Normalising sexualised violence in popular culture: eroding, erasing and controlling women in rock music

ABSTRACT

How does music play a role in normalising men’s sexual violence towards women? Using mainstream rock and metal music as an illustrative case study, we offer a nuanced account of the ways in which men’s sexual violence is normalised. Using a definition of sexual violence drawn from Liz Kelly’s notion of a continuum, which reframes sexual violence as the loss of women’s ability to control sexual experiences, we explore the ways in which sexual violence is a prevalent lyrical and audio-visual component of rock and metal songs. We show that a pernicious theme of rock and metal over the last 25 years is the erosion of women’s ability to refuse sexual activity and to have voice and be heard. We argue that this erosion of women’s consent takes place through the representational use of emotional abuse, controlling/coercive behaviour, and through the objectification of women. The erasure of consent presented through these methods becomes a key means of establishing sexual control. Through manipulation, the confusion of what counts as sexual violence and how it is defined, men’s sexual violence against women is normalised.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• rock music
• music video
• rock lyrics
• sexual violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy/Leverhulme.

Notes on contributors

Rosemary Lucy Hill

Rosemary Lucy Hill is Senior Lecturer in Media and Popular Culture at the University of Huddersfield. She researches gender, popular music and big data. She is the author of Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music (Palgrave) and numerous articles on gender and music as well as the politics of data visualisations. She is currently investigating sexual violence at live music events. She is also a musician. E-mail: [email protected].

Daisy Richards

Daisy Richards is a PhD candidate at De Montfort University, Leicester. Her doctoral research focuses on representations of male sexual violence towards women in TV representation. E-mail: [email protected]

Heather Savigny

Heather Savigny is a Visiting Professor in Political, Social and International Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her work is interdisciplinary and is published in journals such as Political Studies Review; Journal of Gender Studies; Media, Culture and Society; Feminist Media Studies; Popular Music (with Rosemary Lucy Hill). Her most recent monograph is Cultural Sexism: The Politics Of Feminist Rage In The #Metoo Era (Policy Press/BUP, 2020).