Music and Gender

 Music and gender are intertwined in many ways, from the instruments each gender chooses to play, the music each gender is expected to listen to, and the way that artists of each gender are expected to present themselves. In this post, I am mainly focusing on how gender stereotypes effect word choice in music, as well as how music can be perceived differently based on the gender of the artist.

Separate from music, men and women are expected to act specific ways as societal steretypes push ideas of how each gender should act. Men are typically expected to be tough, relaxed, loud in comparison to women, and often hypersexual in that being too affectionate can be perceived as “gay.” Women are expected to be delicate, quiet, emotional, attractive but also not too sexual in any way. As society believes these traits are what are acceptable for each gender, they shape our perceptions of people in all facets of their lives.

These stereotypes are often seen in the music industry, one way being the topics that artists tend to write their songs on, as well as word choice used in shared topics. In the music I typically listen to, I find that women often write songs about love, breakups, or general feelings, while the men I listen to tend to write more about drugs and sex, as well as love or breakups. These ideas go back to the stereotypes I mentioned earlier, wher men are expected to have less feelings, while women are expected to be emotional. 

Something interesting to note is how both genders perceive topics such as love or breakups in different ways. While I had thought of this a little on my own, an article I read while doing research for this post made these differences more clear to me. The author of the article pulled certain words from breakup songs in order to understand how each gender perceived those breakups. They found that women often used a mix of positive and negative words to describe their partner and emotions, while men used few positive words and tended to heavily rely on negative words to describe their partner and emotions. 

Women’s word choice; there is a good balance of positive and negative words. 

Men’s word choice; very skewed towards negative words

They also found that women’s songs often included themes of self improvement, while men included themes of partying and drinking as ways to cope with that breakup. A good example of this is the song Flowers by Miley Cyrus in comparison to Hot Girl Bummer by Blackbear.

In Flowers, Miley describes her ex, saying they were good, and throughout the song talks about forgiveness. The main chorus is about her learning to love herself after the breakup.

In contrast Hot Girl Bummer starts out with the artist dissing his ex and then the chorus is him saying he's going to go party and get wasted. 

It can also be noted that gender affects how these songs are perceived. Maybe it is because of the choice in lyrics each gender often uses, but their songs are often perceived differently. For example, a lot of the female artists I listen to tend to be more emotional in their songs, and my brother always makes fun of me for it. He likes to say that all I listen to are “blonde white girls who play somber music and play guitar.” This is not true, and he likely has not seen pictures of most of the artists I listen to, but there are stereotypes around female artists that allowed him to come to this assumption.

A song I like, about putting so much into a relationship just to end up alone and feeling worn out.

 What’s interesting is that a lot of the music he listens to has the same topics, but he thinks they’re cool. When I asked him what some of his favorite songs, he told me that Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead and Lithium by Nirvana were two of his favorites. Both songs are on the sadder side and Fake Plastic Trees is a sad breakup song with guitar, the same thing he makes fun of me for, however because the artist is a man, he thinks its cool. If he heard the same song played by a woman originally, he probably would not have liked it.

The song my brother likes, also about putting effort into a relationship and it just wearing them out. 

I find it very interesting how gender affects word choice as well as the way songs are perceived by the general public. I had not thought about it much before this, but as I researched I found that I kind of knew all these things anyway. That makes it even more clear how deeply stereotypes are engrained into our society, to where it is at the point they are present in our minds even if we are not aware. 

https://www.storybench.org/analyzing-gender-differences-in-music-themes-and-lyrics/