Sep. 07, 2010 - Issue #777: The Sex Issue 2010
Beauty in aggression
A woman's place is in heavy metal
A feminist at a metal show might seem like the punchline to a joke. The majority male audience, imagery objectifying women and lyrics that can sometimes depict violence against women, do not paint a welcome image to women looking for a show to go to on a Friday night. Metal as a genre has done a pretty good job of personifying the stereotypes it engenders. So it's interesting that in the kingdom of the white dude metal god more women are owning up to their love of metal.
"I've only been going to shows for a couple of years myself, but even I've noticed the increase," mentions Allison Drinnan, who wrote her thesis on gender representations in metal. "What I noticed even more was this proliferation of women on the outskirts of metal—journalists, photographers, promoters. It's interesting in Alberta how so many women hold together the metal scene."
Terese Fleming, organizer of the annual Noctis festival, and a metal promotor in Calgary, agrees. "This is also an era of thought that gender shouldn't stand in way of anything," says Fleming. "But I think it takes a fair amount of guts [for a woman], especially as a musician, to get into the scene, because it's still pretty much a man's world."
For shows where anything from the beating of a female blow-up doll to a stripper between sets could occur, the genre is still accustomed to having a primarily male audience and playing to those desires. "The history of metal makes it hard to change those stereotypes," says Drinnan. Looking at traditional '80s metal albums, a lot of them look like Manowar's Blow Your Speakers: scantily clad women clambering to get at the thunder-god-like metal band members. And that's one of the more-tame album covers—some contain outright violence against women like Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction. Of course not all '80s metal albums are like this: Iron Maiden's monster Eddie dominates a human world, Judas Priest albums are more artwork with visions of mythical beings and motorcycles. And while most metal fans look back on those years and laugh at some of the absurd artwork that came out of the era the message is clear: to be metal, you have to be a man.
Drinnan saw the expressions of power in society playing out in the metal scene. "I saw that the metal scene had this discourse of power where it was super important to be seen as authentic, but the way most people define being authentic was being a man, and being tough, expressing a very gendered idea of being a man."
Otep frontwoman, Otep Shamaya, who is not only a woman but one of the few but growing number of metal musicians to be openly gay, states that she believes some of the resistance to her being part of the scene is based on gender stereotypes: "I guess I'm the antithesis of what they embrace as what a woman is. Like, you know, tits and ass." And Shamaya has stated in past interviews that her inspiration is in the aggression that metal promotes.
Fleming points to that aggressive nature as reinforcing stereotypes and sexist attitudes. "They [women] can be judged quite harshly because the genre is naturally aggressive [and] they'll think the chick is not aggressive enough."
But Drinnan also found through her own research that women were looking for this scene as a venue for alternate expression.
"Watching Terese [with Exit Strategy], it's something I didn't even realize—aggression could be a beautiful thing in women, watching her with aggression and power in music, it was unbelievable. I think watching that, it made me want to be aggressive," Drinnan says, explaining that it made her realize all of the ways women are aggressive and can express that in their work, whether they're musicians or journalists.
And as the number of women in the scene grows and the "boys only" signs come down, a feminist at a metal show no longer sounds like a punchline when feminism is developing because of a metal show. V
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