anything...

― Pye Poudre, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:48 (nineteen years ago)

when it's gabber night gonna feel alright oh what a night

http://www.rijnmond.nl/uploads/rutgerleertstappen/blog/wp-content/6.jpg

― scott seward, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:50 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.xseno.nl/userimages/100/100716/4889845eb05e93737d9d53ed12e43d5e.jpg

― scott seward, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:51 (nineteen years ago)

No, Pye, that's not what you're saying, because you're connecting it with broad-ass things like "most of my female friends aren't into electronic music." I really don't see much evidence that this sort of thing is terrifically genre-bound -- just about qualities any given act could have.

Basically I think there's only one period of life where male and female experiences tend to be different enough -- and sufficiently inaccessible to one another -- to have any kind of noticeable effect on something like "taste in music," and that's the kind of tween / middle-school years where boys and girls really differentiate and divide up into really different sets of concerns and activities. And in any genre, I think an act can speak to one or the other of those sets in a way that might not entirely make sense to the opposite gender. But that's about an ACT, not about something as broad as "making electronic music."

― nabisco, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:54 (nineteen years ago)

not in my tween years. everyone loved reo and van halen.

― scott seward, Friday, 30 March 2007 18:59 (nineteen years ago)

I suppose it's too late to change the title of the thread to "Girls and IDM", which is really what I meant.

― Z S, Friday, 30 March 2007 19:00 (nineteen years ago)

is the op a time traveler from 2003? who cares about idm ffs

― am0n, Friday, 30 March 2007 19:00 (nineteen years ago)

Chicks enjoying Shitmat shocker:

http://www.borderline-music.com/see/shitmat_mochvara_161205_06.jpg

― everything, Friday, 30 March 2007 19:00 (nineteen years ago)

xpost

P.S. that's not to say that male and female experiences aren't different throughout life, just that they're not exactly going to be totally opaque to one another or express themselves in dumb terms like "I don't like Autechre because of my gender experience" -- I only point up those tween years because they're a formative imaginary period where the doings of either sex can actually be mysterious to the other!

Hahaha Scott my theory is slightly vexed by the fact that I love loads of twee bands whose imaginations seem firmly entrenched in the girl-tween imagination! But I think that stuff is still in play -- like I'm fascinated by their girl-tween imaginations because I have no personal experience of it (and I'm sure plenty of women would hate the sense of pointless regression to it, having maybe been there once).

― nabisco, Friday, 30 March 2007 19:02 (nineteen years ago)

Nabisco:

"most of my female friends aren't into electronic music"

I never said or agreed with anything even remotely like that. From my very first post, I was suggesting that it has nothing to do with any specific genre. Rather that there are certain qualities that can be present in all genres that often (or maybe just sometimes) attract boys and repel girls. That's it, and I think it's exactly what you're saying.

What gave you the impression I was saying otherwise? Again, sincerely curious...

― Pye Poudre, Friday, 30 March 2007 19:02 (nineteen years ago)

xpost sorry Pye I got you confused with the thread-starter!!!! Please ignore my post a couple back.

― nabisco, Friday, 30 March 2007 19:02 (nineteen years ago)

Also nabisco:

Think a lot of fandom is based on the way music resonates with our teenage selves, even when we're older. Thus, the "appeal to teen" that attracts middle-aged men may well repel middle-aged women.

― Pye Poudre, Friday, 30 March 2007 19:04 (nineteen years ago)

I'm more peeved with how wrong you are about Finnegans Wake and Gravity's Rainbow. (NB, the first one doesn't have an apostrophe in it's title. Knowing that might make you look like you know what you're talking about.)

― Noodle Vague, Friday, 30 March 2007 23:08 (nineteen years ago)

Fuck a throwaway typing/thinkin error. I've read it and that's good enuf for me. Come on, you're really arguing that the genre defined by books like Finnegans Wake and Infinite Jest (if that weird zone can really be called a "genre") isn't totally DOMINATED by guys?

In case you are: it is.

― Pye Poudre, Friday, 30 March 2007 23:16 (nineteen years ago)

I'm saying that those books don't share a genre. And that I disagree with yr description of the former and its authors imagined intentions.

― Noodle Vague, Friday, 30 March 2007 23:21 (nineteen years ago)

And I, too, have lots of female friends that go for "challenging" music.

