How Can I Say This So That We Can Stay in This Band Together?
The bar we’re playing at is dark, with only the corner we crammed in to play illuminated with a heat lamp for a stagelight. Our friends and family are posted up at tables perpendicular to us, yelling to each other over the pounding drums, booming bass, fast-paced guitar and my singing: “Girl, I want to be with you all of the time / All day and all of the night.” It’s the third set; everyone watching is a bit tipsy and a wedding party from the venue down the road is filing in to party. During the guitar solo, I look over to the bar to see a guy who came in while we were setting up. “What time do you go on? What kind of music do you play?” he had asked politely as I wobbled into the joint three hours prior, large PA speakers cradled in my arms. He’s now standing up from his bar stool, staring directly into my eyes. I stare back into his, glossed over and vacant. I lower my eyes a bit to see his hand moving rhythmically in his maroon sweatpants.
The Kinks song ends, and we quickly go into the last song of the set, Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic.” Not wanting to yell over a hot mic and cause a scene, I try to discreetly text my parents who are sitting at a pub table nearby from behind my music stand shield. “He’s touching himself,” I type shakily, trying to sing without blacking out and forgetting the words. “He’s touching himself and looking at me.”
My mom’s bar stool flies back. She pushes the motherfucker with all of her 5’1’’ might. Everyone’s heads whip around in the direction of the commotion. My mom runs around the back of the bar to get the bartender, manager, anyone, to do something, screaming, “He’s wacking off! HE’S WACKING OFF!” The song ends and the band goes silent. I don’t even know if I was singing. A giant bouncer comes out from the kitchen to push this dude, who still has his hand in his pants, out the front door.
I grab the mic. “Thanks everybody. We’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be back up for one last set.” While everyone in the bar shares a laugh over what just happened, I spend my fifteen-minute break crying in the bathroom. When I get back up to sing for another hour, I stand in place the rest of the night while everyone dances around me.
The spaces in which I experience the weight of sexism are those that I seek freedom of expression: the spaces where I play, write and perform music.
I have been musical for as long as I can remember, singing along to cassette tapes of Britney Spears with my Fisher Price boombox and microphone at my mom’s dinner parties at four years old. I began taking singing lessons at nine. I started singing in my first band at twelve, practicing with my cousin and his friends in a garage. I’ve been playing in a cover band with him every weekend since. I also write my own music in my band Molly Ringworm, and lend back up singing and bass playing to friends’ bands. I went to a performing arts high school to study music. I disc jockied, organized and booked shows for my college radio station. “Musician” is as much a part of my identity as “woman.” But the collision of these identities produces sexist responses from strangers and peers that leave me feeling more like I’m nothing.
There’s the baseline crude stuff every woman experiences, the blatant sexual harassment. When I was seventeen, playing at a local bar, a guy came up to me with money for our tip jar. He asked, “Am I supposed to tip you down your shirt?” I stared blankly at him as he laughed and dropped a crumpled dollar into the tip bucket at my feet. Another guy that saw me play found my Twitter account and DM’d me telling me I was “cute as shit” and that I look like I “enjoy being choked sexually.” More recently, a former band mom’s boyfriend Facebook messaged me at one in the morning telling me, “you could always text me if your [sic] ever bored” and asked if I was interested in him taking me out to eat sometime (as if I’d ever give a thirty-something man who doesn’t know how to use the correct “you’re” the time of day). These unwarranted comments rip down any wall of comfort I feel when performing. I am not a person or artist; I am a thing to be acquired and another object of the male gaze.
As I entered my twenties, I began to notice more subtle forms of misogyny. When playing shows with other bands (who are mostly, if not always, made up of all cis white guys), groups my band shared the stage with would only greet my male band members. I’m never given a handshake or hello. I’m never not asked which band member’s girlfriend I am, and when I respond, “No one’s,” the standard reply is a dropped jaw. Showing up with a guitar in my hand never sparks the idea that I am actually in the band, and the only way I could be is through a heterosexual relationship with a dude that plays guitar. It’s as if I’m not allowed to have an interest in music without a man being my gateway. I could not possibly like and do what I do of my own volition. If I am acknowledged, it’s as the “girl band” in the lineup — othered, tokenized. These descriptions are belittling and diminish all of the hard work that I have put into playing music; it puts my identity before my art.
This emphasis on me being the other adds a pressure to my musical ability. The missing of one note comes under so much self-scrutiny. I have to be twice as good to show that I’m worthy of being in the same lineup as a few mediocre guys. Not only do I need to possess the ability, but I need to possess musical knowledge. It used to be that the name-drop of an unknown band brought on fear of the tarnishing of my street cred, or that the talk of a song I was unfamiliar with would mean I was the biggest idiot to walk the face of the planet. I soon came to realize that even if I did know my shit, I’d still be made to feel like a fool.
