Women and Fandom: Here We Go Again

The more I return to the subject of women as music fans, the more frustrated I become. But I have agree with what Flavorwire's Judy Berman  says about this new music blog in which a woman, with tongue-in-cheek naivety, reviews her husband's massive record collection album by album.

[...] the subtext couldn’t have been more clear: The people who love music, are frighteningly knowledgeable about it, and accumulate enormous record collections are dudes. Women know very little about music, find this behavior entirely alien, and could stand to educate themselves rather than hollering at their husbands to get rid of these goddamn dusty records already. 

Of course, in the stubbornly diverse real world, there are plenty of women who love music and know quite a bit about it, who have to allow ample room in our moving vans for boxes of records that number in the teens. And for us, My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection is inspiring more eye-rolls and social media snark than Facebook Likes and expressions of identification. The problem, as I see it, isn’t just that this project reinforces the assumption that women don’t know as much about music as the men in their lives — it also perpetuates the more general, ’70s-Woody-Allen-worthy idea that heterosexual relationships revolve around men educating women.

Although women are often overlooked as fans and collectors and should be celebrated wherever they're found, MHSRC perpetuates the myth that women's fandom is something less serious and in need of male guidance. But there's another, often overlooked issue here. Whenever there's an article -- even a smartly written one -- about the gender divide in music collecting, or just music fandom in general, the cost, the time and effort it takes in maintaining a collection, is almost invariably left out. Given than men are more likely to have the spare cash, and are less likely to have their free time eaten up by things like housework or childcare, they can devote more time to those hobbies. Even if that weren't a variable, it's always been more acceptable for men to "nerd out" over something.