So, uh, ask them why they don't go to shows? (No, really, that was initially snark after the "girls only like bands with hot dudes" thing but I really would be interested in what they'd say if they like the music but wouldn't go and see it live.)

We don't get many electronic shows where I am and they're pretty sparsely attended overall, usually with a slightly older geekier crowd than most gigs with even fewer women, so I was surprised when I went to see Ceephax Acid Crew out of town. After the familiar territory of just me, two friends and the promoters during the support acts, suddenly the dancefloor packed with a few guys and a lot of fashionably dressed student-aged girls.

Sweeping generalisation I don't know if I agree with: maybe girls are brought up to think that staying with your social group and with what they like is more important than indulging fondness for weird stuff they're not interested in, whereas boys are encouraged to branch out and get this whole "if I know stuff other people don't or I get really into things that most people can't stand then I'm cooler than them, which is its own special kind of social status". But I'm not even sure whether I'd be pissed off to read someone else saying that.

I do feel a bit unusual, though, being a woman on my own at shows (and older than most too), or dragging my better half to see gigs and I'm the one nerding out about what gear they're using and how while he looks bored and texts his friends to say it's too loud and he wants to go home. Ahh. (Just as a data point for Nabisco's posts, as a teen I lived miles from my friends and spent my evenings staring at the computer instead of... whatever girls were meant to do. Apparently I don't even know.)

― a passing spacecadet, Friday, 30 March 2007 23:23 (nineteen years ago)

"I'm saying that those books don't share a genre. And that I disagree with yr description of the former and its authors imagined intentions."
-- Noodle Vague

That's totally fair. I respect that.

I think we can conceive of a genre of novels unified by several central characteristics: intense intellectualism; apparent intent to "shock the world" or "transform literature"; apparent desire to make a significant social/literary/political statement; heavy page count (usually - not required); total willingness to alienate the reader in pursuit of artistic goals; use of unfamiliar, opaque or even invented language (not required); and apparent desire to wrestle the whole messy, contradictory experience of life into a single work of undeniable brilliance.

I don't know what we'd call this genre (if we could agree that it exists), but I think it would be fair to include both Finnegans Wake and Infinite Jest in it, and I suspect we'd find it dominated by men.

― Pye Poudre, Friday, 30 March 2007 23:46 (nineteen years ago)

Add "the novel as philosophical treatise" and "apparent disdain for 'mere' domestic realism" to the above list of genre qualifiers.

And I'm not arguing that women never write such novels. You get Kathy Acker and Ayn Rand, etc., etc., but they tend to be exceptions rather than the rule.

Possible (?) examples of what I'm talking about (regardless of what we think of their literary quality): Moby Dick, The Unconsoled, War & Peace, The Satanic Verses, Focault's Pendulum, TLAR/CODPOL, House of Leaves, Volman's ongoing American history project, The Brothers Karamazov, In Search of Lost Time, the novels of Joseph McElroy, The Runaway Soul, etc.

― Pye Poudre, Saturday, 31 March 2007 00:04 (nineteen years ago)

my girlfriend likes house of leaves a lot more than the bits of it i've skimmed in the past

― stephen, Saturday, 31 March 2007 00:17 (nineteen years ago)

yeah, but that book is for girls. heck, poe did the soundtrack.

― scott seward, Saturday, 31 March 2007 00:28 (nineteen years ago)

hahahahahahaha

these threads are fun

― scott seward, Saturday, 31 March 2007 00:29 (nineteen years ago)

Skipping 35 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

Maybe male-dominated scenes develop due to innate desire in men to bro down?

― sexyDancer, Monday, 2 April 2007 21:43 (nineteen years ago)

Actually wait, who am I kidding, I have noticed: the male/female ratio was much higher at the last basement noise show I went to than at the last indie-rock show. But it was also much lower at the last New Music performance I went to than at the last indie-rock show, which is why I disagree with Pye's listing "challenging," "difficult," and "esoteric" as differentiating qualities.

― nabisco, Monday, 2 April 2007 21:49 (nineteen years ago)

i think the fact that scenes like extreme drum n' bass or grind or whatever are even more male dominated than other scenes is simply because those particular genres are so inaccessible to the vast majority of music fans. to me, this is sort of like why there are so comparatively few female mathematicians. just aren't encouraged to take it up like men are.

(though certainly this is less true than it was even just, say, 15 years ago.)