“Do you know ‘Australia’ by The Kinks?”
“I do—”
“Probably not, it’s a later, more obscure track.”
These experiences of sexism arise from my subversion of the active/passive binary. It’s feminist theory 101: the masculine is regarded as active and the feminine as passive. When a woman steps out of her passive place in the hierarchy, someone has to push her back into place. The sexual harassment and exclusion are attempts to overturn the empowerment I feel through the act of performing to put me back in a subservient role: audience member, girlfriend, sex object. If I am to perform, it is for their pleasure, not my own.
The narratives of these experiences are everywhere in music from the women and non-binary musicians I admire; I’ve heard it in their songs and I’ve read it in their interviews. Sadie Dupuis of Sad13 and Speedy Ortiz has talked about being picked up and moved by a sound engineer setting up at her own show (New York Times), and writes about being the only woman on the bill in her song “Line Up.” HAIM had to fight to get paid the same amount their male counterparts were making at the same music festival (Teen Vogue). “Why couldn’t people just forget I was a girl?” Hayley Williams writes in Can You Deal?, recounting her attempts to reject femininity to fit in as a front woman in a rock band. When asked “What’s it like being a woman in the music industry?” Lizzo writes, “I don’t have a dick. Now can we talk about my musicianship? . . . Black Lives Mattering? How if I had a dollar every time I’m asked what it’s like to ‘be a woman in the industry’ I’d still have 20% less than the men asking me?” (Can You Deal? Zine). Knowing stuff like this happens to women that make it big time in music is both comforting and discomforting: I’m not alone in what I’m experiencing, but there is no escape no matter your level of success. Women with fans on a global scale have the platform to speak out about these things and have some sort of impact. But what kind of power do I possess as a girl in a small town who’s experiencing the same thing? Will I ever possess any power at all?
What hurts the most isn’t the sexual harassment from strangers or the failure of a couple of douchebags to say hello to me while I set up my equipment in a coffee shop. It is the silence of male band members who witness these things happen. I would like to think that their passivity does not make them sexist people, but it does make them complacent with misogyny. I’d like to think I have aided in learning experiences for them as men in the world and have given them a first-hand experience of the realities of sexism, but I often find my exclusion is not as obvious to them. It’s normal in their minds. When I talk to them about feeling slighted as the only woman in the lineup or the only one not greeted at the show we’re playing, my band members are vocal only to me about their denouncement of this behavior. There is talk of sticking up for me, or a public condemnation of exclusivity, but it’s never done. These beliefs mean nothing without action.
Maybe my band members didn’t hear the guy who asked to tip me down my shirt, but the words ring loud and clear in my mind. They were oblivious that they were the only ones to have their hands shook, so nothing could be said about it to the other bands. They can claim that they think these things are fucked up when I present it to them after the fact, but not saying anything shows me they couldn’t care less. Their alliance to me is just part of the band’s performance. I hope that with every push I give them, they will eventually do better. But sometimes the labor I have to put into making myself heard makes me want to collapse in on myself like a dying star.
When you find yourself locking eyes with someone masturbating to you, it’s hard to believe that the situation is reality. “It’s crazy. I can’t even believe it happened,” a band member recounted later while we were telling the story to a coworker. It’s unbelievable to the people that witnessed it. It’s even unbelievable to me; I have to question my experience. Was this even an experience of sexual harassment, or was the dude just crazy? If no one else around me could recognize it as a violation, how could it be?
I second guess all of my experiences of sexism. I start thinking that I must have done something to provoke the unnecessary, predatory sexual advancements, or that my accusation of being ignored by other guys in the scene is an overreaction. I read so much into these situations that are so clearly gendered, I wind up gaslighting myself. I know that these same things would not happen to a man. I know that in these moments of harassment, dismissal and silence, gender triumphed my humanity.
There’s no proper way to resolve something like being masturbated to while on stage in public. There’s no way to assure that, at the next show, I’ll have my hand shook. There’s no way to heal the hurt, embarrassment and feelings of exploitation I’ve felt for the ten-plus years I’ve been playing in bands. But there is still a way for those around me to recognize misogyny when they see it and call it out. In a world where women are often dismissed when they stand up for themselves, it is important for men that claim to be feminist allies to do their part. Speak out so we can stay in this band together.
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The title of this piece is inspired by Claudia Rankine’s interview on On Being. Thank you to Emily Van Duyne for encouraging me to write about my experiences and always pushing my writing.