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Journal of Youth Studies

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The perpetuation of hegemonic male power and the loss of boyhood innocence: case studies from the music industry
Martin Ashley
a a

Faculty of Education, Edge Hill University, St. Helen's Road, Ormskirk, Lancashire, L39 4QP, UK Published online: 02 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Martin Ashley (2011) The perpetuation of hegemonic male power and the loss of boyhood innocence: case studies from the music industry, Journal of Youth Studies, 14:1, 59-76, DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2010.489603 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2010.489603

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Journal of Youth Studies Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2011, 59 76

The perpetuation of hegemonic male power and the loss of boyhood innocence: case studies from the music industry
Martin Ashley*
Faculty of Education, Edge Hill University, St. Helens Road, Ormskirk, Lancashire L39 4QP, UK (Received 7 October 2009; nal version received 23 April 2010)

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It has been argued by R.W. Connell that gender equality requires the willing cooperation of men and boys. This study of youth masculinity and singing examines the process through which young people are socialised into the norms of the commercial music industry. It is argued that this industry, which is extremely influential on identities and attitudes, remains patriarchal in its power structures. This patriarchy both constrains and shapes the identities of boy performers and perpetuates the construction of females as fodder for music that requires little cultural capital for its appreciation. The paper draws on case studies of boy performers aged between 11 and 14, together with survey work in schools of young people who were asked to listen to the commercial CD recordings made by the young performers. It concludes that, from an initial position of innocence, boy singers and their female fans become socialised into a complicit masculinity that unwittingly perpetuates patriarchal hegemony. Connells aspiration for men and boys participation in gender equality is rendered an unlikely hope by the power relationships discussed. Keywords: gender; generation; identity; masculinity; music

Introduction A report to the United Nations by R.W. Connell makes the point that men and boys have a role to play in achieving gender equality (Connell 2003). Crucially, Connell argues that, though gender equality has been placed in the public domain generally by women, the gender equality project cannot be completed without the willing support and co-operation of men and boys. She both outlines the various categories of men and boys who have already supported gender equality and calls attentions to the obstructions associated with patriarchal attitudes to gender that continue to stand in the way. In this article, I shall discuss the considerable power and influence wielded by the music industry and the effect this has in socialising young boy singers into a complicit masculinity, creating a patriarchal dividend that obstructs this aspiration of Connell. The article is based upon the findings of two substantial research council-funded studies of boys and singing. It does not attempt to report the whole study programme, but draws on one particular issue that emerged as significant during the studies. This is the degree to which the music industrys treatment of young boy
*Email: ashleym@edgehill.ac.uk
ISSN 1367-6261 print/ISSN 1469-9680 online # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2010.489603 http://www.informaworld.com

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singers and their largely female audiences perpetuates a heavily patriarchal hegemony that is antithetical to progress in the gender equality project. Boys are seen not to be willingly complicit in this but, in the majority of cases, unwitting conscripts as a result of their innocence and naivety. Music and fashion are the two most powerful markers of identity, attitude and value in young people (Bennett 2005). Hence a case can be made that the arguments soon to be presented are important and potentially far reaching.

