screwrocknroll:

You know, no one ever acts like a male artist writing about being a young person in and out of love is something that shouldn’t appeal to a universal audience. If you’re a dude, you’re assumed to be universal. But when a woman writes about this sort of thing, well, you get clown shit

Not to pile on here (not because I’m against piling on but because I don’t think this merits it), but there’s a specific history of us “poptimistically-inclined circa 30 years old straight male” folks who have up to fairly recently been the target of some pretty insidious shit way worse than the “maybe sorta” bullshit insinuation mentioned above. Like, being called out by name on public forums as [p-word redacted for Google] or being directly accused (though not by name) of shady and borderline criminal motivations for securing interviews with a major label artist.

There are two problems here. The biggest one is simply that the insinuations are stupid and go against the literally thousands of words that us 30-ish poptimistically-inclined types have actually written about the artists we write about. The subject and the author come up, and all kinds of weird shit get thrown on regardless of what the author actually wrote about the artist — the more earnest the appreciation (and more removed from the most superficial public image), the skeevier the motivations, apparently.

The other less important but more personal issue is that while such offhand snark might seem innocuous enough there are real-world repercussions for being associated with those stupid conversations that spring up around the “inherent questionability” of listening to teen-oriented music in earnest. I’m lucky not to have been identified by name in the piece I linked above (who knows, maybe my name was on it and deleted by the eds — I don’t know if Z knew that at that point I was still writing for the same site, occasionally about the music that he claims I’m listening to so skeevily), but if you want to make a claim like “lecherousness” or “bad at heart” re: male critics writing about younger female performers, you better bring your block-quote game before shit gets really ugly. There aren’t that many of us, and you know that we know who you’re talking about. Maybe that’s partly why you wrote it in the first place, and maybe it’s incredibly shitty of you. (WORDS HOW DO THEY WORK.)