― Emily Bjurnhjam, Monday, 2 April 2007 21:54 (nineteen years ago)

Maybe male-dominated scenes develop due to innate desire in men to bro down?

Mithras was the central god of Mithraism, a syncretic Hellenistic mystery religion of male initiates that developed in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC and was practiced in the Roman Empire from the 1st century BC to the 5th century AD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism

It is difficult for scholars to reconstruct the daily workings and beliefs of Mithraism, as the rituals were highly secret and limited to initiated men.

Religious practice was centered around the mithraeum (Latin, from Greek mithraion), either an adapted natural cave or cavern or an artificial building imitating a cavern. Mithraea were dark and windowless, even if they were not actually in a subterranean space or in a natural cave. When possible, the mithraeum was constructed within or below an existing building. The site of a mithraeum may also be identified by its separate entrance or vestibule, its "cave", called the spelaeum or spelunca, with raised benches along the side walls for the ritual meal, and its sanctuary at the far end, often in a recess, before which the pedestal-like altar stood. Many mithraea that follow this basic plan are scattered over much of the Empire's former area, particularly where the legions were stationed along the frontiers (such as Britain). Others may be recognized by their characteristic layout, even though converted as crypts beneath Christian churches.

!!!

― Catsupppppppppppppp dude ‫茄蕃‪, Monday, 2 April 2007 21:57 (nineteen years ago)

the whole 'where are the women in electronic music' question always baffles me because whenever I think of my favorite pieces of electronic music there are just as many female composers as there are male... carlos, radigue, amacher, oliveros, ruth white, spiegel have all done works up there with xenakis, ferrari, bayle, stockhausen, parmegiani. and that's just talking about the 50's-70's, things have kind of exploded since then, all you need to do is look. but you do have to look for these people when the whole idea is that they're not into shouting to get your attention

― Milton Parker, Monday, 2 April 2007 22:11 (nineteen years ago)

i think the fact that scenes like extreme drum n' bass or grind or whatever are even more male dominated than other scenes is simply because those particular genres are so inaccessible to the vast majority of music fans.

Huh: could you elaborate on that? It seems a little like you're agreeing with the stuff at the top of the thread (that music that's "inaccessible" and rarefied somehow selects for a more male audience), but I get the feeling you might mean something else -- that if music as a whole is male-dominated, then music that's behind a bunch of gatekeepers of rarity and inaccessibility will be even more male-dominated.

(xpost Milton I hate to be the topic scold on this one, but I don't think anyone on the thread has asked "where are the women in electronic music!")

― nabisco, Monday, 2 April 2007 22:14 (nineteen years ago)

yr right, that was more the other thread

― Milton Parker, Monday, 2 April 2007 22:17 (nineteen years ago)

(haha although your post fits with the thing I was hinting up there: once place to find a whole lot of women in avant-garde music = all the New Music / 21st-century classical spots where people have extensive training with their instruments and you get to sit down instead of smelling a bunch of sweaty guys and there are grants and patronage that allow people to buy enough underwear to wear a different pair each day)

― nabisco, Monday, 2 April 2007 22:18 (nineteen years ago)

Nabisco:

Retrospectively, I regret the use of certain terms ("challenging", "esoteric"). Not necessarily because I think they're entirely out of place in this conversation, but because they're polarizing -- they seem like shorthand for "smart", and I'm not suggesting that women lack an interest in intelligent, intellectually stimulating art.

In linking together Wolf Eyes and Finnegans Wake, I realize that I'm making a MASSIVE leap, and that a lot of folks won't be willing to follow it. I'm not suggesting that these things are the same, only that the kind of fiction that Joyce wrote seems male dominated to me -- just like the audience at most Wolf Eyes shows I've seen. Though it's not really what I was getting at, they might have qualities in common that are relevant to this thread:

1) A violence directed not at the audience (though WE have this, too), but at the medium in which they operate -- words and novels in Joyce's case; sounds, songs and "music" for Wolf Eyes.

2) A seeming desire to ward off all but the most dedicated followers, making the act of appreciating the art a sort of trial or initiation.

3) A presentation that seems to insist on its own importance. In this case, the difference between the two becomes almost complete, and I think I'd be better off comparing John Cage to Joyce. Wolf Eyes to Jörg Buttgereit (or the literary equivalent).

Problem is that I'm trying to explore these ideas more than assert a wholly-formed thesis. ..

