8th March 2021 Women | Electro
Online misogyny and power; Blue Monday and the shape of electronic music
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: It’s not personal—online misogyny and power
It is International Women’s Day today and I liked the list of nine recent books relating to gender politics that the Oxford University Press’ Social Science Teams compiled at the OUP’s blog. Each comes with a little capsule review. All the nine titles look interesting, but I’m going to focus on the first one—Credible Threat by Sarah Sobieraj—on the role of online misogyny as a form of male social control.
She constructs a continuum between the way in which men responded to the arrival of women in the workplace in the 1970s and 1980s, drawing on the work of Reva Siegel:
“Sexualized attention emerged as a weapon in this turf war, a means of making women feel so unwelcome that they would eventually leave” (2003). Long before the language of “opting out,” women were being driven out of spaces and opportunities that had recently opened to them… In addition to unwanted sexual attention, resistance to women’s full incorporation in the workplace also came in the form of uncomfortable interactions that were concurrently nonsexual and yet fundamentally about sex and gender. Male colleagues learned to call out sex and gender—by doing things such as telling sexist jokes or using belittling gendered nicknames such “sweetheart” or “doll”—as a way to highlight the abnormality of women’s presence.
Eventually the US Supreme Court brought sexual harassment into line with the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Cases that claimed that a work environment was “hostile” needed to demonstrate that Pothers’ conduct in the workplace was severe or pervasive, created a hostile or abusive working environment, was unwelcome, and was based on their gender.”
The connection that Sobieraj makes to digital speech is this: “If we replace the words “employment” and “work” with “public speech” and “speaking,” we find an apt description of the digital environs many women navigate.”
There are some distressing case studies, but one of the interesting findings is while the assaults are felt as incredibly personal, their form is generic, as they were with workplace harassment.
They are largely impersonal and could be brushed across anyone with a similar social location, such that the slurs and threats become nearly interchangeable. And though it may seem odd to describe ad hominem attacks as impersonal, spending time in this space quickly lays bare the truth: these attacks are often scathing and vulgar, and they feel like intimate affronts, but they are less about one individual and more about the class of people or type (p.26) of person the target individual is seen as representing.
All of the nine titles are/linked to a free chapter, to whet your appetite to explore further.
If you want something a little more uplifting for International Women’s Day, the story of the secretaries who inspired the film 9 to 5 might work. It’s a different take on the office gender struggle in the 70s and 80s (Podcast, 26 minutes).
#2: ‘Blue Monday’ and the shape of electronic music
It was the anniversary last week of the release by New Order of ‘Blue Monday’, which went on to become the biggest selling 12” single of all time. (12” single? It was an ‘80s thing.) As NME once said,
whether you first heard it last week or in 1983, it has the whiff of The Future about it. That makes sense—The Future is precisely what it created.
Which gives me a reason, or an excuse, to mention the podcast series Transmissions, which tells the story of Joy Division and New Order—with side helpings of Factory Records, Tony Wilson, Peter Savile and the Hacienda Club.
It’s presented by the British actor Maxine Peake, and one of the episodes is devoted to ‘Blue Monday’. The series seems to have been funded by the band and its record label.
Few musicians are lucky enough to be in one path-breaking band, but New Order did it twice, first in Joy Division and then as they picked up the pieces after Ian Curtis’ suicide.
I like ‘Blue Monday’ because—as well as being a great piece of music—it is also a story about keeping your eyes and ears open, sticking to your guns, and also then benefits of working with constraints.
Keeping your eyes open: They set out to make the sort of music that they heard on a trip to New York —a long track that you could dance to in the clubs, at a time when British dance culture was transitioning away from the Northern Soul scene, and the new club scene was nascent and undefined. Hence the seven minute playing time, widely regarded as being death to chart success (because it wouldn’t get radio play at that length (sticking to your guns).
Working with constraints: It would be a lot easier to make ‘Blue Monday’ now, in the age of computer production, although the interviewee who said he thought it would only take a few minutes clearly hasn’t spent much time with Logic Pro. Nevertheless, they were wrestling with early synthesizers in an analogue studio and up against time constraints that inevitably involved an all nighter. Oddly, this might be part of the reason for its longevity. If you did make ‘Blue Monday’ on a computer, the sound would be more precise, more exact. The analogue variations that the production process introduced made the track sound more human.
You might also be interested in an article I wrote a few years ago looking at the emergence of electronic music as a pattern of change: Crack-Expand-Recover-Adapt.
Notes from readers: In response to the piece on TikTok on Friday, Leo Sanders sent me a Wired article that argued that TikTok has played quite a big role in spreading disinformation in the US—partly as result of the way the platform is designed.
j2t#046
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