Not to bring the whole place down, but... this is about being a female professional
So, I vicariously watch a lot of YouTube videos because my husband is an audio engineer and he watches a lot of YouTube videos by other engineers, music producers, musicians etc. It seems like YouTube is always on my tv when I pass through the living room, and sometimes I stay and watch. This means I've learned a lot of really weird things during the pandemic, and now I'm strangely fond of several music producer channels.
One channel I love is by Benn Jordan. He's an ex-boxer/MMA fighter who's also a musician, producer, and has a SERIOUS hard-on for science, math, and engineering. His videos are all over the place - he doesn't restrict them to music - and he's a determined research nerd, which often makes them very insightful. Last night I watched "Why aren't there more female producers?", and well... it really hit me hard.
I encourage you to watch the whole thing if you have any interest in the question. For me, it was depressing to watch. I felt the validity of each statement he explored and nodded my head along with the experiences of the women he interviewed. And I was also grateful that he made the video knowing that MEN would watch it and most would pay attention simply because of his reputation within the community. If a woman had made it, no matter how talented or powerful she was in her field, she would be villified, bullied, trolled, threatened, gaslighted (gaslit?) or dismissed on social media. If you are a woman, you already know this with certainty.
I thought back over my adult work experiences and remembered be sexually harrassed, coerced by authority figures, intimidated, fearful for my safety, verbally abused, overly worried about how I presented myself (body shape, clothes etc.), talked over, dismissed, had my job mansplained to me, asked to work for less money than others at the same level were earning, told I was "too emotional", been passed over for promotions, been made fun of (usually in a sexual context), feared loss of income or unemployment for speaking out, and felt the unspoken pressure to be twice as good as male counterparts just to seem "equal" with them. And that's just PROFESSIONAL experiences. Don't get me started about personal ones.
As I looked back and took stock of 25+ years of jobs, I recognized two things. One, is that despite the multitude of negative experiences, I know that most of them could've been much worse. I've always been a cautious person and if a situation didn't feel right, I got out of it quickly. I've never been assaulted or had violence done to me, and even at my lowest point, I always had a roof over my head and a support network available. And I'm also white and educated - those privileges saved me from a lot of hardship. The second insight was, at the time when these experiences happened to me, while they felt instinctively wrong, a voice in my head told me, "this is just how things are". I rarely fought back despite knowing the behavior was wrong. In some situations, other men stepped in to defend or shield me from it, and it took me years to realize what they'd done. I feel such gratitude for the handful of guys, most of whom were just casual co-workers, who saw something victimizing happening and did something about it long before society got wise and 'woke' about such things. Wherever they are now - thank you, dudes - I didn't even realize what was happening.
What Benn Jordan's video and my resulting trip down memory lane showed me was not much has changed in 25 years. The things the women in his video were talking about happened to me 20 years ago in a different career field. They still happen now. A client mansplained my job to me a few years ago in front of senior reps of the company I worked for. It was humiliating and infuriating. I've worked hard to gain the knowledge and skills I have, and I'm very good at what I do. But some guy with no insight into my profession felt empowered enough to sit across from me and explain how I could do my job better. And in the end, he fucked up his project and I fixed it for him, so he could continue on his merry way thinking he knew what he was talking about. That's what depresses me so much - there's no point in this feminist timeline we're trudging along where men just magically 'get it' and change their way of being. Most do the things they do because that's what they see in the world around them - it often isn't a malicious, misogynistic choice. And when we try to change those societal reflections, we get dismissed, diminished, stalked, threatened, accused of attacking masculinity, labelled as "man-hating feminists". For these reasons, I am afraid of being known on social media. I'd love to start my own YouTube channel about design and what I do for a living, but I see what female YouTubers or female professionals on Twitter put up with, and I'm afraid. It's heartening to know that other women are brave enough to face the onslaught of sexism, trolling, misogyny, professional disregard, and threats of violence, but I am not. So now, I feel like a middle-aged woman who knows herself and understands the societal forces working against her, but I'm still just as trapped by them as I was as an ignorant 20-something. In many ways, social media has set women and minorities up for increased prejudice and targeting than a generation before. Sometimes I think we're actually moving backwards.