Boyhood and innocence It is first necessary to describe briefly what is meant by boy and to define innocence as the term is to be understood in this paper. I have treated boy in all my writing as a social construction, drawing inspiration from the feminist poststructuralist perspective on performing or doing the masculinities that are available to children from the gender discourses they encounter. Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) reiterate that gender remains relational and, in spite of the possibility that even hegemonic masculinities are multiple, the need for boys to react against some model of femininity, real or imagined, remains. For many boys, vocal performance, not least because it is so frequently seen as a doing of key aspects of femininity, is one such model. There is, however, one important caveat with regard to the principle that the social construction of masculinity is undertaken independently of fixed bio-medical properties. Between the approximate ages of 10 and 14, boys reach a pubertal midpoint in the development of the larynx which results in a unique ability to sing with what is frequently referred to as the voice of angels (Cooksey 1993, Mould 2007). This ability is possessed neither by children under the age of 10 nor adults, only by mid-pubertal boys. Whether or not it is in any way possessed in the same way by mid to late-pubertal girls remains a hotly contested issue (Welch and Howard 2002). However, even if girls do possess similar physical ability to sing with the pure voices of angels, this may be valued socially less than boys ability to perform the same feat for reasons akin to a patriarchal dividend (Paechter 2006) and a complicit masculinity that has formed much of the substance of the study. Thus, though boy meaning physically or socially juvenile can apply to males of any age between the pre-natal and the full grown adult (Groth 2007), in this study it refers to those aged between approximately 10 and 14 whose precocious singing talent is exploited by the music industry. Current discussions of boyhood innocence tend to be drawn towards two discourses. There is first the discourse of child protection, which sees all boys as sexually na ve and in need of protection from dangerous strangers (Kitzinger 2003). Then there is the discourse of toxic childhood (Palmer 2006) which encourages the belief that children are in fact growing up too soon, one symptom of which is an alleged early sexualisation, distasteful to a conservative outlook. In both cases, it is boys sexual innocence that is the valorised concept. It is true that boys can be the victims of pederasty or ephebiphilia, though potentially also the perpetrators of sex crimes themselves. However, in this paper, I shall argue that moral panic (Cohen 1987) results in other potentially equally significant forms of innocence being overlooked.

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Lack of adult sexual knowledge is indeed only one of the definitions of innocence given by Gittens (1998). She refers to the broader meaning of innocence, which is simply lack of any knowledge. She also calls attention to the Latin in-nocere, meaning either not to hurt or not to be hurt and cites the postmodern theorists Kroker and Cook (1988) in likening the cynical exploitation of bimbos by record companies to excremental culture characterised by disposability and meaningless gratification. I have argued previously that young people also significantly lack knowledge of economics, that they are economically innocent and potentially the victims of economic abuse. Young people are frequently criticised for their failure to appreciate the value of things, yet the consequences of an education that prioritises competency in mechanical calculation at the expense of understanding the values associated with the numbers are less often questioned (Ashley 1998). Giroux (2000) makes a further fundamental point about innocence. Children, he argues, are still seen as the unreasoning, primitive creatures of unspoiled nature. The result is that they are subdued by a huge bureaucratic weight of child protection that simultaneously fails to recognise their agency and autonomy. This paper will demonstrate how boys are not passive victims in need of protection but active agents learning through experience how to construct a stable, complicit masculinity that is ultimately supportive of the patriarchal status quo in the music industry. Boys involvement in the music industry There is a significant gender imbalance in favour of females with regard to young peoples participation in singing, both presently in the UK (Welch et al. 2009), historically (Koza 1992) and across most Western cultures (Harrison 2008). The need to understand this as an issue of boys well-being (Courtney 2003, Clift et al. 2008) was the principal motive for the study programme, although security of availability of male singers was a cited potential benefit for user groups such as choir directors. Literature review confirmed what was already strongly suspected, not only that boys regarded singing as sissy (Green 1997), but that the discourse of compulsory heterosexuality (Kehily 2002) acted as a disincentive to the majority of boys who, conscious of their bodies as a living, moving, text (Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli 2003) avoided performances perceived as associated predominantly with girls. Boys who did want to sing could feel resentment at their exclusion by the failure of schools to tackle the issue (Freer 2006). Literature review also revealed that commercial music possesses a strong economic orientation to the use of heterosexism as a marketing tool, the singing of boys such as the Westlife boy band being marketed to girls and women keen for a sexually charged video performance by nice clean boys, with hair on the chest obscured (London Weekend Television 2003). A market for younger boys singing has been created through so-called bubblegum pop (Brownlee 2003) in which, for example, a Disney Channel video of Stevie Brock portrays scenes of a young 13-yearold boy being idolised by teenybopper girls who gaze adoringly at him during a stage performance. Later on, the chosen one of these is portrayed in a fantasy adolescent romance scene of the two sitting together on a swinging bench and leaping into a swimming lake. Bayton (1993) is amongst those who note the degree to which females have been excluded from performance in rock and relegated to the low status of pop fan and

