misogyny | fleurmach

i really don’t get it,
never have.
hard rock/metal in general, i mean.
too much sweaty hair thrashing around,
too many notes overcrowding each bar,
too many gratuitous tempo changes,
the voice (always male) too yowly or growly,
the lyrics, ridiculous.
i can dig the more spacey prog stuff from the ’70s, king crimson for example, or the o.t.t. weirdness of frank zappa, but the testosserterrain of deep purple/motorhead/budgie etc etc… i just don’t get it.

it reminds me of all the wankers i tried to sing or play guitar with at school.
i could never find anyone who wanted to do anything interesting.
all they did was spank away over and over for hours and hours at the same led zeppelin or sabbath or metallica riffs,
show off their paradiddle-diddle-diddle drumming,
their kakky renditions of les claypool slap bass,
drink black label quarts, smoke dagga, crow about forcing themselves on girls.

here’s a memory from when i was about 15 or 16… i’m at a house party in kloof, drunk and very bored, after one such disappointing “jam”. the drummer, julian (still remember his stinking name), with long fluffy hair and a straggly beard and juicy zits who’s maybe a bit older than the rest of us, starts kissing me and i’m kinda flattered but not feeling anything at all. so i crawl off a bit later when he’s getting another beer to go sleep in someone’s bedroom plastered with creepy iron maiden posters.

he comes to find me and i wake to his entire weight bearing down on me, smothered in salty, smoky hair and he’s forcing his hands into my panties and shoving his filthy callused stompie fingers in my virginity and his penis is grinding into my thigh and i can’t move or breathe. i’m choking. i bite at his furry beer tongue and he swears at me and slaps me, calls me a cocktease, and then he’s gone. mercifully. i need to vomit and wash myself but i daren’t go to the bathroom. i’m scared that he’ll come back. i’m lying there groggy and rigid with the reek of him on me, his plaque in my mouth, with that eddie creature leering down at me from the moonlit posters, with the drone of mosquitoes and the signature riffs of the morning birds over and over for hours and hours – bulbul, white-eye, hadeda, bulbul, white-eye, hadeda, bulbul, hadeda… somewhere a cock is crowing and finally i can get out of there.

coda: my younger sister got seduced by the whole scene and ended up pregnant at 16 by one of these fret-tapping frauds that she’d called her boyfriend for about 2 years. a few months after the baby came, he slunk off with the chick he’d been cheating on her with.

so yeah. i don’t enjoy hard rock/metal’s machismo-drenched doodling.
i find it the aural equivalent of being fucked badly.
there’s not a smidgen of feminine awareness in its puffed-up rooster strut.

september 15, 2008

The following videos are posted by very young teenage girls looking for validation from strangers online in the face of negative comments about their appearance… There are MANY, MANY videos like this on Youtube – it’s become a strange sort of meme.

The exact motives for making these movies are mixed, but if you read the comments under the videos, you’ll see how mean people can be under the cloak of anonymity – meaner, probably, than the unkindness at school that the girls are hoping to drown out with the “objective” opinions of strangers online, for this is what all the videos have in common.

I don’t think I will ever understand how hurting someone else, even if it is because you yourself are hurting, could help you feel better at all… which I guess is what always made me an easy target for bullies myself. I don’t retaliate because it doesn’t make sense to me to do so. That’s lethal bully-bait when coupled with the conviction to stand up for oneself, to speak back. I hit people teasing me a few times when I was a kid, mainly to get them out of my face. It made me feel sick to do that, and it didn’t help. Mostly I would just try to shout them down.

My mom’s mantra, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me,” roared uselessly.

It took me years and years to figure out how futile and dangerous it is to try to shout, to speak, to whisper back, to appeal to sense and truth, to reason with cruelty. It doesn’t work, because cruelty isn’t rational. It is senseless. Cruelty is fed by any and every reaction. These girls won’t realise until the damage is already done and they have lost their voices completely. It hurts to watch them exposing themselves to so much pain.

“I feel like I could just go away and never come back. I feel like I’ve been standing all these years and keep getting torn down… Deep down inside, all girls know that other people’s opinions don’t matter, but we still go to other people for help because we don’t believe what people say.”
~ Faye (13). More on her story HERE.