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Sexism on repeat: how the music industry can break the cycle

From Keshas case against Dr Luke to Miles Kanes objectification of a female journalist, the industry has to admit theres a problem before sexism is curbed

Watching the eddies of controversy around gender and pop in 2016 has been nothing if not soul-crushing. Inciting incidents pop up; they get passed around, then analyzed to seemingly no end; and eventually they recede into the background. Thats until the next big to-do, the one that might, finally, stop the cycle where women and men are slotted into roles not all that dissimilar to the ones they occupied when MTV was launched some 35 years ago.

The dueling lawsuits between Kesha and her former guru Dr Luke, which are awash (at least on Keshas side) with horrific tales of sexual misconduct and outright meanness; the swirling stories about the publicist Heathcliff Berru, whose serial harassment of artists and other industry types led to him entering rehab and issuing a lengthy apology; and, this week, the Spin profile of the Last Shadow Puppets that was more remarkable for the way Miles Kane propositioned reporter Rachel Brodsky than for anything pertinent to their imminent second album. Theyve all been brought into the content cycle and put on spin, given the outrage of the day treatment before being hung out to dry.

Its wearying if only because the stories and the inevitable clamor that accompanies them are generated at a constant churn, which makes them feel horrifyingly normal. Anyone who aspires to be a woman in rock (or pop) is only able to inhabit that scene as an other. They exist in a place where theyre only seen as women, as being to be looked at first, and as such can be relegated to subordinate status at any moment.

If the lopsided relationship between men and women in music was only played out in these pretty terrible ways, it might be easier to eradicate. But smaller behaviors that reflect womens status not as professionals with artistic or business goals, but as nurturers and/or sex objects, exist all over the music industry, from capable female musicians being treated by venue staff as someones girlfriend to not-so-innocent asides offered up by male interviewers and interviewees to their female compatriots.

When I got into music many years ago, I was a fan of hard rock the critically reviled bands decked out in black leather and Aqua Net. For the most part, those bands lyrics looked at women as sometimes irritating, yet necessary for whats now called emotional labor and, of course, sex. I humored it because I was a teenager with hearts in her eyes, and because it at least seemed like the men involved liked some of the women who they sang about as people. Over time, that fandom morphed into a love of riot grrrl, the confrontational bare-bones punk that preached a girls to the front mantra, and other bands that were populated by women. I didnt hear women as a genre, but I did relate more to the lyrics of singers like PJ Harvey and Heliums Mary Timony, who scraped womanhoods carcass dry for their precisely wielded observations.

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Other listeners, however, are happy to lump women together as their own thing. Women in rock have been treated as curiosities even as theyve been allegedly celebrated, with their status as others called out in fashion spreads, tour lineups and roundups that seem well-meaning, but only serve to solidify womens position as the other. It also goes without saying that, for the most part, these ideals are being played out in a decidedly heteronormative and cis-centric sphere, and also largely among white principals; the othering that goes on with sexual orientation, race, and able-bodiedness also screws in societal perceptions of who the default might be.

The manner in which sexual harassment stories are dealt with by the media cycle has a similar effect they are reported and chewed up by aggregators, turned into a trending topic and joked about by people who feel theyre above the fray. Along the way, the humanity at their core becomes abstracted to grander points about men and women, which can then be explained away by biology-borne nonsense lifted from a self-help book.

The weariness brought upon by this revolving door of bad actors has made me skeptical that all this social-media-borne sturm und drang will change anything at all. For starters, the upper echelons of the music business even on the independent side are pretty solidly white and male. And even those stories that resonated far and wide have had mixed fallouts. On Wednesday, the Hollywood tabloid the Wrap reported that Sony was ready to drop Dr Luke from his label and publishing deal; that story was followed up by cheering from the social-media sidelines and a hasty denial from the producer, and Sony has yet to make the move that the Wrap hinted at. The lawsuits, meanwhile, will drag on, with the next hearings not scheduled until May. Thursday morning brought with it a new video from the Last Shadow Puppets one that was posted as normal on the usual-suspect music-focused outlets. Sure, some offered the begrudging link to Brodskys story, but the net result of promotion for the band obliterated any behavioral critique.

One of the biggest truisms about gender relations to emerge in 2016 is that, Twitter character limits notwithstanding, there are few pithy answers to the big questions. The occasional huge offender can be struck down to much fanfare, but patterns of behavior that result from centuries of societal conditioning rarely get changed in public, let alone with the roar of Twitter and Facebook narrating every move. If this year is to be one that music takes an honest look at its relationship with gender, it must be one where not only the stories that make the biggest waves get looked at and interrogated deeply even if that means questioning seemingly innocent behaviors that, in the long run, help prop up the more benign manifestations of skewed gender parity.