As in-person events like concerts and festivals have returned since the pandemic, concert-goers are noticing a drastic change in etiquette and behavior during live shows. Fans have become more inclined to disrespect artists on stage –– predominantly female artists –– by catcalling them from the crowd, not respecting the boundaries they’ve put in place with their fans, and sexualizing them in videos of concerts online.
Clairo
A recent viral tweet on 24-year-old indie artist Clairo demonstrates the current relationship many female artists are facing with their younger fans. As Clairo performs her song “Blouse,” which is about sexual harassment in the workplace, a fan screams “you’re so hot!” at her. Clairo’s face drops, and fans reported that for the next several concerts, she seemed hurt and less inclined to interact with the audience.
Clairo must no doubt be hurt by the betrayal of her own fans, especially after being so outspoken on issues of sexual assault and harassment in the indie scene. In 2020, she hired a larger team of security to protect her fans from sexual harassment.
“I want nothing more than to create a safe and inclusive environment at shows, online and within the music,” she said in the announcement of this precaution. While she has done all she can to protect her fans from facing any level of discomfort or lack of safety, they have not returned the decency.
Rico Nasty
It seems that fans have not stopped at cat-calling, however. On a recent tour opening for Playboi Carti, rising female rap artist Rico Nasty had to dodge water bottles and other objects being thrown at her for multiple nights of the tour. Crowds booed her through her set, yelled profanities at her, and recorded themselves playing on their phones or acting completely uninterested to post on social media. The stark difference between how the same crowds treated Playboi Carti with respect and enthusiasm on the same nights left no room for dispute that this was a result of both sexism and racism. Rico Nasty later went on Twitter to vent about the attitudes of the male-dominated and hurtful crowd. “Y’all win,” she writes. “Crazy how I wanted a tour bus my whole life and now I just be on the tour bus crying myself to sleep every night.”
“This situation makes it obvious that the hip-hop realm of music can be very anti-black and isn’t welcoming to black women and artists,” says a fan. “It’s just been relentless not only at her shows but online as well. Everyone just decided to make it a trend to show up to her shows pretending to fall asleep to post it on TikTok. You can tell it’s gotten to her.”
Mitski
Many other female artists continue to face harassment on online platforms as the digital age and the pandemic have increased the amount of users, discourse, and hate speech online. Whether it’s sexualization, body-shaming, or tokenization, women undeniably face more harassment than their male peers.
In February of this year, alternative artist Mitski approached her online fan base to speak on digital presence at shows.
“I wanted to speak with you about phones at shows,” she wrote. “Sometimes when I see people filming entire songs or whole sets, it makes me feel as though we are not here together…Just putting it out there that sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can experience magic at a show. But only if we’re there to catch it.”
As gentle as this request was, Mitski faced so much hate online because of these tweets that she deleted them soon after. Other male artists such as Wilco, Prince, and Jack White have posed this request in the last decade of the digital age, but never received as much backlash as Mitski from her younger Gen-Z audience.
This isn’t the first time Mitski has relayed to her audience that she feels she is not listened to or respected by her fans. In an interview with Vulture this year, she explained that being a woman in the music industry has felt like “[being] a product that’s being bought and sold and consumed.”
Mitski, like all women in her industry, has experienced objectification from co-workers, press, and audiences. Harassment has always been present in the music industry; two-thirds of women creators have reported or identified sexual harassment in their workplaces.
“I remember my first press tour in Europe. I’m still traumatized by it,” Mitski continues. “There’s no notion of consent…Because I was an Asian woman, almost all white men, one after the other would say the most racist, sexist things I have ever heard to this day. I got a lot of sexual harassment.”
This harassment continues in the workplace for women, but now with the changes in etiquette and fan culture in recent years, the harm has spread to what was once a sacred and safe place for creators ––– their shows. The para-social relationships and pedestals that artists are placed on have fed into the dehumanization and the perpetuation of sexism and racism within the music industry and beyond.
