Wesleyan University, the Liberal Arts College I attend was very sure to assert its progressive nature right away at orientation. At our first hall meetings, we voted on whether or not we wanted our bathrooms to be gender-neutral, and then we made fantastic first impressions on fellow freshmen at the cross-dressing dance. We learned “hir” and “ze” were options and made jokes about heteronormativity. Gender became as sensitive as race, and any way of stereotyping, or simply differentiating a sex from another grew taboo. It seemed here women could finally break away from the gendered hierarchy upheld by insecure high school boys.
Every time I raised my hand in class, or a female colleague would make an interesting point, I thought nothing of it. Women outnumber men at Wesleyan, as they do in many colleges, and no one bats an eye at the notion of female professors and administrators any more. It’s the 21st century, and we stand on the shoulders of Friedan and de Beauvoir. Now that we’ve established our intellectual equality, its easy for women to believe that sex no longer inhibits our ambitions, but in reality, it already has.
Many of my favorite bands formed in college, and as an amateur musician, I hoped to find a group of people to make music together. Music is, generally, a boys club, which tends to marginalize girl bands and musicians as novelties. Yes, yes there are exceptions, but all too few. Men don’t need to know how to play the guitar to strum out some power chords and call it punk, but a woman better be damn good, or be prepared to face disparaging remarks.
To earn any respect in music and to break out of the clichéd confines of “singer/songwriter” or “sexy vocalist,” women are forced to be hypergood. This explains why its hard for women to start playing instruments relatively late, say, in college, because groups, mostly male, are reluctant to jam or practice. Case in point: one campus band’s drummer will go abroad soon, and I asked another member what the group planned to do. He said they were considering using a prerecorded tracks, or maybe waiting for one of their friends to get drum lessons, but when I suggested a female drummer whom I knew, he quickly dismissed her as “not good enough” without once hearing her play.
These notions seem old fashioned in our progressive, post-gender campus, and I tried to dismiss them- but feminism stagnates on the campus music scene. Women have so much to say and play and sing about, but it seems no one wants to listen.
Now is the time to be heard, and to stop writing and practicing behind closed doors; if music is sticking it to the man, man has no right to dominate it. In general, it takes a kind of bravery to write and play music, but to make music in a sexist environment, especially in a college environment that denies its chauvinism? That takes more than balls. That takes ovaries.
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