"I'm beginning to think I have two years encountering sexism without really realising it"
About this Quote
The line lands like a slow dawning: a recognition that what felt like background noise was actually a pattern. It captures the way sexism often operates not as a single dramatic event but as an accumulation of slights, questions, and expectations that only cohere into a picture over time. The tentative phrasing, beginning to think, hints at the self-doubt that accompanies such realizations. If you have been taught to keep your head down, to value toughness, and to treat discomfort as the price of doing what you love, it can take years to admit that the discomfort had a name.
Kristin Hersh came up in a music culture that celebrated outsider credibility while still clinging to old gatekeeping habits. As the songwriter and bandleader of Throwing Muses, a pioneering American group on the 4AD label, she played angular, uncompromising songs that defied easy marketing. The industry around her, however, often tried to domesticate that edge or explain it away. Journalists asked gendered questions, publicists framed her as an exception among women rather than a peer among musicians, and the machinery of promotion favored sexualization or softness over difficulty. Credit could drift toward male colleagues; critiques of her work blurred into judgments of her body or temperament. When she became a mother, the novelty of it for a touring rocker invited prurient curiosity that rarely attached to fathers.
Realizing you have been encountering sexism without really realizing it is not an admission of naivete; it is a diagnosis of normalization. The culture trained her, and many others, to regard the friction as personal misfit rather than systemic bias. Naming it does not rewrite the past two years, but it reframes them. It returns agency. That shift matters artistically too: it validates instinct against the smoothing pressures of the market, and it offers a clearer account of what resistance looks like in practice. Hersh has often let the work speak, but this kind of clarity sharpens the ear that makes the work.
Kristin Hersh came up in a music culture that celebrated outsider credibility while still clinging to old gatekeeping habits. As the songwriter and bandleader of Throwing Muses, a pioneering American group on the 4AD label, she played angular, uncompromising songs that defied easy marketing. The industry around her, however, often tried to domesticate that edge or explain it away. Journalists asked gendered questions, publicists framed her as an exception among women rather than a peer among musicians, and the machinery of promotion favored sexualization or softness over difficulty. Credit could drift toward male colleagues; critiques of her work blurred into judgments of her body or temperament. When she became a mother, the novelty of it for a touring rocker invited prurient curiosity that rarely attached to fathers.
Realizing you have been encountering sexism without really realizing it is not an admission of naivete; it is a diagnosis of normalization. The culture trained her, and many others, to regard the friction as personal misfit rather than systemic bias. Naming it does not rewrite the past two years, but it reframes them. It returns agency. That shift matters artistically too: it validates instinct against the smoothing pressures of the market, and it offers a clearer account of what resistance looks like in practice. Hersh has often let the work speak, but this kind of clarity sharpens the ear that makes the work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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