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the above is an example of what Bennett (2000) describes as the use of women and girls as fodder for the music industry. Wald (2002) is concerned by the phenomenon of the girled boy band and points out that there is high and low culture within the so-called pop world, and boy bands that fall into the category of manufactured teenybopper pop acts are the lowest form of culture. She sees this as part of the discourse of degraded womens consumption in which females are held inferior to males by their uncritical attachment to formulaic and inauthentic fodder, sold through appeal to adolescent hormones and derided by the legitimate and serious male rock critic. Meier (2008) confirms the degree to which the patriarchal power structures of the music industry enforce a view of cultural taste in which the authentic is produced by serious males, authenticity involving a process of raising artistic (male) rock above commercial female pop (p. 241). Whiteley (2000) testifies to the futility of womens resistance, the attempts of female Bass player Suzi Quatro to dress in a bikers outfit being dismissed by New Musical Express as Penthouse fodder. The authors own contribution to this discourse has been to examine the relationships that attach, not to rock or pop music, but to the voices of angels possessed by 10 14-year-old boys (Ashley 2008a, 2009). Outside the traditional performance arena of sacred choral music, there is a significant commercial market for such voices in the classical/pop crossover genre. Recent successes in this genre and studied by the author include The Choirboys, Angelis and Libera. It became very clear during the authors research that the largest single audience for this work was elderly and female the term grannies being employed repeatedly by the young people interviewed and surveyed, though this included mothers, usually of older children. The only other significant audience (and this depended on the finer details of imaging and repertoire) was young adolescent girls. Notably absent from the perception of young people were adult males, pre-pubertal girls or boys of any age. Considerable significance was attached to this for two reasons. First, if there is no adult male interest in boys singing, there is no reason for boys to associate singing with an adult masculinity which, according to Mac-an-Ghaill (2002), they yearn for but cannot have. Second, if the majority of boys show no desire to join with other boys who sing or imitate older peers who have been commercially successful in this activity (as would be the case in sport), the perception of the activity as for girls confirms its status as a subordinate or suspect form of young masculinity (Frosh et al. 2002). Both these matters clearly concerned a project which sought to identify reasons for boys under-representation in singing. To state, however, that there is no adult male interest in boys singing, however, is not entirely correct. Setting aside a homoerotic underground of which most boys were either innocent or reluctant to discuss, there is a strong adult male interest in the commercial aspects. If angel voices can be exploited to earn money, then they are of interest to the males who control the music industry. This possibility assumes significance as both boys and women are subordinated to a patriarchal order in which a young boys body and voice is manipulated to maintain the status quo of females as fodder for commercial music. It is this aspect of the study that is now examined in more depth. What has been learned about the reproduction of patriarchy within this particular niche of the music industry?

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Two studies were funded. The first was as an interdisciplinary enquiry which was to draw equally on the literatures of gender studies and music and voice, covering all genres of singing that are available to young males who have not attained adult vocal development. This study employed mixed methods. It was structured around 12 detailed case studies of boy performers, which were qualitative (described below) but also investigated the reception of their work by age peers. This latter process was predominantly quantitative, involving field work in a total of 17 secondary and nine primary schools distributed across all regions of England, Wales and the Isle of Man. The second study was funded to develop and test materials based on the outcomes of the first study. This had strongly suggested that a key issue to be tackled was an intergenerational one in which adult tastes dominated the market for the singing of 10 14-year-old boys. This study was, in consequence, significantly concerned with the way in which boys of this age were imaged through repertoire and dress to satisfy adult nostalgia and fantasy about childhood and the consequences of this for the perception of singing as an appropriately masculine activity amongst boys. Whiteley (2005) employs the terms wild boys (rock) who rebel through aggressive (and in the case of heavy metal, misogynistic masculinities) and nice boys (pop) who are idolised by females manipulated as passive consumers. This rebellion, which uses language calculated to destroy the idealised bond between boys and older women who think them cute, resists firmly any attempt to reverse the conventional male upon female direction of the subordinating gaze. It describes well a not inconsiderable rift which was found to be significant in the present studies. The main research instrument was a multimedia presentation of young male vocal performances. Audio samples of performances, short video sequences and visual examples of the way the singers had been imaged were included in a montage assembled with video production software. Twelve performances in the genres described above by boys aged between 10 and 15 were featured. This instrument was employed to stimulate discussion in the homes of boy performers and in music classes in the schools visited, a process of data gathering spanning in total some 2 years. In each of the primary schools, the Y5 and Y6 classes (ranging from one to three in number according to the size of the school) were visited. In the secondary schools, teachers were asked to identify a Y7, Y8 and Y9 class that would be timetabled for music during the days of the visit. Y10 or Y11 General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) sets were also visited in four of the schools. Focus groups of six male pupils, six female pupils and three male/three female pupils who had seen the presentations were also arranged. Schools were selected to include a range of different types in which boys might be expected to sing as well as schools chosen on the grounds that music was not a particular feature of the curriculum. As far as possible considerations such as the need to achieve a spread of urban and rural location and differing ethnic and social class demographics were taken into account, although the nature and impact of the music department with regard to boys singing was the primary variable. The primary schools visited were located in the catchment areas of the secondary schools. Nine KS2, 20 KS3 and four KS4 classes were visited, resulting in data from over 500 young people. A full account of this process is given elsewhere (Ashley 2008a, 2008b).

