[After rage-Slacking for months about all-cis male bands with names like Black Pussy and Womb Ripper, the Stranger‘s Kim Selling and I decided to write this piece on sexist monikers. There are a lot of
them!—CD]
GREETINGS, cis men musicians of Earth! Sound the bonerkill airhorn, because it’s time to talk semantics and sexism in the music industry. We’re warning you now—this whole piece is about stuff that might inspire you to rage-post on Twitter. But we promise that if you make it to the end of this, we will tell all your future dates that your creative work passes the Bechdel Test. So let’s start this year off with a consensual bang, shall we?
For musicians, choosing a band name can be stressful. Should you play it cool and pick some vacant placeholder devoid of meaning? Should you painstakingly weigh the pros and cons of various monikers before landing on one that seems to reflect the creative drive of your passion project? Who the fuck cares, right? Rarely does a band name adequately capture the essence of the work it’s describing in a few self-conscious syllables. Well, we care when cis men feminize the name of their group for personal and/or professional gain.
As we are two ladies with music criticism jobs, we’ve spent years of our lives working in the industry (no need to mansplain its complexities to us, nor the innate tautological structure of this sentence, designed especially for you, dear reader). We’ve crossed paths with just about every kind of band name that exists, including many of the “chick shit” variety, by which we mean any band name capitalizing on the use of terms originally deemed only necessary to describe womxn, ladies, chicks, bitches, sluts, whores, and girls.