[A mild trigger warning applies; my email is robette at hotmail.co.uk if you have questions/concerns/a nice bridge to sell me.]
Recently we hooked up some speakers in the kitchen, because the pile of CDs was getting a little silly and threatening to crush one of us beneath its plastic depths when - not if - it fell over. Now we are battling to see whose mp3 player gets plugged in each time. It is more enlightening in terms of what we all listen to than when we had a stack of individual albums.
My father copied the music off my hard drive a couple of years ago and merrily listens to all of it without comment, angry girl music and all. He will never be parted from his AC/DC back catalogue, but he can also take the credit for introducing me to kd lang. Sometimes I catch him doing embarrassing dance routines to the Ting Tings. (Embarrassing for me, that is, since I am faced with the prospect of what my own dancing really looks like. He couldn't care less. His jazz hands, let him show you them.)
Mum, on the other hand, listens to music that is almost exclusively by men, and openly admits thaat she prefers male voices.
Way back when women first started reading the news on television, my grandmother complained that she couldn't take them seriously. The news was just more believable coming from a man, she said. Mum still repeats this today in abject shock and horror at the way things Used To Be - as if anyone could fathom believing a man over a woman! Oh, what a world, what a world. And yet, here she is, explaining that she just likes music by men better.
Hole? Too whiny. Thea Gilmore? Too wordy. Alicia Keys? Too much wailing. Amanda Palmer? Too strident.
Plenty of the music she listens to could fit these categories. Nirvana are the epitome of whiny, but she'll happily listen to them for hours. Barenaked Ladies are pretty damn wordy, but it's cool when they play with language. I can think of plenty of male artists who wail (Radiohead fans, represent!) and, indeed, many who could be considered "strident" - except that's a word that only ever really gets applied to women, specifically, women who don't know their place and have the nerve to get angry.
If it was just that she didn't like the genres I had been playing, I could understand that. I don't expect her to fully embrace my unironic love of Rihanna, or appreciate the shouting of Help She Can't Swim. What frustrates me is that I am playing things that are very much like that she usually listens to - except that they are sung by women.
Now, I myself enjoy plenty of music by men. Being of a dudely persuasion does not preclude one from making awesome music. There is, however, a vast array of awesome music out there that is
not made by men, and I am trying to get her to understand this. I just can't help but feel that casually dismissing the music made by women (or, indeed, anyone not male) is indicative of a wider unwillingness to listen to women's
voices overall.
If I had a gold coin for every time a man spoke over me or interrupted me and was listened to nonetheless, a gold coin for every time a man told me that my past experiences couldn't possibly be true because he'd never witnessed them, a gold coin for every time a man said that he couldn't possibly take me seriously when I was angry, well, I wouldn't be worrying about my student loans. My experiences, my emotions, my intelligence, my autonomy, my voice: all of these things are worth less because I am a woman.
This is how prejudice works: it allows us to deny the experiences of people who lack our privilege, because somehow our opinions are worth more than their actual life history. I get to deny my friend's problems as a Pakistani man in a racist society, and he gets to deny my problems as a white woman in a sexist world. This is how the kyriarchy maintains itself: it pits us against each other, so that nobody ever wins.
We get to deny each other's voices.
We get to not listen. We get to say we don't like something because it's sung by a woman. We get to not take it seriously when a woman reads the news. We get the luxury of not paying attention to a person or colour or a trans person or a person with disabilities, because we can other them. We get to shut ourselves up in our little bubble and ignore any voices that make us uncomfortable.
My mother, God love her, is and always has been very good at invalidating other people's experiences. (You can't be tired. You're not really hungry. You don't have a problem. You're being oversensitive. You just want attention.) I am sure part of that comes from her own problems with processing emotions; however, on a wider scale it speaks of her privilege in being able to deny what is someone else's reality.
Mum has no doubts about the existence of sexism. The issues she does have are with how we perceive and challenge it. I have sometimes considered playing
Concern Troll Bingo with her, though I would never actually do so to her face, because, come on, she's my
mother. (Behind her back I am one conversation away from a blackout.) Of the two of us, I am not the one who has been sexually assaulted, and sometimes when she tells me what I should and shouldn't be angry about it's hard not to write off my own experiences in deference. If she can write off her own past so easily, what right do I have to get worked up about a few cries of "show us your tits"?
Except, of course, that's not how it works. We all know that street harassment is just part and parcel of the way women - and women's bodies - are treated. I am allowed to get angry about assault and shouting and every other damn thing all at the same time.
It is hard, sometimes, to accept that you are in an unprivileged position. Accepting one's own privilege is pretty damn difficult as it is; what some people find almost as hard is the idea that they are not always treated purely as a human being on their own merits. Sometimes it's easier to stick your fingers in your ears and sing Mary Had A Little Lamb* than to face up to the fact that you might have been treated differently because of something over which you had no control.
Being indoctrinated into a particular system makes us unwilling to examine the ways in which that system treats us, because we are taught that the system is good to all of us equally. Sometimes it is easier to just disregard evidence to the contrary. Challenging the status quo, sticking one's head above the proverbial parapet, is difficult and dangerous and scary. I can see why mum doesn't want to examine her life for instances of sexism and privilege.
