The Music Proof

Sometimes, my male friends (and I) will wonder why there aren’t more women involved in music.

Sometimes, I’m reminded of the little things that can make women feel unwelcome.

The back story: there is a space in town, run by a collective, where ManPants and I have been arranging to have shows for the past 9 months or so. It was a great space, if not exactly a big draw for our weirdo outsider music, but at least somewhere that our friends that were passing through town could come to make a racket with us. Unfortunately, it’s closing down at the end of this month. There were two other venues devoted to music but one was a cafe (not very conducive to loud electronics) and the other forced bands to either pre-sell tickets or pay out of their own pockets to play. The former shut down in April and the latter is apparently closing soon as well.

So at our show last night, the last one that we will have in that space, I tried to talk to the guys who were running the door. I asked why they were having to close and what would happen next. They answered, but only briefly. Buck told them about our music website and our long involvement in music, but it wasn’t until I said that we had been running our zine for 6 years that they really seemed to pay attention. When I said, a few minutes later, that we often have bands coming to town and would love to know of successors to this venue, they finally started to converse with me as an equal.

In other words, I feel like I had to prove myself first.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, either. The double mark of not saying a lot and being female seems to make people think that I’m just along for the ride, nevermind the fact that ManPants and I work tirelessly side-by-side on almost all of our music-related things. If I don’t mention going to shows every weekend as a teenager, or editing a music zine for 6 years, or talk about the everyday intricacies of running a small-time record label, it seems to be assumed that I am little more than arm candy, a groupie*.

They say it with their eyes, which will never make contact with mine. They say it with their body language, turned away from me (and often toward another male). They say it with their tone of voice, which answers my sentences and questions with short and distant responses. They say it with their words, with their simplicities and brief replies, as if I wouldn’t understand or be interested in anything longer and more detailed.

To be fair, I’m not the warmest, most talkative person with strangers. It takes me major effort – and more liquor than I care for these days – to not appear awkward and uncomfortable around people I don’t know.

To be fair, there are a lot of other things, too, that keep women from becoming involved in music scenes. I haven’t had as much experience with those myself, though, so I can’t say anything about how they effect a woman personally.

To be fair, though it seems to be the majority of them, this isn’t every man. Some of the people who encouraged me to even try my hand at music when I had very little experience with it were men (especially ManPants) and women can act this way as well, though it seems to come more from an unconscious belief in a limited number of slots for women in a given group than plain gender dismissal.

To be fair, the standard of proof required of me is not high and doesn’t cost me much. The music scene I was involved in as a teenager gave women almost no options for being taken seriously. The only way to be female and considered something other than a “groupie” (always with a negative connotation) was to be a lone female in an otherwise male band. And there are plenty of other instances I can think of where my identity would be a greater hurdle – if I were a different race or obviously physically impaired, for instance.

To be fair, ManPants says that he often feels like he has to prove himself too. I could be misinterpreting the role of my gender in this little drama; it could be a process that everyone has to go through with certain individuals, since we all carry boundaries of behavior between our different ways of identifying ourselves.

Yet even after all this fairness, my instincts are still telling me that my gender plays a part. To be any woman who experiences this and deals with the nagging leftovers of such a small but significant event can be difficult. The women I know in parallel situations to mine are all tough women, not easily deterred by the minute scratches that can make other women leave, or not even try in the first place.

But the point is that we shouldn’t have to be tough women; there shouldn’t have to be women who leave, or never even try in the first place.

A female musician said to me recently that she makes an effort to tell other female musicians when she likes what they are doing, more than she does with anyone else. “It means more,” she said. I agree. It means that we have one less person to prove ourselves to, and in a way, it means we don’t have to prove ourselves to anyone else either. Because she’s already come through that blockade; she knows what it means to step through it. And if she made it, that means other women can too.

*If you ask me, there is nothing wrong with groupies. But that’s another post.