Men listen to men all the time. Our playlists are full of masculine performers and bands that express emotions and stories from a man’s perspective.
This standardized point of view in songs is more evident in gendered languages in which social gender changes the way in which words are written and rhymes are crafted, creating a repertoire that sticks to the lived experience and utterance of a man.
This is not a gratuitous situation but the result of the patriarchal culture in music. The open dominance of men in worldwide music charts and specialized journalism shows a terrible imbalance in terms of representation: only 7 out of the first 20 greatest artists of all time in a list curated by Billboard are women.
What is worse, in those first 20 places, all performers are from the English-speaking sphere, and a man is named twice: Paul McCartney, as part of The Beatles and as a solo singer. If that happens in mere terms of representation, what does it mean in terms of power dynamics in music?
Men dominate music industry and the social life of music around men is the standard, leaving few spaces for women, gender diverse people and men who does not adhere to conventions on cisgender and heterosexual expectations.
Homosociality is common in men’s social interactions and reinforces validation practices in which the masculine perspective is sought; this means men tend to socialize and listen to men more on a daily basis rather than interacting or listening to women.
Mainly cishet men have men as their heroes and role models inside and outside music, but we rarely include women in those high places of admiration, or we place them in those spaces only if we have a real-life connection with them.
Patriarchal culture serves as a scaffolding to translate that masculine homosociality to the general audience’s taste in music, favouring men and their bands in our ears.
Regarding that panorama, we can transform our listening practices to include women artists on the one hand and musical expressions and genres from all around the world on the other hand to grasp a wider insight into the human diversity in music.
When we decenter men while listening to songs and music, the possibilities of understanding reality, emotions, aesthetics, and lived experiences multiply and thrive.
Other worlds are opened before us and get closer to our understanding through the performance of a woman: Respect by Aretha Franklin could not be understood and felt the same way when sung by a white man, nor could Macorina by Chavela Vargas be comprehended as a defiance to heteronormativity in a highly sexist environment such as Mexican vernacular music in the 20th century.
If we, men, want to go even a step further, we can ask women about what they hear when listening to music, and, if we pay careful attention, we can discover the same song we listen to at the same time has completely different meanings coded by gendered interactions and lived experiences.
Therefore, men urgently need to listen to women in the music context, and that means listening to them as musicians and composers, as an audience, and, broadly, as equals in the social world we share.