Pretty Boys and Metal's Misogyny

I found this Paris Review story  on Axl Rose's early days on writer Sarah Jaffe's blog . As someone who spent her early teens in the 80s listening to the most painted of metal bands, this one-paragraph excerpt stood out:

"It’s the shots of him at eighteen that move me, though. He isn’t pretty yet, he hasn’t begun to think of himself as a rock star. He’s a boy-man, with a trace of fear in his pugnacious stare. I can’t remember what he’d done, that time. Stolen another kid’s bike, I think. Or destroyed another kid’s bike. When I first saw his hair, I understood something Dana had told me hours before, at a bar: that when they were children, Axl was Raggedy Ann in the Christmas parade. Looking longer, a person could understand something else, too, about the Midwestern darkness in his voice."

Jaffe added:

"Thinking about pretty and men being pretty and how much of anyone’s prettiness is a decision they made. The most beautiful boys I’ve ever been with didn’t really know it (there was one who did but that is another story) and there was something else about them other than pure good looks, even though dark hair hanging in warm eyes, broad shoulders, big hands, the line of a jaw or a cheekbone, all those are undeniable. 

But looking at this photo, reading this description—how much of Axl Rose’s prettiness was a choice he made to leave that Midwestern boy behind and pour himself into skintight pants, tease his hair and his voice to unimaginable heights and become that guy on the poster I had on my wall in middle school."

I can't pretend to know Axl's motivations for fashioning his image out of teased hair and tight pants, aside from its being the style of the day for rock bands, though in the young mug shot, Axl looks no different from any of the shaggy-haired, lower-middle/upper-lower class Midwestern boys with whom I went to school -- a lot of them fans of his music. I will comment on how some of those bands -- Guns n' Rose included --  produced some of the most blatantly sexist music while championing essentially a feminine look. I grew up with this music, even when I wasn't actively listening to it, because it was the soundtrack to a certain subset of teenagers who had no access to the alternative, literally and metaphorically.

I'm not going to turn this into an "indie" is, or was, better because I eventually found my way toward it -- lord knows I hate the pitting of music fans against each other. In fact, I think indie rock in the 80s and 90s was just as hostile environment to women as commercial hard rock, but I find little about metal that's praise-worthy, even in a nostalgic sense. Axl's "prettiness" doesn't negate his misogyny, and I have a hard time trying to find any empathy -- for him as a misunderstood kid or his fans.