A Woman's Place...

The joke goes like this:

"The only metal a woman knows is pots and pans."

Otep doesn't really help disprove this, of course.

 
In 2018, with the #metoo movement in full swing, it's harder to laugh at a statement like that. Mainly because one, it's demonstrably false. There's more tr00 female heshers than at any time I've ever been able to recall. And two, publicly laughing at that statement in 2018 means you're possibly taking a side in the cultural shitshow between cock-hating Third Wave Feminists and the human toilets that comprise the online communities of Mens Rights Activists, Incels, and Alt-Right cum stains to whom disparaging women isn't a laughing matter but a very real vocation in between their sessions of playing Call of Duty, eating Hot Pockets, and generally avoiding the sun.  

There really isn't a sadder more pathetic community on the internet than the Incels.

But as women in metal become more commonplace, periodically we see articles on the various blogs and forums on the topic of "female fronted" bands. Recently long terrible and thankfully long inactive nu-metal band Kittie opined that they shouldn't be thought of as a female fronted band. Quite ironic, given that when their record label first presented this Canadian embarrassment to music to an undeserving world, pretty much all of their hype centered around their gender and age. It was widely speculated shortly after their debut that at least some of the "musicians" in the band were even so inept that they couldn't competently tune their own instruments.

All these members. Yet so little interesting music.

It is a fair point, nevertheless. Should it really matter what the identities of a band's members happen to be? It seems like "female fronted" is a poor label to use to distinguish bands based on their sound. Arch Enemy, a band guilty of blatantly using an attractive female vocalist to gather attention in an otherwise over-saturated melodic deathmetal genre, sounds pretty goddamned different from Nightwish, purveyors of frilly froo foo symphonic powermetalish horseshit. My strong opinions about these artists notwithstanding, the only common denominator between artists in this manufactured "genre" is that the bands feature females as vocalists. It is pretty shitty to therefore isolate bands featuring female membership and to judge them not as bands on equal footing with the rest of the genre but only in comparison to other bands featuring prominent women. 

This is marketing, not creative brilliance.

Metal should be exclusionary. It's an outsider genre of music and a subculture for people that feel like outsiders. That said, I don't see why that label only fits white heterosexual men like myself. In fact, if any group of people in western society based on gender and ethnic identity are insiders, it's people like me. I see no reason why people with vaginas, or people of color, or people with various sexual, gender, ethnic, religious, or even political identities cannot identify with the alienation of feeling like an "outsider" and feel drawn to this type of music. 

Metal is not a goddamned pie. Just because more people decided they want to try it doesn't mean you get to have less.

At the same time, if a band wants to be judged on its merits and not the identity of its members, then that band needs to present itself that way. Kittie chose to market themselves as angry teenage girls and when they became thirty somethings and weren't getting respect as serious musicians outside of a dwindling fanbase, that's when they said "stop calling us a girl band." When Butcher Babies two front women put their tits all over everything and say "we're selling serious music", that's basically bullshit. There's nothing wrong with tits or pushing sexuality, but using sex appeal to get attention to sell shitty music doesn't make the music better. I've got no problem with someone being comfortable enough to push themselves that way, but you can't really complain that no one buys you as a musician when you're selling sex rather than music. (Though in the case of Butcher Babies, that's probably a smarter financial move.)

They could be selling basically anything here.

There's plenty of women involved in metal bands that are producing great music. Nervosa's entire lineup is female, and Haemhorrage, Eluveitie, Electric Wizard, Bolt Thrower, Abnormality, and My Dying Bride come to mind right off the top of my head as bands with female contributors. I don't think it matters if you've got a cock n' balls or a vag; if you're making good music then you're making good music. It's really not much more complicated than that.

An honest to goatlord decent solid thrash band.

In short, a woman's place is wherever she wants it to be. That includes within the metal scene. And women shouldn't have to leave their femininity at the entrance to the hall, either. But if women in metal bands use their gender to distinguish themselves from other bands in the genre, then it's hypocritical to then wonder why their bands aren't evaluated the same way as other bands. If you want to be accepted and fit in, then fit in.