WE HATE YOU LITTLE FUCKING GIRLS

Haha, this isn't a post about how Throbbing Gristle is misogynist (though that would be pretty fucking funny since, despite years of loving essentially their whole body of work, and that song in particular, I don't honestly know much about them), but just some more thoughts about shitty scene themes.

Heads up: image of an industrial flyer below contains sexified lady image.

As I told y'all in my introductory post, it grieves me that a scene that purports to be countercultural is so damn mainstream in the shittiest ways. Today I will whine about the constant sexualization of women in gothy/industrial flyer imagery.

Sexualization is legitimately and truly harmful. I'm not making this shit up. The American Psychological Association says so, too! Dig it:

There are several components to sexualization, and these set it apart from healthy sexuality. Sexualization occurs when

• a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics;
• a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy;
• a person is sexually objectified—that is, made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making; and/or
• sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a person.

Image: A bus station advertisement window with a white background that has been painted with red spray paint. The paint says "If your priduct was any good you wouldn't need sexism to sell it." There is a bus driving past in the background of the image.

Part of being socialized as a woman is having repeatedly driven into your brain that all you're good for is being sexy, and you begin to develop your whole self worth around this concept. There ain't a damn thing wrong with being sexy, and enacting sexiness can be fun and fulfilling, but it is destructive in a big way to be held to such narrow conceptions of sexiness and have its necessity constantly reinforced and reified by every excrescence of the dominant culture-- even when you don't watch TV or read magazines there's still the billboards and bus shelter ads. And goddamnit, the goth/industrial subculture isn't much better.

Thinking back to when I was a regular at gothy/industrial nights/shows/events, the flyers regularly capitalized on images of pr0n-approved women's bodies, often without heads or faces, leaving us with sexualized body parts, incomplete and lacking in humanity. Some of these were local models and women I knew. Just now, from my work compy, I did google image searches for "goth flyer" and "industrial flyer," and I invite you to do likewise to see what I'm getting at. While the results for industrial flyer are less egregious, they almost invariably feature sexy women. If you read my bio on the sidebar, you may have gathered that I am all about women. But if an archivist from another planet were to attempt to reconstruct our scene based solely on the flyers generated for events, they would have no choice but to conclude that we are every one of us a sexy lady who fell into a vat of make up, latex, and hair dye. From an objective stance it's just sort of weird that essentially every flyer ever features an image of a woman. While I'm the first to admit that I'm not much of a dude-gazer, considering that men make up such a huge part of the scene and are the primary and most celebrated creators of the music it's all about, why are we not seeing them? I'd love to hear other people's thoughts, particularly people who generate flyers, on why this is. All I got is that it's a depressing mimic of mainstream marketing gimmicks. Some of the image results are kinda adorbz and invite us to identify with the subject and appreciate her complexity, but most of them are just there to be looked at and seem to have no spark of human inspiration or energy. Here's a particularly distasteful example from LA.

Image: A flier reads "Devil's whorehouse presents... All Hallows Eve at Saints & Sinners 'Goth Night' Wednesday, October 31st. Cheap Drink Specials!! DJ Mike will be spinning the best goth, industrial, darkwave, and old school punk rock all fuckin' night!! Cum dressed to depress!! 21+ only - No cover!!" The lettering is red and white on a black background. The left side of the image has an illustration of a white woman with red hair wearing only boots and underwear with a long devil tail sticking her bum out towards the viewer.

Because Jayzus. What is that really supposed to communicate to us?

And in our tradition here at Industrial Anti-Oppression of highlighting things that are not terrible, I have so much love for this flyer from Columbus, OH.

Is it coincidence that it promotes a night DJed by a woman?

In closing, I would like very much to echo Kraftwerk in saying that I don't want to be a Sex Objekt.