― Pye Poudre, Monday, 2 April 2007 22:29 (nineteen years ago)

[/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i][/i]

― Dominique, Monday, 2 April 2007 22:33 (nineteen years ago)

haha

― Dominique, Monday, 2 April 2007 22:34 (nineteen years ago)

hmm

― sexyDancer, Monday, 2 April 2007 22:35 (nineteen years ago)

nope

― sexyDancer, Monday, 2 April 2007 22:35 (nineteen years ago)

And to Milton Parker & Nabisco:

What you say is true, Milton, but it's reflective of something I was talking about upthread. There are certain gates through which female attention is engaged. I've been talking mostly about "non-mainstream" noise/rock/electronic stuff, since that's where I live. In those circles, the attention of a broader audience (male and female) is often attracted by hipster approval, especially attractive or engaging performers, a good stage show, secret appeal to pop forms, positive critical reception, etc. And the whiff of high-art credibility is definitely one of these gateways.

With regard to "fine art" music (the sort that doesn't have one foot in the pop gutter), the male-female divide seems much less pronounced. But the culture is so markedly different that it almost seems like a different discussion. I probably just confused the issue by bringing in high art fiction, thus inviting the comparison...

― Pye Poudre, Monday, 2 April 2007 22:41 (nineteen years ago)

Haha no, I think the comparison was invited by the list of words you used up top -- "challenging, difficult, esoteric, unsettling, harsh, punishing," etc. -- all of which apply to PLENTY of fine-art music, but don't seem to, like, have some inherent effect on sex-of-audience in that context.

― nabisco, Monday, 2 April 2007 22:56 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah, that too. Good point.

― Pye Poudre, Monday, 2 April 2007 23:00 (nineteen years ago)

</em>

― M.V., Monday, 2 April 2007 23:13 (nineteen years ago)

[Removed Illegal Link]

― M.V., Monday, 2 April 2007 23:14 (nineteen years ago)

[Removed Illegal Link]

― M.V., Monday, 2 April 2007 23:15 (nineteen years ago)

iiiii

― am0n, Monday, 2 April 2007 23:48 (nineteen years ago)

that if music as a whole is male-dominated, then music that's behind a bunch of gatekeepers of rarity and inaccessibility will be even more male-dominated.

yes, exactly. sorry if i wasn't clear. my whole point is that the actual music is not somehow better understood by men than women - it's just that women aren't encouraged to pursue ambitious, intellectually rigorous, or confrontational art in the same way that men are. and for the same reasons that women haven't yet risen to equal standing in the realms of math or chemistry or physics or other "difficult" scientific disciplines. though once again i qualify this by saying that this isn't as true as it once was.

― Emily Bjurnhjam, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 00:15 (nineteen years ago)

[/i]The odd thing about minimal actually is that so many of the female producers tend to sound quite IDM-ish in one way or another - Ellen Allien, Ada, Anja Schneider, Dinky, Magda...

― Tim F, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 01:11 (nineteen years ago)

Dinky? Ada? really?

― fandango, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 01:32 (nineteen years ago)

But none of them were satisfied by this response, because it was still prizing what the acts were doing, and claiming it as open to both sexes, whereas their whole complaint was that what the acts were doing/prizing was NEGATIVELY masculine (and so for women to be involved in it would be a bad development, one supposes).

This is OTM x 10000 -- the idea that this is music that epitomizes What (Most) Girls Don't Like About (Some) Boys, and so it's hardly a shocker that it wouldn't find a female audience.

(Which raises the question, is this response legitimate, and is there a complementary response that's equally legitimate [i.e. Lilith Fair, though that's a very very lazy example]? In other words, is it ever not sexist to dislike the gendered quality of a kind of music? I'd say "yes".)

it's just that women aren't encouraged to pursue ambitious, intellectually rigorous, or confrontational art in the same way that men are.

Is this really true, though? Especially on that last count: if there's a stereotype of woman-produced avant-garde art, I'd say that it's that it tends to be overtly political and confrontational, often dealing explicitly with the body, etc. On the other hand, there's also a stereotype that women artists/musicians tend to avoid extremely process-oriented techniques like serialism, depending on if that's what you mean by "intellectually rigorous".

Also, at the risk of being controversial, I have to raise an eyebrow at including W. Carlos in a list of women composers, but maybe I'm mistaken in that -- I mean, W. Carlos is a woman composer, but...

