Masculine Pleasure? Women’s Encounters with Hard Rock and Metal Music

The broad genre of hard rock and metal is frequently characterised as dark masculine music (e.g. Walser 1993) that employs lyrical misogyny alongside practices such as the use of violent pornography to exclude women (e.g. Kahn-Harris 2007, Vasan 2011). Arnett (1993) argues that the music can fulfil a cathartic purpose for its male fans, its focus on anger and hatred providing listeners with the means to cope with their own difficult emotions. However, through interviews with women fans I found that their engagement with the music was more complex than the dominant orthodoxy allows. I employed critical discourse analysis to analyse women’s descriptions of the pleasures afforded them by the music. Far from being exclusionary ‘masculine’ music that only provides release for male listeners, my participants used a broad lexical range to describe their musical pleasure. This encompassed feelings of travel, romance, and being ‘lifted’ above the mundane. These expressions of musical enjoyment are in contrast to notions of the music as masculine where ‘masculine’ incorporates values of fierceness, loudness and anger. Women’s pleasurable experiences thereby highlight the way in which the music is not only heard as a cathartic masculine genre, but one that has more nuanced meanings for its listeners. Attention to women fans’ experiences of musical pleasure can therefore enable complex understandings of the music where simplistic meanings reinforce sexist assumptions and reduce the meaning of the music to its therapeutic value.