I can also see why, perhaps, she is not as alert to it at a low level than I am. In most ways, my childhood has been far more privileged than my mother's was. However, there is a crucial difference: she went to an all-girls school in the sixties, whereas I went to a mixed school in the nineties. She was taught by nuns, true, many of whom had strict ideas on the way things Should Be, but this was in the heyday of Vatican II, when the Catholic Church looked for one glorious moment as if it might be about to embrace a slightly more liberal ideology. Within the classroom, and in the school corridors, my mother was an equal. When I was at school, in a mixed group, getting argumentative would be met with scornful cries of "time of the month". I though nothing of the fact that in summer you ran the gauntlet of being doused with water to make your white shirt see-through. I sighed and held my tongue when boys asked if I was a prostitute and threw pennies at me while I waited at the bus stop. Blowjob and rape jokes were a sad fact of life. These things were just normal, because they were
boys.
I was overjoyed when I found out that it was okay for me to be angry, that it
wasn't just the way boys are, that saying so is harmful to all involved. Sadly, my mother was - and still is - big proponent of the view that I should just smile and play along, because boys will be boys.
There was a boy at school who had a crush on me. (Stop laughing at the back, please.) This boy talked to me whenever he could. He stared at me whenever we were together, he would touch me without my permission, and he would follow me around. He made me feel - "under siege" is a rather heavy term to use, but I certainly felt I couldn't go about my business as normal. My heart would sink every time I caught sight of him. Though both of us have since grown up and even moved away from home for a while, I saw him the other week as I walked into town, and the old impulses were so strong that I actually faked a phone call so that I wouldn't have to talk to him.
Sometimes I would complain to mum about him bothering me, and she would pat me on the shoulder and say it was the curse of being a pretty girl. He just doesn't know how to talk to you, she told me. You should be nice to him! After all, he likes you, and it would be awful to hurt his feelings. He means well, but he's only a boy and he doesn't know any better. Just grin and bear it, she said. He's harmless. (Not to me, he wasn't.)
So I carried on grinning and bearing it, letting him stare at me, letting him sit next to me on the bus and trail after me from room to room like a kicked puppy. Once I had had enough of him tracking me between practice rooms in a music lesson, and I turned and bellowed down the corridor: for fuck's sake, stop following me. The other students were shocked; I wasn't supposed to shout at him. He was only trying to express his feelings, and now I'd gone and crapped all over them like a pigeon on a statue.
My feelings on the matter were irrelevant to everybody, my mother included. I wasn't supposed to tell him to leave me alone, no matter how much I wanted him to stop. I wasn't supposed to tell him that he made my skin crawl, because it might upset him. He had a crush on me, wasn't that sweet, wasn't I grateful that a boy fancied me?
What was drilled into me by this experience, as I am sure is drilled into many other impressionable young girls, is that the most important thing I can do is to put aside my own discomfort to make sure that I don't hurt anyone else's feelings. I was told that my own feelings were invalid, unimportant, easily dismissed. I was told that my voice didn't count, even if I was trying to tell people that I was unhappy. Getting angry was certainly not allowed, because no matter how much you're hurting, you mustn't upset anyone else. (Why, yes, that would be our old friend the Tone Argument! Placing arbitrary restrictions on the ways in which people are allowed to complain about the shitty way they're being treated? Yeah, it's just another way of shutting up someone you don't feel like listening to, and it's not cool.)
If there is one thing that anyone takes away from this mishmash of band references and rage, it should be this:
Denying someone their reality is wrong. Denying them a voice is wrong. Denying them the freedom to speak out when things hurt them is just as bad as doing those hurtful things in the first place. A refusal to accept my feelings left me putting up with being made uncomfortable. On a deeper level, a refusal to accept the reality of members of marginalised groups leaves them not only putting up with the same old shit, but thinking that they
have to put up with it. Maybe I
am being oversensitive when I worry about mum dismissing music made by women. Or maybe I need to go with my gut feeling that it's wrong to write off other people's voices just because you don't like listening to them.
This is a tiny, petty front on which to fight, but I am picking my battles. I have never been good at arguing with my mother. I find it especially hard to argue with her about feminism, because she criticises me for getting angry, and then we have the whole "your argument is invalid because you are getting emotional" problem to contend with (which is actually
part of the whole problem in the first place, see above), and quite frankly I'd need to raid the cutlery drawers of every house on this street before I had enough spoons to go head to head with her over that one. The battle of the bands is an easy way for me to address the problems of silencing and invalidation without actually
addressing them, if you see what I mean.
I am so tired, sometimes, of having to say the same things over and over again. I am so tired of my sister being told that the way her friends treat her is okay because they're boys. I am so tired of my mother rejecting female voices when equivalent male voices are deemed acceptable and worth listening to. I am so tired of having to explain and justify myself. I am so tired of being made to feel that someone else's opinion of my life is more valid than my own experience of it. I am so tired, which is why I am damn well going to carry on playing my music in the kitchen, because a backup singer or two never hurts.
*Points to anyone who got the
Heathers reference.
For your delectation, this is the version I always sing:
"Mary had a little lamb
she sat it by a pylon
a thousand watts shot up its bum
and turned its wool to nylon."
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