Anyone remember that old insult heard on the playground when boys weren't too hot at sports? “You play like a girl.” No wonder so many women feel incapable of athleticism from a very young age. This is annoying in and of itself, and could certainly (and perhaps one day will) constitute its own entry. But today I want to write about the other use of this epithet: music.
My male partner loves Sleater-Kinney. He was watching a video of theirs and happened to read the comment section. There were lots of folks who said they were “pretty good for girls”. This angered my partner, who rightly believed that Sleater-Kinney is just plain good. The gender issue annoyed him even more after reading a story about a woman in an orchestra who became the lead trombonist only after the organization switched to blind auditions. The conductor was flabbergasted that a female was the best trombone player and treated her badly. But in the end, he chose her for the position without realizing she was a woman. So I decided to hold my own "auditions", popular music-style.
My extremely unscientific, simply-to-satisfy-my-own-curiosity, will-never-and-should-never-be-published-anywhere-but-on-a-blog “study” went like this: Participants (AKA my open-minded friends) listened to ten different musical samples, all about thirty seconds long. Five of the artists were men, five were women. If multiple musicians were involved, all people within the sample were the same gender, so as not to confuse things. No vocals appeared at all. Participants were asked to guess the gender of the musicians based only on the instrumental performance and overall sound.
I hypothesized that people would get an average of five correct; this turned out to be a very bad hypothesis. One lucky participant got six right (and he admitted to blindly guessing), but the average fell between three and four. One participant only guessed two correctly. I am pleased that so many folks got these so wrong, because my point has been proven: people simply don't know what gender a recorded musician is unless they sing- and sometimes not even then.
What else did I glean from this “study”? People seemed the most sure of a musician's gender when they were incorrect. One person wrote “definitely a dude” when referring to a guitar solo by Mary Timony. The all-male Fugazi sounded like women to all but one participant. And most importantly, only one person thought that Sleater-Kinney sounded female. Most folks were strongly convinced that they were men. So it turns out that Sleater-Kinney sound exactly the same as any male musicians would. Big surprise.
The moral of the story? Everyone plays like a girl.
Thanks for posting this! I was really curious to hear the final results. I enjoyed participating, because I was really surprised at how few I guessed right, even having been a female low brass musician! (The only one in the section, in fact)
ReplyDeleteI, fortunately, had an amazing band director who put plenty of deserving females in first chair, but it's sad to hear about those who struggle to prove their talent to people who insist on seeing what they want to see.