Tangentially, do I remember reading that women, on average, have more sensitive hearing than men? That might have a slight influence on the gender distribution at shows full of screaming noise, etc.

― lurker #2421, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 02:20 (nineteen years ago)

I'm maybe biased by being in SF/bay area, but it seems to me women playing electronic music are hardly rare. The *audience* going to hear electronic music still seems mostly male, but then I've never seen any numbers on concert attendance in general regarding gender. (nor have I seen any gender-specific numbers on who is buying CDs or downloading mp3s)

― Dominique, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 02:27 (nineteen years ago)

"Dinky? Ada? really?"

Dinky = sometimes deep housey yeah, but also very much into post-villalobos complex percussion in a way that can be traced back to Black Dog.

Ada = IDM plangent chords, perhaps more Orbital than, say, Warp, though.

They're not necessarily more IDM than male producers, but I find it interesting that so few of them are erm functionalist producers, they're all actual or hypothetical album-artists (as in, you can imagine them succeeding in making an album qua statement). Shinedoe is one exception I can think of. Actually she just released an album herself, but it wasn't exactly album qua statement.

― Tim F, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 09:47 (nineteen years ago)

It's getting better, slowly.

― blueski, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 10:10 (nineteen years ago)

you can add MIA to that list of female minimal producers...

― lex pretend, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 10:17 (nineteen years ago)

some of th great electronci ladies
are
Jessica Rylan
Maryanne Amacher
Pauline Oliveros
etx
eggcettera
estrocettera

― danbunny, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 11:34 (nineteen years ago)

estroe...

― fandango, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 11:44 (nineteen years ago)

delia derbyshire.rar

― lfam, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 13:09 (nineteen years ago)

As another genre gender example, from what I can remember of my experiences with going to jazz shows, most of them that I've gone to (which tend to be at the free jazz end of the spectrum) have many more males than females in the audience.

Incidentally, I feel about the same way as Milton: when I think of my favorite electronic/musique concrete/electro-acoustic experimentalists, there tend to be at least as many female names on that list as there are male names. I would add Ann MacMillan and Annea Lockwood, among pesonal favorites. (But that might be beside the point of the original question, which was more about audiences, and more about a different sort of electronic music.)

As for female mega-novelists (I think that's an applicable term for what some people were describing upthread--I've even seen it used in literary journals, though I'm not sure it's caught on--and I'm not sure I'm sorry about that either), they are around. Gayl Jones's Mosquito fits in here, with lots of interest being in the formal/surface elements of the language, plus a certain amount of opacity due to her version of dialect (some of which I gather doesn't reflect any real African-American dialect, but you couldn't prove it by me). Maybe Leslie Marmon Silko would fit in, though I don't think the language in her work has much opacity. (But difficult in certain ways? yes, at least for what's being constantly pushed into the reader's attention.) I have a feeling there are a bunch of others I am forgetting.

― Rockist Scientist, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 13:27 (nineteen years ago)

There are plenty of women on the more synthpoppy/gothy end of electronic music - Tracy & The Plastics, Le Tigre/Julie Ruin, Chicks on Speed, Anna Oxygen, etc., and going further back, Algebra Suicide and Tara Cross.

― mike a, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 13:56 (nineteen years ago)

I'm maybe biased by being in SF/bay area, but it seems to me women playing electronic music are hardly rare. The *audience* going to hear electronic music still seems mostly male

uh too be fair i'm talking about from a chicago perspective here but i think it depends on what 'electronic music' you're talking about - trendy german house tends more male here, but there's a huge scene of mainstream house here where women are the main clubgoers...maybe not performers, but to say the 'audience for electronic is mostly male' is only if you're looking at certain subgenres. (and vice versa)

― deej, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 14:41 (nineteen years ago)

yeah, not really thinking about dance music at all actually -- though if I did, shows at Mezzanine for example seem about 50/50. Before, I was mainly talking about electronic improv, noise or academic (?) composition -- and actually, maybe I should take some of that back, because I've definitely been to shows where guys were in the minority (tho most of those were women-themed shows). Still, overall (and paraphrasing Steve Shasta), it seems like I'm surrounded by dudes.

― Dominique, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 15:01 (nineteen years ago)

dudes don't like to dance!

