i grew up in the 90s, which were a period where the gender imbalance in music started evening out, but which was still overwhelmingly skewed towards men. i don't want to apologize for listening to a skewed sample, given that the female musicians of the period were overwhelmingly commodified for their looks.

i'm not going to listen to bad music because it was made by girls, or ignore good music because it was made by boys. i'm a musician - i care about the sound art. i don't think my record collection needs an affirmative action program, or that gender parity within it is an ideal to strive for. so, yeah - my record collection in my formative years is overwhelmingly male.

not exclusively. there's lots of female voices in there. but, overwhelmingly - and that's a reflection of the culture, not of me.

if you wanted to be a girl in a band in the 80s and 90s, you had two paths: you could either date somebody in one of the bands (which is actually fairly common in underground music of the period) or you could market yourself with your body. it kind of didn't matter how talented you were or you weren't, that's just how it came out in the wash. the talent consequently existed largely on the fringes, and, even so, only managed success though sexuality. for example: tori amos is talented, but that's not why she sold records, unfortunately.

i guess it hit a breaking point in the mid-00s, and actually flipped over some time around 2010. nowadays, it's very difficult to find any interesting music made by men at all. entire genres are dominated by women. even guitar music is dominated by women. the only type of music that young men seem interested in making is bro-rock, and it's this like weird gym class culture that i've never wanted anything to do with. from psychedelic music through to industrial music, women really dominate the entire spectrum.

and, so, while my formative years were spent listening mostly to male voices (not exclusively. lots of girls in there, too.), nowadays i'd guess that women take up upwards of 75% of my listening time.

i think we all tend to default to certain periods in our lives, and that these periods tend to expand. contemporary music converts itself into memories over time, and my posts will even out in gender as that process unfolds itself.