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Female Bassist Threads
- Thread starter Dr. Cheese
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love your avatar
This really is the best thing about being a man. The world is our urinal!
Girls can't pee their names in the snow either.
I agree with this, I often open doors for people of whatever gender just because it’s a nice way to show you care. Offering help is a nice thing to do for someone. Random acts of kindness and all that. If you want the world to be a better place, start with yourself. If we keep looking for bad intentions we’ll keep finding them. Sometimes you can just let a remark or action pass in the spirit that it may not have been meant with malevolence.
I’m thinking now about a lion who has successfully challenged the pride leader. He kills all of his predecessor’s cubs so he can impregnate the lionesses with his own genes. Are we that different? Are we genetically designed to dominate those who are not like us? The new pride leader is not thinking about the collective success but only his own. He doesn’t care about the lioness who has lost her cubs. He wants her to carry his. We think we are elevated from the animal realm because we create great cities, science, physics, literature, art, but socially we are still driven in a very primal way. We don’t use the size of our goat herd to display our dominance but we strive to dominate just the same with cars, real estate and careers in business and politics and there are some very clear demonstrations of that going on right now on the world stage.
We can also compare ourselves with our closest relatives, the Bonobos. We have about 98% of our DNA in common with them (versus the banana, with which we share about 50%). That 2% means a lot, but these guys have been our cousins for the past several hundred thousands of years of evolution (EDIT: oops, 8 million - before that we were the same thing), with similar conditions and environmental pressures, until relatively very recently.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-society-2006-06/
Some of us are more like chimpanzees, though.
I’ve heard that Bonobos use sexual behaviour to soothe social conflicts and maintain a stable extended family clan. I think that must be part of the 2% we don’t share.
We do it a lot more than you'd think, but we also have a heavily-impacting amount of non-genetic socialization - rules, mores, etc - that inform our approach to these kinds of negotiations, which are not universal to humans. Just mostly post-modern industrial cultures that have descended from agrarian and then industrial economies. In this culture, wealth is hoarded by a very small number of people and kept out of the economy. Bonobos live in the forest, surrounded by food, so scarcity is much less of an issue for them than it is for most humans. Scarcity leads to aggression and dominance in pretty much all animals, and with us, that leads to aggressive and dominating ways of handling conflict and stabilizing social structure - militarized police, incarceration, capital punishment, corporal punishment, rape, murder, fences, road rage, arguing with strangers on the internet. None of that is universal to humanity. It's just more unique to humanity.
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How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Their Egalitarian Ways
we can use our minds instead of our instincts. we can think things through. we also can have empathy, which would mean men would choose not to kill the male children because they're children, because the women would grieve (and reject them), and just because most of us don't want to kill anyone.
Your quite right. The killing part wasn’t the similarity I was trying to illustrate. That we take steps to further own own agenda at the cost of others is what I was alluding to and that sort of behaviour is rife in our society.
Carol Kaye ended the argument about the gender of bassists about a zillion years ago.
As a “female bassist”, I can say that 3 of my biggest pop auditions were specifically casting a female. Of course I agree with the idea of equality and believe that our musicianship extends far beyond gender- let’s face it....we are in the entertainment industry. Movie roles get CAST as “female lead,” “male lead,” and sometimes bands also hold gender specific auditions for musicians. I played in CeeLo Green’s band which was an all female band and it was one of my favorite musical experiences. We bonded like a sisterhood and everyone in that band slayed. Maybe I’m a weird minority, but I’m proud to say I’m a female bassist because I love being a female and i love being a bassist....so why not take pride in owning that title. When I see other women onstage, I feel empowered by them. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. When I joined the 90s rock band Filter, the singer was searching for a female bassist because he had a female twin sister and missed having female energy on the bus. When I came onboard, I was the one he could trust enough to sit him down in the back bus lounge and sometimes say “hey, maybe it’s time to take your medication.” I was the nurturing bus mom. So, I don’t think owning up to the title “female bassist” has to have any sort of negative stigma. I look at it as something pretty rad.
214 posts on this since Saturday? And how many of them are from women? I wish men actually understood what it feels like to be discussed in the third person.
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