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Why aren't there more women on audiophile forums?

I've seen this question bandied about on forums frequently. Here's a long analysis of the subject matter.  For those going to the beach and needing a read, the whole dissertation is available for download.

"Masculinity and gear fetishism in audio technology community discourse"
Annetts, Alex (2015)
Doctoral thesis, Anglia Ruskin University.

"This thesis is a study of audio technology community discourse and its historical features. I contend that the audio technology domain is fundamentally exclusive and hierarchically stratified, based on discursively inscribed prerequisites to participation and enunciation, notably a hegemonic masculine performance, gear fetishism and the articulation of technical knowledge.

I show that communities organised around audio technology, socially construct and perpetuate these features as components of their respective discourses. I expose all three elements to be rooted in culturally embedded gender stereotypes, dating back to a nineteenth century dichotomy of public and private space.

I present a deconstruction of the complex discursive performances of masculinity and offer opportunities for privileged masculine recordists to critically reflect upon their dominance and homogeneity within the domain as an original contribution to knowledge. In this endeavour, I investigate the emergence and development of exclusive tropes as components of audio technology culture, and demonstrate how they continue to be perpetuated in the face of both social and technological developments that offer possibilities to destratify the community hierarchy and enunciative function.

My methodology is based on a comparative discourse analysis of industry and academic texts, as well as the communities that surround and influence the construction of modern audio technology discourse. Case studies are conducted of two leading industry publications: Tape Op and Sound On Sound, and supplemented by an exploration of Women's Audio Mission. I combine these sources with interview material gathered from relevant industry professionals. In doing so, I observe how the audio technology community has maintained barriers to participation, often in the face of technological progress that offers supposed opportunities for democratisation. My work presents an argument against this notion, exposing the supposed democratisation as an illusion of accessibility and thus as mere massification."

https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/702044/
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hickamore
659 posts
 
Despite their opposite moorings, Miller and nonoise are both models worthy of emulation. We should all aspire to think and to write with their clarity and precision, if without their amusing rancor, which they have both earned the right to deploy.

That said, it's rather puny to claim no more than that the contemporary "alt right" has been pissed since the Enlightenment. Your transitory "alt right" didn't exist in the 17th Century. You're thinking of Colossus: the Roman Church, whose orthodoxies imposed cultural hegemony for a thousand years. Church intellectuals are just as well-educated as their secular counterparts, but unlike the latter, they repudiate Sartre's dictum that the intellectual's duty is "to think -- to think without restriction." The Church insists that you think WITH restriction, that is, when Aristotelian inquiry contradicts Church doctrine, doctrine must prevail. Aquinas taught Churchmen how to finesse this trick in the 13th Century, after being inconveniently confronted with the newly rediscovered works of Aristotle. 
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
Neo-Marxism has so skewed American politics that what many call "the right" is now mainstream America. What are the values of "the right"? Life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, the right to be left alone. These are total mainstream American values. These are total mainstream universal human values.

Universal everywhere that is but on the left. If you want to talk history, let’s talk history. Marx held that there are no truths, it is all about power, and therefore anyone who has anything took it by force and oppression. Marx held that the capitalists were the oppressors. Couple hundred million dead later, whole nations economically and spiritually impoverished, Marxism died a total failure.

Until that is idiot French (but I repeat myself) philosophers reincarnated it as Neo-Marxism. No longer is it rich against poor. Now everyone is divided into every race, and gender, and ability, on and on endlessly on, all of them oppressed by the evil white man and his hateful patriarchy.

If you want to think, intellectually or otherwise just think at all, mine is the model to emulate. The model of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, of Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ. The model of the divinity of the individual, the sanctity of life, of free and open inquiry.

The other model is the exact opposite.

Choose wisely.
scowler1
54 posts
 
aewarren: funny post. Made me laugh and much appreciated. This topic (as always…only my personal opinion) is truly a “contemplate your navel” exercise. Have at it but your contemplation won’t explain or change anything. It is what it is.
‘And realize that the writer of this “dissertation” definitely sat in front of their computer with a Thesaurus desperately trying to find impressive erudite-sounding verbiage to replace the plain-speak of normal thought. Take that to the bank!😎
nonoise's avatar
nonoise
10,832 posts
 
Thanks @hickamore, 
I'll admit that I liberally used some shorthand in the alt right designation but it would take way too long to put it into perspective, and, I wouldn't be able to do as good a job as you did in describing it.

On a similar note, I always thought it was referred to as Liviathan, and not Colussus. Maybe it was Burke and the critters in his timeframe that started to use that term. It could very well be that once religious domination started to wane a bit and politics sought some differentiation that that term was used to supplant the previous one.

As for MC's clumsy take, I'll let his own words "own" him.

All the best,
Nonoise
hickamore
659 posts
 
MC, nonoise,

nonoise: Hobbes's Leviathan is the state, not the church. And I capitalize "Colossus" only for emphasis. Although both Latin and Roman, the word has no special meaning with reference to the Church of Rome. That I know of.

MC: But you are perfectly describing classical liberalism! The progressive left embraces life, liberty, property, privacy, etc. -- they simply understand the unfairness of laissez-faire capitalism, and seek to moderate its harsher consequences. Don't buy the Right media trick of pretending that something idiotic done on campus bespeaks an embrace of tribalism on the progressive left. We're historically aware enough to grasp that identitarianism is a cyclical thing which crosses political bounds. Our age happens to be suffering an outbreak at the moment. But liberalism will allow this tribalist foolishness to play out to its absurd logical end, as we know it shall and must, while gently stressing the universalist themes of cosmopolitanism, tolerance, human rights, and human equality before the law. 
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