FEATURE:
Put Yourself in Her Shoes
PHOTO CREDIT: Anthony Tran/Unsplash
Treating Women in Music with More Respect
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THIS is not related to any particular event…
PHOTO CREDIT: Ben White/Unsplash
or bit of news, but I am thinking ahead to International Women’s Day. The theme for 2023 is DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality. International Women's Day 2023 will focus on how technology and education in the digital age can help the empowerment of women and girls across the world. That happens on 8th March. It is a very important date in the calendar. I have written about misogyny in music and how there needs to be a #MeToo-style movement. I shall come to that in a minute. The past couple of weeks have really struck me. I have read about some horrifying experiences women have gone through. Whether it is sexism, abuse or misogyny, it is something that is extremely toxic and troubling. There needs to be conversations in the music industry around this. It can take the form of abusive or sexual messages, sexism at festivals and lacking opportunities, or a general lack of respect. Prior to that, I want to widen things out and look at two stories that concern misogyny and abuse outside of music. Michelle Williams recently spoke with The Guardian in promotion of the new film, The Fablemans. The subject of #MeToo arose, as did equal pay:
“Yet in 2017, she had evolved sufficiently to effect real-world change by speaking out. Williams had learned that while she was reportedly paid $1,000 for her reshoot work on Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World (they had to hastily swap Kevin Spacey for Christopher Plummer), her co-star, Mark Wahlberg, received $1.5m. She blew the whistle on the discrepancy and said it had left her “paralysed in feelings of futility”. The case kickstarted Hollywood’s pay parity revolution.
PHOTO CREDIT: Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello/Trunk Archive
On Fosse/Verdon, Williams made the same as her co-star, Sam Rockwell. Does it feel good or bad to have money now? For the first time in our conversation, she stalls. “It’s a hard question. It’s something I’d have to reckon with before I really know how to talk about it.”
She also edges around specifics on #MeToo. But when I say I’m surprised more people weren’t brought down, she has the look of someone who knows where the skeletons are buried. “Maybe there’s still hope for that.”
What she will say is that she sees the fruits of the movement all the time. “Boy, oh boy, do I ever!” she says when I ask if the young actors on The Fabelmans were more confident than she used to be. “I did not possess any grace or calm, nor did any of my contemporaries. I was raised in the 80s. Selfhood wasn’t put into young women. And now it is. I get to see it in my own daughter and I can’t take my eyes off her. It is a glorious miracle to behold that I never thought I would witness in my lifetime.”
When Williams talks about Matilda, rather than about being her mother, she speaks slightly differently. She speeds up. Concerns over exact expression are overtaken by enthusiasm. “I thought I would have to teach my daughter how to subvert herself and crawl underneath the system to keep herself safe. And, instead, the system has exploded and these young people act with compassion, integrity and righteousness.
“I have the chills talking about it. These girls aren’t prey. These girls are already victorious. I love to sit back and watch them in the world and know that it is safer and more inclined in their direction than it was for me”.
Hollywood had an awakening and reckoning with #MeToo, and there has been definite progress. Whilst there are still cases of misogyny and sexual assault on sets and in the industry, there does seem to have been development. On issues like equal pay, I still think there is a disparity between men and women. I am not sure why, but the idea that male actors are a bigger pull. Not to deviate too much but, also, I was shocked reading about Emily Atack’s experiences of sexual harassment and abuse online. A new documentary, Asking for It?, sees actress and comedian Atack discuss her experiences of receiving online sexual harassment. She also heard from women in all walks of life who shared their experiences too. It is a upsetting but essential documentary that should, let’s hope, lead to changes in terms of behaviour, attitude and the way social media sites monitor sexual graphic messages and photos. Atack spoke with The Times about how things escalated during lockdown:
“But then came the pandemic lockdown and a surge in the volume of explicit and extreme messaging flooding her DMs. “It made me feel ten times more isolated, vulnerable and alone. Because all of a sudden I was looking around me, thinking, ‘I’ve got no one to protect me here. I’ve got no one to laugh about it with, even.’ I got really down about it.”
The onslaught, she says, made her feel “lonely, disgusting, embarrassed, ashamed, violated. It feels like sexual assault — and I have been sexually assaulted, so I know what that feels like. I feel like I’m being sexually assaulted hundreds of times a day.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Robert Wilson
But, she continues, “There were so many other things going on. People were dying. People were in care homes having to wave at loved ones through windows. I didn’t feel I could come out and say, ‘Can you stop sending me pictures of your dick?’ So I bottled it up.”
The campaign group End Violence Against Women reports that one in five women has experienced online harassment and abuse, while a June 2022 report by the Victims’ Commissioner reported that one in four women has experienced cyberflashing — being sent sexual images, aka dick pics, without consent.
Ask your girlfriend. Ask your sister. Ask — horrifyingly — your teenage daughter. Research by Professor Jessica Ringrose from University College London found that 76 per cent of girls aged 12-18 had been sent unsolicited nude images of boys or men. (And that study was carried out in 2020, before the pandemic intensified online harassment many times over.)