― deej, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 15:23 (nineteen years ago)

but they bring dates who do! (+ some like to dance)

― Dominique, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 15:28 (nineteen years ago)

"...whereas their whole complaint was that what the acts were doing/prizing was NEGATIVELY masculine..."

-- nabisco

Exactly. Culture labels certain qualities/interests/activities for the "boy" bin and others for the "girl" bin. So, there's a lot of boy music out there -- often made by men and celebrating stereotypically masculine qualities. Just as there's girl music.

And, for whatever reason, certain boys and girls sometimes (perhaps often, but certainly not always) dislike material that seems to belong too wholly to the other gender. Used to be, you heard the phrase "chick rock" tossed around. And I've known open-minded women to roll their eyes at nerdy-ass boy stuff from time to time. Nothing surprising in any of that.

But what are the qualities that separate one from the other? The inobvious ones, I mean. Sure, you sing a bunch of violent, misogyinst shit, you're probably gonna chase away potentially interested women and attract lots of creepy guys. But what about the less clearly demarcated zones? Black metal, hard drum & bass, noise, "underground" hip-hop, IDM, free jazz -- why does the audience for these genres often tilt so heavily towards dudes? Is it really a sensitivity-of-hearing thing (see lurker #2421's earlier comment)?

Emily B. points out that girls aren't encouraged to take up a listening or practicing interest in "extreme" music forms. There isn't a support culture that works to include women. And that seems true. But not every tiny niche music form is sausage city. In a way, you might imagine that very small subcultural spaces would be more open to women, since so many of the artists work in isolation anyway. Grassroots scenes can spring up anywhere people are excited about something.

As an open question, I wonder what "NEGATIVELY masculine" qualities in music guarantee that the audience is gonna be a boy's club? (Besides the obvious: misogynist lyrics, songs about beating people up, super-obvious boy-culture affiliation [sportsporncarskungfu], etc.)

― Pye Poudre, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 16:16 (nineteen years ago)

but they bring dates who do! (+ some like to dance)

well yeah of course, i dance.
i just mean when yr talking about 'electronic music' there's a divide right there! it couldn't be more obvious, i think

― deej, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 16:29 (nineteen years ago)

3) A presentation that seems to insist on its own importance. In this case, the difference between the two becomes almost complete, and I think I'd be better off comparing John Cage to Joyce. Wolf Eyes to Jörg Buttgereit (or the literary equivalent).

Cage on Joyce:
"I hope to let words exist, as I have tried to let sounds exist" (For the Birds 113, 151). (2)

Making language as interesting as music, Cage was to learn, depended on the dismantling of "normal" syntax. Much as he loved Joyce, Cage felt that even Finnegans Wake was conventional in this respect:

"Reading Finnegans Wake I notice that though Joyce's subjects, verbs, and objects are unconventional, their relationships are the ordinary ones. With the exception of the Ten Thunderclaps and rumblings here and there, Finnegans Wake employs syntax. Syntax gives it a rigidity from which classical Chinese and Japanese were free. A poem by Basho, for instance, floats in space . . . . Only the imagination of the reader limits the number of the poem's possible meanings." ("Foreword," M 2)

In the former case, the words themselves are made strange, Joyce being, of course, a master of word formation, punning, metaphor, and allusion, but the syntax is left intact; "Joyce," Cage remarks elsewhere, "seemed to me to have kept the old structures ("sintalks") in which he put the new words he had made" ("Writing" 133). The alternative (Basho's) is to use "ordinary" language but to explode the syntax, a process Cage regularly referred to as the "demilitarization of the language." "Speaking without syntax," he explains in a note on "Sixty-Two Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham," "we notice that cadence, Dublinese or ministerial, takes over. (Looking out the rear-window.) Therefore we tried whispering. Encouraged we began to chant. . . . To raise language's temperature we not only remove syntax: we give each letter undivided attention setting it in unique face and size; to read becomes the verb to sing" ("Notes" 97).

― the table is the table, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 17:50 (nineteen years ago)

Joyce was a modernist. Cage was by no means a modernist.

― the table is the table, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 17:51 (nineteen years ago)

Agree about the differences between Cage and Joyce on the grounds you cite. Then again, each attempted to dismantle/reinvent/transform the conventional structures of an art form. Six of one, half dozen of the other...

