Women in the Music Industry

If you follow me on twitter or know me in real life, you should know that I have an opinion on practically everything and I'm not really afraid to express my opinions. Which means, when I have a chance to write about something I feel strongly about - I will. So here it goes.

Women in the Music Industry

With the growing number of female musicians who are having success in bands where they play instruments, you'd think that females in the music industry would be finally recognised to be equal to men. However, that's not the case. For some reason it's still a shock that a woman can play an instrument well. Men can just be a bassist or a drummer or a guitarist - a musician, but as soon as the guitarist is a woman, she's a 'female guitarist'. Why can she not just be a guitarist? Because subconsciously, most people will judge her ability on the fact that she is not male, and that's 'weird'. For example, the phrase "she's good for a woman" might be used. 
Although male musicians may attract fan-girls, most of the time comments made about them are for their music, with the occasional "he's so hot". With females it's different. Take Ellie Rowsell from Wolf Alice for example, her name constantly pops up on my twitter timeline, but it's rare that I see a comment about her ability as an artist. The tweets are mainly about how attractive she is (I do agree) but not how talented she is, which I'm sure must be annoying for her as a musician. 
Another example is a band that I am not particularly fond of: Haim. Now, I don't like Haim purely because I don't like the music they produce, but people always try and argue back to try and make me like them. One of the first arguments that a Haim fan will use is 'But they're so pretty'. And believe it or not, I've once had a friend of mine tell me he didn't think that musically Haim were great, yet their attractiveness was one of the main reasons he liked them.
Now, you can argue back if you like, but most people don't try and support the fact that a male musician is good by the way he looks? It doesn't make sense - so why does that happen for female musicians? 
This brings me on to my next point: the sexualisation of women.
Many female pop artists look to being 'sexy' as a way to gain following, which it does. This though, means that they may not be taken as seriously and again the main subject of a conversation is not the vocal ability she has, but how 'hot' she is in her latest video. Even male musicians look to the use of an overly sexualised woman in their music video. Even bands that I really love are guilty of it, including Peace. Recently, the biggest outrage has been over Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines', a song perpetrating rape culture, and that uses women in a completely degrading and sexualising way, but I won't talk too much about that, because that could go onto something completely else.
Now as the last major point of this post, I want you to ask yourself a question. If you saw a teenage boy walking down the street in a band shirt and a teenage girl in a band shirt, who are you most likely to say actually likes the band? The boy, right? Because most people have built up this idea that girls only like bands for an image or to impress people. Why? Because girls actually liking something other than the sexualised pop music that is played so often is 'strange'.
I'm going to finish with a quote by one of my favourite musicians of all time.

"The media says that equality for women has arrived, but if you look around, you still don't see girls playing guitars and having success with it." 

- Joan Jett.

-Charlotte x