Rock shows–a male-only space?

Bitch Magazine’s theme this month is Masculinity, and there’s a really fantastic article by Juliana Tringali about how rock music came to be dominated by men, and female musicians who subvert that. Anyone who read Mouse Words regularly knows that this is a subject of much fascination for me.
Tringali tracks the early days of rock music, where men were mostly the musicians but there was a heavily female audience (think the Beatles’ early days) to when rock music became “intelligent” and therefore women had to be shoved to the margins even further to maintain the illusion. Of course, things got weirder and weirder until the heyday of cock rock in the 80s with the hair metal bands, where women’s main role was to be wet and roll around in music videos.

Tringali mentions that there was a decline in the number of women at rock shows, most of which have to do with the music and lyrics and criticism of it all taking an implicitly or even explicitly anti-woman stance, and she mentions in passing that the shows themselves became hostile places for women to enter. This is a detail that stuck with me–I’ve maintained for a long time that the theory that rape is a form of social control is well-proven when a woman walks into a mainstream, cock rock show. Most of the time, it’s just a matter of time at these shows before someone molests you. Because of this, going to a mainstream show is a sort of fishbowl for watching women’s coping strategies for getting by in a male-dominated enviroment.
Groupies are the most obvious example of the lengths women will go to get even a shadowy form of access to a scene they love. It’s degrading to be used as a sex object like that, but it is also a status symbol–in a no-girls-allowed space, the groupie gets to stay. Just so long as she knows her place, of course. I think that’s why in the end that movie “Almost Famous” had so much resonance in it–in midst of a larger look at the music scene in the 70s, Crowe slipped in a critique of the way that women were badly used with the scene where a groupie is sold off for a 6-pack.
Of course, in the indie rock/punk scene, women got in the other way, by getting a little feminist, picking up guitars and standing up to bullies who wanted us to go away. As a result, these shows are much, much safer for female fans, even if there’s not a “girl band” playing. It’s really quite heartening, especially when you realize that the men of the scene have, as a general rule, embraced the influx of women, and will even stand up to other men who think that it’s still the era of Guns ‘n’ Roses and get to grabbing and harassing.