― Pye Poudre, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 18:02 (nineteen years ago)

Oh, you TOTALLY can't say this about electronic music in general -- I mean, hell, people's criticisms of mainstream dance music tend to be explicitly gendered, from "Sharons" to "handbag house" to "trance is for girls."

Pye, one thing to add to that explanation is that qualities of art aren't gendered equally -- we put some things in a boy bin and some in a girl bin, yes, but culture as a whole also has a tendency to disparage the girl bin as dumb, fluffy, unserious, insufficiently rigorous, etc. This is surely 90% of what my one friend was kicking back at when she said "ick, BOY music" -- accepting these things as gendered, but switching the value system we put on that.

― nabisco, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 18:25 (nineteen years ago)

"Oh, you TOTALLY can't say this about electronic music in general...]"

Agreed. Not saying that at all. Problem here is that there are too many sub-points bouncing around, and nothing has been unpacked properly. Signifiers of importance in one art form compared lazily to completely dissimilar signifiers in another in order to suggest that "singifiers of importance" might in themselves be a boy thing. Now it's all too complicated. Everything coming back to haunt me. Eeeaagh.

"...but culture as a whole also has a tendency to disparage the girl bin as dumb, fluffy, unserious, insufficiently rigorous, etc.!

Where was I? Oh yeah: AAAAAGH! Fucking BINGO, dude! That's what I was looking for. Boy stuff = serious, important, difficult, worthwhile, etc. Girl stuff = trivial, fluffy, unserious, disposable. That's a big component of the cultural baggage put on art.

Therefore, boys have a lot to gain by embracing what the culture labels "boy stuff". Boy stuff is thought to be worthy of respect. And girls earn only disdain when the embrace "girl stuff". Girl stuff is ridiculed (or, at least this has historically been the case).

This causes two kinds of effects:

1) Women in the arts must embody or appreciate boy stuff in order to be taken seriously. This is problematic, since it seems predicated on the idea that female culture really is inferior, and that women have to succeed in male culture on male terms to be worthy of respect. Implies self-loathing.

2) Women in the arts take boy stuff down from the pedestal in order to make the claim that traditional girl stuff is equally valid, period. You see more of this second approach in the world today, and it seems healthier to me.

Anyway, I think that might be why music that drapes itself in the mantle of seriousness-through-difficulty (or otherwise adopts boy-culture value signifiers) seems off putting to some women.

― Pye Poudre, Tuesday, 3 April 2007 18:58 (nineteen years ago)

At a certain point I got frustrated and had to stop reading this thread, but to whoever made that comment about men like Foster Wallace and Pynchon and Joyce writing inscrutable, made up language, challenging avant garde novels, try reading some Gertrude Stein, who predates most of them and contains all those elements tenfold.

― filthy dylan, Wednesday, 4 April 2007 00:23 (nineteen years ago)

2) Women in the arts take boy stuff down from the pedestal in order to make the claim that traditional girl stuff is equally valid, period. You see more of this second approach in the world today, and it seems healthier to me.

Healthy, but it doesn't pick up enough attention even for other women who like girl values to discover the music and/or notice the approach is out there until guys start writing about how Girl Values are better than Boy Values for reasons which only make sense in the Boy value system anyway, like "girl values are FUN and boy values are rockist" or "these women sound a little like [male artist] but they are still obscure and weird because they're women, be the first on your block to listen".

Which is some way off the original topic, but when I tried to tie it back in I got drawn by the thread's line between complicated music and masculinity into confusing "pretty girly-girl silly ditsy fluff" (also pretty enraging for women, I'd hope) vs "music that is more heartfelt than complicated or difficult" (which, I don't know, also gets taken a lot more seriously from men than women, even by women), and then I still didn't know whether I was back on-topic.

― a passing spacecadet, Wednesday, 4 April 2007 00:37 (nineteen years ago)

...In case anyone wants to object, I'm not claiming "complicated" and "heartfelt" music are mutually exclusive, just that that's how I see music criticism tending to frame (the positive sides of) each end of the dichotomy.

― a passing spacecadet, Wednesday, 4 April 2007 00:40 (nineteen years ago)

1) Women in the arts must embody or appreciate boy stuff in order to be taken seriously. This is problematic, since it seems predicated on the idea that female culture really is inferior, and that women have to succeed in male culture on male terms to be worthy of respect. Implies self-loathing.