Ask a woman in her teens or twenties or thirties if a man has slid into her DMs and asked her to send him videos. Ask if she’s ever had an image sent to her phone via AirDrop by a stranger sitting nearby on the bus. Ask if she’s ever got chatting to a guy on a dating app, given him her number and suddenly been deluged with pictures of his penis — without even having gone on a date. The answer will almost certainly be yes.
PHOTO CREDIT: Robert Wilson
If you’re over 40, however, you might well be blithely unaware of the extent of the issue. Less because, as members of my fortysomething book club commented the other night when I did a straw poll on the subject, “Nobody wants to AirDrop their dick to a middle-aged woman,” and more, I believe, because our demographic — too old to be digital natives, or even confidently to know how to turn on their AirDrop facility — simply spends far less of their life online. Those female friends over 40 with prominent public and social media profiles — and who are therefore more digitally accessible — are, in fact, bombarded with images and abuse.
Even armed with evidence of how widespread the problem is, Atack admits she was still plagued by feelings of shame and self-blame. “Is it because I posed in a bikini? Is it because I get my cleavage out on Instagram and talk about my sex life on stage? Am I part of the problem?”
This is the starting point for Atack’s upcoming BBC documentary, Emily Atack: Asking for It?, an impressively honest and personal exploration of the harassment and abuse she is subjected to, how it has affected her — and other women who experience similar — and an attempt to understand what motivates the men behind it.
Today, sitting across a table from me, sipping coffee and cradling her teacup cavalier spaniel, Penny, in her lap, she admits to nervousness about how it will be received. Will the public understand the complicated conundrum she is attempting to unpick? Will they grasp the internalised misogyny that makes victims blame themselves?
“I think I will always slightly feel like it’s my fault,” admits Atack. “Always. I’m working on it as hard as I can. But when something is ingrained in you from such a young age, it’s hard to unravel all that”.
These are not isolated incidences outside of music. Whilst most men condemn the actions of the few, there is still this disturbing reality that women all around the world have to go through such horrifying, demeaning and vile days. Ones where they are attacked, threatened and harassed. I cannot tell you how many tweets I have seen that relate to artists receiving sexual messages, being the victim of harassment and sexual assault, misogyny or sexism. Whilst there was a sort of #MeToo movement in music at one point, I don’t think anything as concrete and visible as the one in Hollywood has taken place. Musicians like Catherine Anne Davies (The Anchoress) have been victim of harassing and abusive messages. She is not alone in this. In October, Phoebe Bridgers featured in Teen Vogue. Although women are now at the forefront of Rock and Pop, I still feel there is this struggle of recognition and equality. Women still not being given the same platform, respect and opportunities as their male counterparts:
“Bridgers is part of a legacy of artists — including Sinead O’Connor and Fiona Apple (who became a Bridgers collaborator) in the 1990s, the Chicks in the 2000s, and countless others into the 2010s and today — who joined the music industry, looked around at the world and those running it and thought, This isn’t good enough. Alongside Bridgers, those speaking out for what they believe in, especially when it comes to abortion access, include Megan Thee Stallion, Billie Eilish, Lizzo, and Olivia Rodrigo.
Paramore’s Hayley Williams, another Bridgers collaborator, was one of the few women in rock permitted to succeed in the 2000s; she has since criticized their hit “Misery Business” for contributing to a “‘cool girl’ religion,” “feeding into a lie that I’d bought into, just like so many other teenagers — and many adults — before me.” Like Williams, Bridgers has taken up the mantle in a movement to provide emotionally complicated music that is detached from the misogyny the genre was built on, and to make space to talk about different types of pain. Bridgers’ vulnerability is a key feature of her music and lyrics, earning comparisons to her icon, Elliott Smith.
PHOTO CREDIT: Chloe Horseman
Having been let down by the musicians who came before, many of whom were white, male, and straight — and some of whom took advantage of their younger, female fanbase — she and her peers feel a sense of responsibility to create better industry conditions than the ones they endured. “I’ll bite the hand that feeds me,” Bridgers, Dacus, and Julien Baker harmonize on the 2018 boygenius EP.
Today, rock and alternative are dominated by women-led, genderqueer, and LGBTQ+ artists from a diversity of backgrounds, from Mitski and Pom Pom Squad to Snail Mail and Black Belt Eagle Scout. They represent stories and experiences previously disregarded and ignored in rock music, overtaking tales of men hurting women and blaming them for it.
“It's just sad that we've been forced to identify with white boys…. I think it shows you how desperate we've all been for any f**king representation,” Bridgers says. “I also think, at the heart of it, it's just wanting to be understood.”
