The exclusion of women from the arts is one of the more painful losses women endure under male domination. It gets at our souls, not our bodies. Women painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, musicians, all face almost insuperable odds.
Why is this? Why do men find it an affront for women to participate in the arts? Darwin's Theory of Sexual Selection explains why. Human culture is based around two male evolutionary reproductive strategies, while women's strategies are suppressed by the system of male domination. These two male strategies are 1) male competition with each other for mates, and 2) male courtship of females.
Art is a way men compete with each other and court females. A female entering the arts is simply irrelevant or gets in the way of the real business at hand. That women have a need for creative expression for their own evolutionary reasons is ignored. That's why men are always trying to take Ms Ian's guitar out of her hands and will never stop.
Check out Geoffrey Miller's work on the evolutionary root of human music-making:
"In sum, music is a complex adaptation, and it has costs, but no identifiable survival benefits. Therefore, it is most likely to have evolved due to its reproductive benefits. Because there are such clear functional analogs between human music and bird song, gibbon song, and whale song, which all seem to have been shaped by Darwin’s process of sexual selection through mate choice, music seems most likely an outcome of mate choice. The principal biological function of music, then, is sexual courtship."
"Consider Jimi Hendrix, for example. This rock guitarist extraordinaire died at the age of 27 in 1970, overdosing on the drugs he used to fire his musical imagination. His music output, three studio albums and hundreds of live concerts, did him no survival favours. But he did have sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel longterm relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the U.S., Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more. Hendrix’s genes for musical talent probably doubled their frequency in a single generation, through the power of attracting opposite-sex admirers.
"As Darwin realized, music’s aesthetic and emotional power, far from indicating a transcendental origin, point to a sexual-selection origin, where too much is never enough. Our ancestral hominid-Hendrixes could never say, “OK, our music’s good enough, we can stop now”, because they were competing with all the hominid-Eric Claptons, hominid-Jerry-Garcias, and hominid-John-Lennons. The aesthetic and emotional power of music is exactly what we would expect from sexual selection’s arms race to impress minds like ours."As a non-feminist male scientist Miller has picked up the general theory and male evolutionary instincts here, BUT treats them as harmless and doesn't speak to the consequent suppression of women's creativity. It continues to sadden me, even though I understand why, that although human culture's origins in the drivers of sexual selection are being increasingly studied and accepted, only the "male" side is being examined -- there is a wall on taking the obvious next step of examining the impact of male domination of suppressing women in culture.
Miller is a prominent evolutionary psychologist: https://www.primalpoly.com/ Many radical feminists discount evolutionary psychology for the same outdated political reasons they discount any discussion of the biological bases of human behavior, namely, that the minute the field was invented the men rushed in to shape it in their image. In this case, though, I think women scientists should put up a very strong fight to support the field while condemning the misogyny that creeps into every area of science. I say this because this field could explain so much that baffles women, and completes radical feminist theory.
Miller's full article on human music origins is available here: ftp://dlib.info/RePEc/els/esrcls/draftfin.pdf
...
Janis Ian, the well-known songwriter who has been in the music business in the US for many decades, has documented the unrelenting suppression of her creativity on her Facebook Page. It's a fascinating, awful, typical tale. But it becomes so much more useful as evidence when incorporated into a radical feminist/evolutionary explanation for WHY this occurred in her life:
"Warning. Rant.
Thanks to the person who asked "You chose female singer. How are you doing so far?", and thanks for being polite and respectful in your question. It gave me the opportunity to really think about it.
Women are paid less in the music industry, too. We're afforded less opportunities. We're not treated as well. The argument that we take time off to have babies doesn't really hold, because many of us don't have children. When we do, we normally raise them while working full time (like so many others.)
Not to make too much of it, but I don't think most artists "choose" to be artists in their field. I certainly didn't. From the time I was two years old, music and writing were all I wanted, and all I cared about.
As to how I'm doing with that? Hm. Allow me a moment of your time....
I consider myself a songwriter first, musician second, singer third. Luckily, the talent I was born with, and my own hard work, gives me a wide-ranging skill set. I can read a score, orchestrate, arrange, fix someone else's song, play several instruments, copy out other peoples' work for sheet music books (yes, I earned a living doing that), sing background vocals and half a dozen other things. I'm very fortunate that way, because I've always been able to earn some kind of living writing and being musical.
That being said... when I was 12, a local band of 11-14-year-olds were auditioning, I learned "Satisfaction" up, down, and sideways, because that was the song they wanted. And I was told I played better than any of the boys who auditioned, but couldn't join, because I was a girl. That it would be embarrassing for them to be on stage with a girl guitarist.
To be honest, that shocked me, because in the folk and bluegrass world I came from, no one seemed to care if a musician was a girl - they just cared that she could play. Ditto my own family. So it was a shock, but I thought it was a one-time experience.
