According to Chrissie Hynde, the notion that the music industry has always been a man’s world is a myth:
“I tell ya right now, if a woman walked in here and looked like Pamela Anderson and played like Jimi Hendrix, there’s not a band in the world that wouldn’t be falling to her feet and saying, ‘Will you be in my band?’” Hynde told PEOPLE. “Men like it when women can play guitar. Prince had all women in his band. Jeff Beck likes working with women. These were the greatest guitar players alive.”
Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon had a different experience. “Do you want to look cool, or do you want to look attractive?” photographer Michael Lavine asked her. “As if the two were mutually exclusive,” Gordon reflected in a post she penned for The Guardian.
“In Britain, journalists took to asking me a single question over and over: 'What’s it like to be a girl in a band?' I’d never really thought about that,” Gordon revealed. “The mostly male music press in the UK was cowardly and non-confrontational in person. They would then go home and write cruel, ageist, sexist things. I assumed it was because they were terrified of women…”
Some of our favorite badass frontwomen sound off on sexism below. Quotation above via pretenders.org.
—via bust.com
—via radio.com
—via theguardian.com
