Simon Reynolds on the Lack of Female Record Collectors

It’s not that women don’t collect stuff. Some do — art, antiques, vintage clothes, dolls. Indeed, according to researcher Susan M. Pearce, a slight majority of women self-describe as collectors. But her research also showed that the obsessed, out-of-control, living-to-collect collectors were generally male rather than female. Record collecting certainly remains a male-dominated field as one glance surveying the stalls and aisles at a record fair will tell you. 

Canadian academic Will Straw, the author of several incisive essays on record collecting recalls being interviewed for the documentary Vinyl and learning from its director that despite its best efforts, only five of its hundred collectors interviewed were women. Straw argues that record collecting offers a kind of alternative masculinity in which mastery is based around knowledge and discernment. This appeals to those who are either alienated from or feel inadequate to, the more traditional masculine ideals. -- Simon Reynolds from Retromania 

When I read stuff like this, my initial impulse is to apply some form of feminist criticism, but I don’t entirely disagree with Reynolds here, though I wish that in addition to positing that record collecting is a kind of surrogate masculinity, which would make it unappealing to many women in the first place, he would have added that women are less likely to have the leisure time and the resources for the collector lifestyle. Collecting shit is expensive and time-consuming.

I'm a woman who collects stuff related to music. Or I should say, collected, as in the past tense, for the aforementioned reasons. I'm not saying this to grant myself "special female" status among male collectors and superfans (personally, I think I'm closer to the latter), but I've spent quite a bit of time in their presence, and I can tell you with surety that the competitive aspect of collecting is a huge part of it.  I hate seeing this presented as one of the primary reasons women aren't involved in collecting, because I loved the "chase" of hunting down rare records, instead of one small faction of why women are involved in anything that's held to be "guy thing."