More On Being a Fan and a Feminist

I've quoted Ellen Willis a lot here lately, but I think this is especially valuable for female music nerds:

Female fans made an analogous identification with male rock stars — a relationship that all too often found us digging them while they out us down. This was not masochism but expendiency. For all its limitations, rock was the best thing going, and if we had to filter out certain indignities — well, we had been doing that all our lives, and there was no feminist movement to suggest things might be different.

Willis wrote this probably more than thirty years ago, and sadly, not a lot has changed, though there is more of an awareness of the misogyny that permeates all forms of mass media — books, movies, tv — not only music. The problem is, I think, is that awareness isn’t filtering down to the mainstream consumers — it’s still too connected to academia.

And I’m not above this: like most people, I’m still consuming art made by men, not informed by feminism. I don’t think one should have to give up everything they enjoy simply because it doesn’t jibe with their personal politics, though I struggle with this more often than I’d care to admit. I said this in another post over a year ago, but if I removed every song from my Ipod, or every book from my bookshelf, with even the slightest tinge of misogyny, I'd be left with... not much.

That's not to say we shouldn't question the media we consume, but it's just really damn hard to rake through everything. It sounds like a cop-out, for sure, but sometimes it's all you can do. (An invariably, we miss things.)  I don't want to say acceptance is the key because acceptance implies complacency. I keep coming back to the word "awareness," though awareness doesn't always equal action.