How Far Down Does This Iceberg Go Exactly?

So Laura Snapes wrote this wowser for The Guardian about the Ryan Adams-is-even-more-of-a-skeezy-fuckbag-than-you-already-thought scandal. Entitled "The Ryan Adams allegations are the tip of an indie-music iceberg," it's worth coming back to because Snapes talked about how typical shitty sexist misogynist behavior is in the music industry (and as someone who once played in a band fronted by women, let me concur it sure the fuck is).

It was the section at the end, where it seemed Snapes was writing from personal experience, that got my attention.

To this end, publicists for male indie stars ask for guarantees that allegations and evidence of an artist’s bad behaviour aren’t referred to in interviews, and often receive those guarantees. Managers intimidate women at public events because they don’t like the way they have written about their male charges. Music magazine editors sideline female employees who raise red flags when plans are made to cover well-known creeps. Publications continue to write about men outed as beasts once the heat has died down – having profited from clicks on righteous op-eds at the time of the outing – and venues continue to book them, disregarding protests.

Beta male misogyny is a musician repeatedly emailing me asking to be his “antagonist pen pal” even though he knows I dislike him. It’s another male musician threatening to get me fired because I tweeted a joke about him. Another using the full force of his management to try to make me delete a report about him telling a rape joke at a gig. In just nine years in a supposedly more enlightened industry, I have seen all of this. To be clear, these infractions are minuscule, but legion, and the tip of an iceberg visible from space.

Misogyny is also a band and label refusing to eject an offending male musician because they don’t see the big deal. It is a man putting obstacles in the way of a former partner who seeks to release new music. It is praise being lavished upon male musicians who make obvious statements about masculinity and sexism, and the women who have been saying those things for years being asked why they’re so angry. It is men being dismissed from high-profile positions for sexual misdemeanours and walking straight into similar roles. It is major publications not reviewing Taylor Swift’s album 1989 – too pop, too disposable – but lavishing space on Ryan Adams’s tedious song-by-song cover of it.

That last example she's referencing is Pitchfork, a place where Snapes' writing also appears. One big things jumped out at me as I read this. If I ran a music magazine/website, I wouldn't cover artists who treated my writers like shit. If a publicist made those kind of demands, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves. If a manager attempted to intimidate one of my writers, I wouldn't cover that artist, not for that press cycle at least. Or I'd encourage the writer to write about their treatment. These "publications" Snapes talks about, I have to assume include such bastions of liberal woke posturing as The Guardian and Pitchfork (according to her twitter bio, her work has also appeared at Q).

I've seen a lot of commentary around her article, but I haven't seen any one notice that Snapes essentially just wrote that two of the largest music publications at the moment are staffed by misogynist-enabling, almost entirely male, assholes who allow the women on their staff to be treated like shit. But then, you'd have to be a naive dreamer to assume that the rest of them aren't like this too. At least, Ryan Adams has the excuse of tortured artist to hide behind (though hopefully that tired old trope is just about finished), what the fuck is the excuse for an editor at The Guardian?