Friday, June 22, 2007

something to stir up a bit of debate...

(disclaimer: i'm talking about differences between men and women ON AVERAGE, not about all men and women)

lately, i've noticed more and more girls who are passionately into their music. and i have my theory that the internet, itunes and online social networks like myspace have gone some way to level the playing field.

what do i mean? i think that men tend to collect music more than women but are not necessarily more or less passionate about listening to it. and faced with a collector with an encyclopaedic knowledge of records it can be a bit intimidating...

for example, in my experience of deejaying (and of course this may be conditioned on how good or bad looking i am), all the requests i have had from guys have been of the type "have you got such and such track by such and such" and from girls more like "can you play something that we all know"? i think that it is easier (in general) for a guy to go up to a deejay and ask for a request... the girls that come up tend to be more drunk by the time they start asking. the same thing goes for specialist record shops (just make a count of how many guys to girls there are on average) which has a more far reaching effect...

so, my point is that, behind the anonymity of your computer screen and with the ease of finding and downloading related music that you like on the internet, i wonder whether this has balanced out this social bias and left us just with those who are passionate about music and those who are not so passionate (be they men or women).

1 comment:

wooodenelephant said...

Could have a point there. I've noticed a few girls on the Brownswood forum (you still go on there, by the way??) but its still a drop in the ocean compared to all us obsessive diggers and hoarders from the unfairer sex, isn't it!?
I'll go out on a limb and say it'll always be like that cos of some relation to our roles layed down by evolution (though I might get blasted for sexism for saying that). The music obsession thing is probably a modern mutation of male hunter- gatherer / hoarder instincts.
...You heard it here first! :)