Poll: Hot Ladies

[sqbr]

There's been much discussion about the absurd gender bias in the hottest 100, which I've been somewhat avoiding until I got around to listening to the recording I made (Though thanks to the east coast time difference I still have to listen to 100-80 and 50-30 ish, luckily the website has streaming for the next few days)

Anyway: 2 out of 100 with female vocalists, and (I think?) 4 with women in the band is pretty pathetic. I looked into my iTunes library and out of my 230 five star songs, 58 have female vocalists(*).

I was inspired to make a poll of other people's favourite songs with female vocalists(*). I've always wanted to try out Google forms :) It's a bit dodgy, but on the plus side the only effort I have to go to collate the results is pressing "Sort column" :D Is there any better (and equally low-effort) way to make this sort of poll?

I'm not really interested in discussing the whys and wherefores because I really don't know (or care, to be honest) that much about the music industry. Go check out Was the Hottest 100 Of All Time sexist? asks Triple J’s Hack or any of the other posts on the subject. Also purrdence has another aleternative poll.

(*)I don't know about you, but I don't pay enough attention to who's in a band to know which ones have women in them unless I can hear them singing.

Comments

[yiduiqie]

I suppose I have to stick to English-language only songs, yeah?

[sqbr]

No, vote for whoever you want! I'd say "Though the more obscure the song the less likely anyone else will vote for it" but last I checked I only have one song with two votes anyway :)

Your question does lead me to the question "What about trans/intersex/genderqueer vocalists?" which totally didn't occur to me. Hmm.

[yiduiqie]

well! my opinion is that any female-identifying singers should count for this poll (though off the top of my head I can't think of any trans women vocalists).

[sqbr]

*nods* Trans women definitely count, it just occurred to me that some voters might assume I'd think they didn't.

I'm not sure I can articulate it but:
I was pondering if explicitly including genderqueer and intersex singers in the list would end up being more tokenistic than inclusive: the conversation is about female musicians, and adding a disclaimer to my poll without doing any serious thinking/talking about the issue doesn't do much to change that, it just makes me look inclusive. Though I guess any genderqueer or intersex people reading the poll might appreciate the acknowledgement.

Basically I haven't encountered much meta/theory etc around the more subtle forms of discrimination against intersex and genderqueer people (rather than more concrete issues like surgery without consent, government forms, toilets etc) and afaict don't know anyone with either identity so don't have a very firm understanding and flail about a bit :)