True story.

[asimplechord]

J and I were sitting in the living room the other morning, caffeinating ourselves, randomly channel surfing until we hit MetalMania on VH1. We watched for a bit while we talked about Books and Movies and Other Important Stuff.

Then she looked at me and waved at the tv and said that 80s and 90s glam rockers would probably be sources for tons of fodder with respect to gender role-playing and entertainment. If anyone were interested.

Why, yes. Indeed. I pointed her at the pile of books near the top of Mount To-Be-Read.

Actually, it'd been a while since I watched some of the "classic" videos they showed, and I'm still sorting out some of the stuff that bothered me and why, but here's what I'm thinking about.

1) the motif in the credits, which included silhouettes of a bikini-clad woman

2) the men in the videos, when they crawled around on the floor, did it in a playful way; somehow it came off as submissive (or completely sexual) when women did it

3) in two hours, a single female rock artist's video aired

I'm trying to figure out why these things should bother me more than, say, listening to the lyrics of Lying Is the Most Fun... or I Write Sins Not Tragedies, songs that basically call the women Ryan Ross wrote them about whores.

Shouldn't modern misogyny bother me more than decade-old sexism?

Thoughts?

Comments

[ariadne1.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to figure out why these things should bother me more than, say, listening to the lyrics of Lying Is the Most Fun... or I Write Sins Not Tragedies, songs that basically call the women Ryan Ross wrote them about whores.

Shouldn't modern misogyny bother me more than decade-old sexism?

It may be that the difference you seek is already contained in your words: the conscious misogyny of an individual artist (or perhaps even the targeted specific hatred of individual women by an individual) is less bothersome than the unexamined sexism of an entire culture. Seems to me hegemony's more bothersome than an individual person-in-pain-and-angry-about-it, on the misogyny/sexism scale.