Jordan showed me things haven't really changed, and I'm wondering if they ever will. Honestly, I don't think women yelling about this will achieve the change we need. Men have to want to change. The question is: how do you make people want to change when they are comfortable right where they are? I wish I knew the answer. And I also wish I had the balls to discuss this on a platform that matters.
One channel I love is by Benn Jordan. He's an ex-boxer/MMA fighter who's also a musician, producer, and has a SERIOUS hard-on for science, math, and engineering. His videos are all over the place - he doesn't restrict them to music - and he's a determined research nerd, which often makes them very insightful. Last night I watched "Why aren't there more female producers?", and well... it really hit me hard.
Click to viewI encourage you to watch the whole thing if you have any interest in the question. For me, it was depressing to watch. I felt the validity of each statement he explored and nodded my head along with the experiences of the women he interviewed. And I was also grateful that he made the video knowing that MEN would watch it and most would pay attention simply because of his reputation within the community. If a woman had made it, no matter how talented or powerful she was in her field, she would be villified, bullied, trolled, threatened, gaslighted (gaslit?) or dismissed on social media. If you are a woman, you already know this with certainty.
I thought back over my adult work experiences and remembered be sexually harrassed, coerced by authority figures, intimidated, fearful for my safety, verbally abused, overly worried about how I presented myself (body shape, clothes etc.), talked over, dismissed, had my job mansplained to me, asked to work for less money than others at the same level were earning, told I was "too emotional", been passed over for promotions, been made fun of (usually in a sexual context), feared loss of income or unemployment for speaking out, and felt the unspoken pressure to be twice as good as male counterparts just to seem "equal" with them. And that's just PROFESSIONAL experiences. Don't get me started about personal ones.
As I looked back and took stock of 25+ years of jobs, I recognized two things. One, is that despite the multitude of negative experiences, I know that most of them could've been much worse. I've always been a cautious person and if a situation didn't feel right, I got out of it quickly. I've never been assaulted or had violence done to me, and even at my lowest point, I always had a roof over my head and a support network available. And I'm also white and educated - those privileges saved me from a lot of hardship. The second insight was, at the time when these experiences happened to me, while they felt instinctively wrong, a voice in my head told me, "this is just how things are". I rarely fought back despite knowing the behavior was wrong. In some situations, other men stepped in to defend or shield me from it, and it took me years to realize what they'd done. I feel such gratitude for the handful of guys, most of whom were just casual co-workers, who saw something victimizing happening and did something about it long before society got wise and 'woke' about such things. Wherever they are now - thank you, dudes - I didn't even realize what was happening.
What Benn Jordan's video and my resulting trip down memory lane showed me was not much has changed in 25 years. The things the women in his video were talking about happened to me 20 years ago in a different career field. They still happen now. A client mansplained my job to me a few years ago in front of senior reps of the company I worked for. It was humiliating and infuriating. I've worked hard to gain the knowledge and skills I have, and I'm very good at what I do. But some guy with no insight into my profession felt empowered enough to sit across from me and explain how I could do my job better. And in the end, he fucked up his project and I fixed it for him, so he could continue on his merry way thinking he knew what he was talking about. That's what depresses me so much - there's no point in this feminist timeline we're trudging along where men just magically 'get it' and change their way of being. Most do the things they do because that's what they see in the world around them - it often isn't a malicious, misogynistic choice. And when we try to change those societal reflections, we get dismissed, diminished, stalked, threatened, accused of attacking masculinity, labelled as "man-hating feminists". For these reasons, I am afraid of being known on social media. I'd love to start my own YouTube channel about design and what I do for a living, but I see what female YouTubers or female professionals on Twitter put up with, and I'm afraid. It's heartening to know that other women are brave enough to face the onslaught of sexism, trolling, misogyny, professional disregard, and threats of violence, but I am not. So now, I feel like a middle-aged woman who knows herself and understands the societal forces working against her, but I'm still just as trapped by them as I was as an ignorant 20-something. In many ways, social media has set women and minorities up for increased prejudice and targeting than a generation before. Sometimes I think we're actually moving backwards.
Jordan showed me things haven't really changed, and I'm wondering if they ever will. Honestly, I don't think women yelling about this will achieve the change we need. Men have to want to change. The question is: how do you make people want to change when they are comfortable right where they are? I wish I knew the answer. And I also wish I had the balls to discuss this on a platform that matters.