WOMEN: Female musicians experience constant abuse.
By Stephen Park, Staff writer
It must be amazing to be born a musician, unless you are born with ovaries. Being a female artist means having to endure sexually explicit abuse; people have made it clear that the world of music is misogynistic and hypocritical. It isn’t anything new, but why are female musicians expected to put up with this—especially in the digital age where verbal sexual abuse is only a click away and harassment goes unpunished since it’s shielded by computer screens?
Nobody bats an eyelash if Robin Thicke wants to borderline molest girls while singing about rape. It’s okay because he “[knows] you want it.” If Adam Levine puts his deepest desires to a pop-tastic beat, nobody cares. But should a woman dare to embed anything sexual within her lyrics, there will be a price to pay. Angry moms, sexist men and old-timers scream about how a proper lady shouldn’t say those kinds of things. They claim sexual messages are a bad influence on the youth, as if sex is some taboo thing that we are not constantly surrounded by. The same group of people who let their seven-year-old rape and murder in games like Grand Theft Auto preach that women should not talk about sex in such a manner. They act as if women don’t have any needs or desires other than to be celibate nuns. It’s almost as if uttering the word “vagina” or “sex” is just as bad as flipping the bird if you’re a female.
Yet these same people, especially the men, don’t care if girls barely old enough to vote run around in nothing but underwear. Think I’m wrong? Go to any artist’s YouTube page and look at the comments: Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Ray, Marina Diamond and many others are guaranteed to be creepily fantasized about and “complimented” about how sexy they look. Why people engage in this sort of behavior, I honestly don’t know. Yet this has been going on for quite some time. Female artists cannot escape the legion of very vocal and sexually obsessed males.
Physical attraction cannot be turned on and off like a light switch. However, sending explicit messages to female musicians is not a healthy way to vent these feelings. Lauren Mayberry of the online band Chvrches posted a screenshot of one of these sexually explicit messages on the band’s Facebook page. The reactions varied between grotesque and supportive of the disgustingly vile:
“This isn’t rape culture. You’ll know rape culture when I’m raping you, b*tch.”
“Act like a slut, get treated like a slut.”
“It’s just one of those things you’ll need to learn to deal with it. If you’re easily offended, then maybe the music industry isn’t for you.”
But why should females have to learn to “deal with it?” There will always be negative reviews and criticism of musicians, but verbal abuse is different. Do female artists need to accept that it’s alright for people to make disgusting remarks, simply because that’s just how women artists are spoken to?
While some people may try to sweep this behavior under the rug, I think it’s worth wondering what the future of music will look like if fan-to-musician harassment continues or intensifies—especially the sexually explicit comments that some female singers receive on a regular basis. Will female musicians see the brutal abuse as too much for the minuscule reward of small fame? Maybe everyone is just sexually oppressed, itching to live out animalistic needs. Maybe if all the worried parents and conservatives exercise their right to go heels-to-toe with Jesus they will be able to sleep at night knowing that explicit material is uttered of out the mouths of women. But then again, maybe I’m not enough of a sexist, hypocritical bigot to understand.
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