2) Women in the arts take boy stuff down from the pedestal in order to make the claim that traditional girl stuff is equally valid, period. You see more of this second approach in the world today, and it seems healthier to me.

a lot of this thread seems uncomfortably like 1) to me - it's veered off the original "electronic premise" to encompass all sorts of things described as 'difficult', 'confrontational', 'intellectually rigorous', though i don't really see anything covered so far as particularly difficult etc etc compared to more female-coded musical styles...

as for 2) wouldn't the actual healthier approach to raise traditional girl stuff on to a pedestal of, er, equal height? make the case for it being just as intellectual or confrontational as any amount of idm or noize - or if it's not, make the case for whatever attributes it does possess as being equally valid as being "difficult" (which does not seem like a particularly positive attribute to me).

to be honest my own empirical evidence suggests that girls are as likely as boys to be involved in any given musical or art scene, really, whether this is minimal house or metal or hip-hop or whatever.

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 4 April 2007 08:33 (nineteen years ago)

"...try reading some Gertrude Stein, who predates most of them and contains all those elements tenfold."

I've read Stein, though not deeply, and she's not my favorite writer. Good point, but it still seems to me that many of the "literary significance" indicators characteristic of the mega-novels approach are implicitly masculine in terms of the cultural coding we attach to them after the fact -- even those that were developed by women in the first place (see response to lex, below). And it seems to me that we celebrate the men who write such novels much more than we do the women.

Men seem to be able to make a good living and earn a measure of general cultural celebrity in the author-of-big-strenuous-important-books field. And while many women may attempt the same thing, their successes are rarer, or tend to be culturally marginal, relegated to academic circles and the various dustbins of serious literature. When we do celebrate the "importance" of female writers in a semi-mainstream fashion, we seem to applaud different things.

I don't have statistics to back up the observation, but I've known TONS of guys who define their reading tastes in terms of head-scratchy postmodern & mega novelists -- and relatively few women who do the same. Now, I've also known more women than men who read a lot, and more women than men whom I'd call "well read" in terms of the traditional canon. Ultimately though, that's all just my personal experience/bias/whatever, and I know that I shouldn't place too much emphasis on any of it. Deep down, regardless of what I've said elsewhere on this thread, I don't think the way the way men and women measure and appreciate "significance" varies all that much from person to person along gender lines. We all make up our own minds in the end.

― Pye Poudre, Wednesday, 4 April 2007 18:28 (nineteen years ago)

"...i don't really see anything covered so far as particularly difficult etc etc compared to more female-coded musical styles...

as for 2), wouldn't the actual healthier approach to raise traditional girl stuff on to a pedestal of, er, equal height? make the case for it being just as intellectual or confrontational as any amount of idm or noize - or if it's not, make the case for whatever attributes it does possess as being equally valid as being 'difficult' (which does not seem like a particularly positive attribute to me)."

-- lex pretend

OTM. When writing that (the bit about the pedestal), I quibbled with my own wording. Was tempted by the approach you suggest, but some democratizing impulse made me go the other way.

We (as a culture) have taken things that guys seem to respond to, and we've defined them as ostensibly "masculine" indicators of importance and worth: difficulty, rigorousness, technical complexity, better-than-the-rest-ness, ironic distancing, creative violence, etc. Meanwhile, we've dismissively co-mingled things that women respond to and things that men dislike, and we've labeled the result "feminine", thus trivial. But it's a shell game. Women may be just as attracted to technical complexity (or whatever) as men. And the definitions are much more fluid than our biology; they change from generation to generation, vary by region and culture, and are interpreted differently by everyone who encounters them.

In fact, a lot of what I'm trying to describe as coded "guy stuff" doesn't really belong to men any more than it does to women, and most our indicators of importance are arbitrary, anyway -- all but meaningless. And since the whole discourse is framed by and in terms of supposedly superior maleness, we get strange dissonances when we attempt to re-recognize the importance of female values. How do we do this outside the at least semi-artificial constructs of traditional maleness and femaleness? How do we do it without responding in a reactionary fashion to what the culture at large tells us about gender?

I dunno. At this point, I suppose we don't get to answer those questions. We just do as you suggest, Lex: put the girl stuff up on a pedestal and see what sticks. And, to some extent, kick the pedestal out from under the boy stuff. Not in a retributive fashion, but just as a way of testing and redefining the constructs.

― Pye Poudre, Wednesday, 4 April 2007 18:29 (nineteen years ago)

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