The arrival of the #MeToo movement in fall 2017 — and its long horseshoe around to misogynistic backlash — coincided with Bridgers’ arrival in the spotlight. That September, her debut album Stranger in the Alps dropped. The album's best-known song, “Motion Sickness,” is about her relationship with musician Ryan Adams, an indie diss track concealed in a deceptively light, lilting groove. As Bridgers later told The New York Times, she met Adams when she was around 20 years old and Adams was around 40. “You were in a band when I was born,” she sings. (In a statement to the Times via a lawyer, Adams called their relationship “a brief, consensual fling.”).
PHOTO CREDIT: Chloe Horseman
The newspaper spoke to multiple women about Adams and his alleged “pattern of manipulative behavior in which [he] dangled career opportunities while simultaneously pursuing female artists for sex.” Bridgers claims that after she broke it off with Adams, he “became evasive about releasing the music they had recorded together and rescinded the offer to open his upcoming concerts,” according to the Times. (Through his lawyer, Adams denied the allegations in the Times report, calling the accusations “extremely serious and outlandish.” Adams also denied withholding her songs.)
Bridgers and I trade names back and forth of celebrities we’ve long heard murmurs about, then turn to the biggest #MeToo story of 2022: the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard case. Not long after the trial ended, Bridgers liked a tweet that supported Heard, who made accusations of abuse against Depp in a high-profile, polarizing trial. (Ultimately, a jury found that Heard was liable for three counts of defamation, and Depp liable for one of three counts in Heard’s countersuit.) Across the internet, people mocked Heard and her allegations of abuse against Depp, and many celebrities liked Depp’s post-trial “comeback” posts on Instagram.
“I think that there's been this falsehood — and I think queer people are included in this — of having to be the perfect victim, or the perfect survivor, or the perfect representation for your marginalized community," Bridgers says. "If Amber Heard exhibited any neurotic behavior, it was held against her. Then Johnny Depp, out of his mouth, admitted some of the most violent, crazy shit in court, and it's somehow like, people aren't surprised?”
The giddy public consumption of the trial was troubling, Bridgers continues. “That whole situation was so upsetting to me, that it was treated like a fandom war. Laughing at someone crying in court? It was disgusting.”
This is something Bridgers seems stuck on: What does accountability or justice actually look like in a society that continuously diminishes survivor narratives? “It can feel insular, like the rest of the world doesn't care about the same morals as us,” Bridgers says. She notes that, like Depp (who lost a libel case in the UK after the court found that a newspaper’s printed allegations that he was a “wife beater” were substantially true), many powerful men accused of abuse continue their lucrative careers.
PHOTO CREDIT: Chloe Horseman
“I mean, is [cancel culture] real? Who's lost their job politically? One huge offender is in jail for actual sex crimes, and then anything short of that is, maybe, they lose a couple friends or lose a couple jobs,” she says. “Then five years later, they're like, ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’ And they come back, but they never apologize — they never go away.”
Bridgers is grateful for the solidarity she’s found with friends and others in the industry, as well as other survivors, but she won’t forget the cost. “It sucks that I trauma-bonded with a lot of my friends first,” Bridgers says. “We didn't get to come from a place of joy; we had to connect on something so dark.”
Like many of her fans, Bridgers came up at a moment of reckoning over who holds power in the music industry — and the culture at large — and how they get to wield it. That’s why Bridgers takes her celebrity so seriously. Yes, she’s a musician who’s pouring her heart out onstage as fans sing (or sob) along. But she’s concerned with making sure everybody is passing the mic — and that it doesn’t stop with her.
“I'm selling me,” she points out. “If I post a link to my friend's GoFundMe, maybe two people will donate to it. But if I'm like, ‘Hey, I will trade you this piece of myself for this’ — I do it all the time with songs…. It’s a lighthearted way to draw attention to something that's dire. As a musician, I have no power to draw anybody's attention to something in any other way”.
Sorry if it does seem like a random assortment of interviews and information, but I was affected by recent cases of women in the public eye who have been recipients of misogyny and sexual harassment. Emily Atack’s words and what she has gone through. I have been thinking about that, but also ahead to International Women’s Day. The fact that, even now, there is still so much work to do. Yes, the fact that so many incredible women have broken through and created incredible music that has inspired change and this need for recognition and evolution. Those who speak up when it comes to harassment and abuse. Those who fight against sexism at labels, festivals, at award shows, and every other corner of the industry. We are seeing small steps in terms of representation and parity, but there is a disparity and gulf still. I think women are leading music and deserve a lot more than they get. Every day, I read about an artist who has received aa disturbing or patronising email. Someone who has not been paid as much as a male artist for a similar gig. Festivals not balancing their line-ups. Women revealing upsetting messages they have received. Others who don’t feel seen or heard. I think it all comes down to respect. The fact is that women in music (and throughout society) have to have endure things that men do not. Whether that is them being overlooked or inundated with sexual messages, it has to change. The damage this does is devastating, and it means that the industry will suffer! Even though there is a wave of terrific new female artists, so many are leaving music or finding that they will struggle in so many different ways. I hope that there is change very soon. When it comes to women throughout music, they should be shown…
NOTHING but respect.