The Gender of Ambient Music

[rynling]

I need to vent about a piece of scholarship. It won’t take long, but this is driving me up the wall.

According to the (male) author of an academic monograph I’m currently reading, ambient music is “masculinist.” What the author is not saying is that many of the most well-known producers of ambient music have been men. Rather, he’s saying that music without lyrics or a well-defined melody is a symptom of masculinist gaming subcultures, and this is because the attempt to establish a “cultureless” space of relaxation is a means of establishing male dominance in digital spaces as male dominance erodes in the real world.

This is only one paragraph in a larger argument about virtual reality, but what the fuck. You can’t just drop something batshit insane like that and then walk away.

Idk, the author’s argument that only men fall in love with video game characters seems kind of sus in general, I type while listening to the lovely ambient OST Jessica Curry created for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and watching my post about Ganondorf's ears gain another dozen notes on Tumblr.

ETA: Okay, this is what I've decided to do: I am going to stop reading this book, bury it in my office closet, go outside, and touch grass.

Comments

[lassarina]

...what the absolute *fuck,* male academic.

I mean. Touching grass is a good reaction. but what the fuck, sir.

[rynling]

The assumption that women don't exist is a huge problem in Media Studies. Unfortunately, peer review has a huge impact on this bias. To give an example, me and this scholar went up for tenure at roughly the same time. He wrote a book saying that women don't exist, and I wrote a book saying that women do exist. He got tenure, and I didn't. Ergo.

I mean, the author is actually a nice guy in real life, and I'm probably oversimplifying. Still, academia can be kind of fucked up sometimes.

[lassarina]

Just. The idea that a space he's trying to define as masculine is "cultureless", I need several moving vans to unpack that sentiment. And I don't actually want to. But what the entire fuck.

It's always sort of bleakly hilarious to me when I see those stats on who spends money on games and more than half of it is middle-aged women playing "casual" games and people are so! eager! to say that doesn't count.

Funny how men whaling for waifus in gacha totally does...what's the difference again? I can't quite put my finger on it but I feel like it's staring me in the face.