Research - looking at sexism & racism in rock, metal and alternative spaces.

The pure honest truth of being a woman in alternative spaces is that either way you can’t win. Here’s some hot takes that my research has uncovered - I will post as much as I can in the space I’ve got. Since the rise of social media, different kinds of sexism is beginning to creep in. It kind of began on myspace to be honest - you had look a certain way, or talk a certain way, shop at certain places etc to be accepted as a scene/emo/metal/goth kid. It also massively excluded people that weren’t from the US, meaning the UK alternative space evolved very differently to the US ones. For example, due to our longstanding history in having alternative scenes, and just being a smaller country, we have rock/metal clubs & pubs, there spaces for younger alternative kids to hang out, shops like Blue Banana, or emporiums like Afflecks in Manchester or The Oasis in Birmingham. However, we do have problems with these - women's alternative clothing is insanely expensive (killstar charge minimum of £40 for anything), the spaces were the kids could hang out were inundated with older men preying on them, harassment is often in the clubs men often assume women are single and follow us around or get in our space.

Alternative Fashion is the latest one I’ve begin to explore - if you’re a woman and you turn up to a gig in your work uniform, or just in jeans and a t shirt you’re called a poser or asked if you’ve only come because your partner has. When you search for alternative fashion inspiration all that comes up are white, tall, skinny women. To be really blunt - it’s a problem. BIPOC don’t see themselves at our scene, and literally everything backs up the racism in it. I’m curvy, and I’ve never see a bigger alternative “influencer” it literally either seems you’re a size 8 alt woman or a size 22 alt woman and there’s literally no inbetween. Being alternative is expensive too - literally anything labeled gothic especially will set you back £20 - £400 - some people just don’t have this kind of money to spend on clothes or home stuff so it just blocks them of our spaces. Brands like Killstar & Disturbia feed into this too - the only models shown on the killstar website are size XS or XXXL, with disturbia doing pretty much the same thing. I worry about the harm this is doing to baby bats as not seeing yourself represented in a scene that is supposedly accepting is insanely problematic and will re-inforce the idea that you need to look at certain, weigh a certain weight and you need lots of money to “follow” the space.

Social Media is now causing problems within itself - it’s giving predatory men in our scenes a platform, algorithms favouring white, skinny alternative people, gatekeeping happening on an even bigger scale. Women are lot more likely to be part of a “fandom” or “stan” a band, but this is often ridiculed by men, even though these women support the bands through social media, creating posters, lyric photos, their own merch, they hold fan accounts to post photos of the band, they often attend multi shows of a tour etc, but men see this as over the top and either gatekeep the band, ridicule the women doing it, or just pure slag off both ends. We often have to label ourselves too, and get slagged off if we enjoy music outside of the label. For example I would call myself a metalhead, but if I listen to reggae I am then called a poser and not a true fan? Men often ask us to “name three songs” if we’re seen in band merch and it’s ridiculous and I’ve noticed particularly in the last few months on tiktok steps are being taken to stop or prevent gatekeeping - the community often speaks about how we have to walk the talk, if we want to be inclusive then the gatekeeping needs to stop, as it puts people off being in our spaces.

We have a huge problem with predators in the scene, with women being preyed on as young as 13. It needs to be nipped in the bud at the beginning, but men don’t call their friends out or think its funny or don’t believe us, meaning the men that are creepy to us in the clubs start bands and have access to wider range of people to abuse, or men use their twitter or online personalities to pull women in. The Warped Tour scandal proved it’s a problem on both ends - over 40 bands were called out online for a range of things, from inappropriate messages to s*exual ass*ult even to r*pe. Some of these things had even been out for a long time (there have been long standing allegations against Dahvie Vanity since 2010) but been brushed under the rug, not taken seriously or ignored. The online thing is a problem and was exposed around the same time as the warped scandal, and it was men taking advantage of mentally ill alternative women through meeting them online, and using them for money, sex and sometimes even using them to elivate their own platforms. Both of these problems are partly born out of the groupie culture - the men in scene just see us as sexual objects or we’re highly sexualised. Things like the “big t*tty goth gf” are problematic because it just reduces us down to our bodies, and can even make women feel like they’re not good enough for the scene because they don’t look a certain way. I think part of the problem is men struggle with being called out on things, they struggle to progress or listen to us - I mean as we saw in the history, the entire space is basically built to enrich alternative white men and not really anybody else. I also think because women, LGBQT & BIPOC are often why genres and spaces move on (we push more boundaries and challenge more because there is more blockades in front of us - however as a white woman in the scene I am very aware that my experience in not the same as BIPOC woman's experience) and men don’t like to be challenged as they believe this to be THEIR space and thats why things like “name 3 songs” exist as they feel threatened. This happens with bands too - it’s often men that will slag a band off (especially online) if they change their sound or try a new diection. It’s very much seen as a masculine genre, a masculine space so anything that is remotely “feminine” is rejected.

One of the other problems I’ve been exploring is the problem of the title “female fronted”. Female fronted is problematic for a couple of reasons. It reduces the entire band down to gender of one person, and it also lumps bands together who sound nothing like each other - for example Butcher Babies & Tonight Alive. One plays Heavy Metal and the other plays Pop Punk, but under this title all that matters is that there are women in the band. Male fronted is not a thing so why have we made female fronted a thing? It treats women in bands like they’re unicorns and also excludes LGBT+ who are trans, non binary or just don’t really fit a label as a lot of women lumped into this category are female presenting and often highly sexualised. A lot of bands with women in are not on equal footing either - spotify is dominated by white men, we have an awful lot of male critics & male journalists, festivals are dominated by white men, women are pushed to small stages no matter how big their band is, women not being let backstage as it’s believed they’re “the bands girlfriend” or “the merch girl” or a groupie. We also don’t have enough women working backstage as roadies, stage hands, assistants, journalists, managers, producers, creative directors, designers etc all of these feed into our culture but being dominated by men for so long just continues to push women out of spaces.