My bad....
I was told, when a male promotion person copped a feel in front of a room full of radio personnel, that I should "get over it" because I was an adult and that was just "what happened". I wonder if my female then-manager would have said that if a promotion person had grabbed her male artist's crotch?
I was told, as an adult songwriter, that I couldn't "hang with the boys" because it would make them uncomfortable - the excuse was that their wives would want to know why I, an unattached female, was at breakfast/lunch/dinner with them. And yet golfing with the boys was networking at its finest. Meals were deals, and sitll are.
I was told, not ten years ago, that it ws a shame I was a woman because I was such a good writer, but most of the cuts were going to male writers who could travel with male artists on their all-male bus tours, write with those artists, and get songs recorded because of it.
I was asked, over and over again, if I really wanted to play guitar or piano on my own sessions because it might "distract" me. I was told not to play my own instrument on television because "people want to see your body, and you're not really playing anyway, are you?"
I was told no women were on the cover of Acoustic Guitar Magazine because "women don't sell magazines". (And that by the then-editor.) I was told, quite recently, that I definitely out-played the guitarist the artist was hiring for their record, but the producer wouldn't work with a female in the studio unless she was in the control room, "watching from the couch."
I've watched male assistant engineers walk out of a session when I brought in a female lead engineer. (One of the best I've ever worked with by the way.) I've watched male producers say "Get that girl out of here. I want a man behind the
board, not some girl who got there on looks." (This about a woman in her 50's who engineered more hit records than that man will ever see.)
As a singer, I've heard more than one promoter brag about a concert by a male artist and say "There wasn't a dry seat in the house", one of the more disgusting comments I've ever heard. I've listened for decades while men from record
companies and agencies explained that women would never sell as many tickets or records as a man, because men appealed to boys and girls, while women only appealed to girls. (Whitney Houston shot that one to sh*t. But only then.)
I've been told by radio stations that their quota of female artists is full for the month.
Statistically, country radio (for instance) plays one female for every 10 males.
Statistically, if you're a songwriter and have a man sing your demo, you have a much greater chance of getting it recorded, because "women can hear past a male singer to their own voice, but men hear a female singer, and assume it's a 'woman's song'."
A woman on tour who sleeps with male groupies is still a slut. A man on tour who sleeps with female groupies is still manly. Like it or not, that's what it is. I've never, in my 69 years on earth, heard it said that a man "slept his way into that
record contract", but I've heard it about many women.
You want to know how I'm doing? I'm doing about as well as other women in my professions. There's still no female head of a major label, music publishing company, booking agency. Women are still horrendously under-represented in bands, and it's not because we aren't good enough. Ditto recording studios - just try getting a job as a female recording engineer.
Ditto songwriting. The Diane Warren success stories are few and far between.
We're as good and sometimes better. We're just not "welcome on the bus".
Do I resent it? Yes. Do I resent the women who've belittled me and refused to work with me ONLY because I'm female, and been vocal about saying so - sometimes even to my face? Yes. It's insidious, because the oppressed often knows nothing else. It's insidious, because we take for granted that it's all right. It's pernicious, because we adopt the attitude of those who oppress us.
For years and years and years, I was challenged by women who demanded to know why there was "no woman in your band". My "band" was a trio. I was
one-third of it. I played all the guitar and all the keyboard. I resented that, too, because it discounted my own contributions as player, as arranger, as musician.
Do I wish men took a greater hand in helping women, the way artists like Prince did? Yes. Do I wish more men were gender-blind? Yes.
My hat's off to men like Trevor Sewell, who hired me to play piano on his records and trusted me to lead the band - we had a nice little hit in the UK with that recording. My hat's off to men like Garth Brooks, who hires women for his band and crew. My hat's off to organizers of festivals like Cambridge Folk, who insist that crews, performers, vendors be 50/50. My hat's off to men like Walter Yetnikoff, who was head of CBS Records then, and immediately fired the man who'd tried to cop a feel. My hat's off to men like my father, who could care less so long as the job got done, who washed dishes and cooked and changed diapers and thought nothing of it, and who was proud of me all my life.
I used to think I couldn't be a feminist, because the men I personally worked with in the studio - the great musicians, the great producers, the great engineers - always treated me like they treated one another. I was listened to, I was heard, I was respected. But some years ago, I was invited to accept an award and do a short residency at a well-known "music college", and after watching what the young women there were going through, I had to re-consider my position.
As I said to the president of that college, "Your school made me a feminist."
(Disclaimer: it was NOT one of the schools our Pearl Foundation supports.)
So, how am I doing? A lot better than many of my contemporaries. A lot better than many other women. A lot better than I'd expected, to be honest. But not as well as I might have done.
I didn't understand that then, but I know it now."
Thanks to Ali Bee for re-posting Ian's story.
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