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Data gathering from the 12 case study boy performers was significantly more detailed. Visits were made to their homes and, whenever possible, observations were made and additional interviews conducted in naturalistic settings such as recording studios. The approach to the performers was through an interpretive, humanistic phenomenological framing (Smith and Osborn 2003, Kendler 2005, Faulkner and Davidson 2006) developed through a previous ethnography (Ashley 2002). Professional discussions were initiated in which the boys talked about their work as performers in relation to the other boy performers, audiences, record companies and marketing. This methodology aimed to integrate observations with an iterative, respondent validated approach to interviewing. The approach was heavily influenced, not only by the emphasis in grounded theory upon continuous interplay between analysis and data collection (Strauss and Corbin 1998) but also by the desire to be naturalistic (Lincoln and Guba 1985). The iterative approach sought also, with some success, to draw the boys into the analysis. This was a process of treating young people, not as objects of research but as co-participants in theorisation and the creation of meaning (Woodhead and Faulkner 2000, Alderson 2003). Ethically, in addition to such routine considerations as anonymity, ownership of data and right to withdraw, it was felt necessary to treat the boys who had consented to case studies as defended subjects, a term associated with Hollway and Jefferson (2000). Frosh et al. (2003) report on their psychoanalytic understanding of the term defended subject when working with boys who were encouraged to express dissent from hegemonic constructions of masculinity that, for example, privileged football. Sagan (2007) similarly discusses an unconscious urge to keep levels of anxiety down. It was known from previous studies that boys who sing are likely to adopt multiple identity strategies to cope with conflicting pressures (Ashley 2002, 2008b). Thus the boys themselves moved on a daily basis between different constructions of masculinity, some hegemonic (the playing of sport, roughhousing and having a laugh) some subordinate (singing) and some complicit (enjoying the patriarchal dividend offered by the music industry). The ethical concern was with not interrupting the boys ability to do this. Results Theory did indeed evolve during my conversations with the boys, and understanding of the emergent phenomenon addressed in this paper continues to evolve. It must be appreciated that some of the case studies occurred later in the process than others. The two shortly reported are amongst the latest and represent the emergence of an issue, unanticipated at the design phase of the study, but potentially of ongoing significance in view of its coherence with the literature on patriarchy within the music industry. Analysis was through transcription and the coding of emergent themes, supported by second order questioning and the cross referencing of interviews during the process of iteration. Though they worked largely in isolation on their own albums, the boys showed some interest in the work of their professional peers when invited to look at these during interview. A particular issue has been that of data saturation. Bowen (2009) is skeptical of the treatment of this concept by some researchers and reminds us that sampling must continue to the point of redundancy.

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Sample adequacy is more important than sample size, and adequacy means that the research participants selected must be those who best represent or have the most knowledge of the research topic. Data saturation from this unusual if not unique sample occurred early on. In the coding, age and sex of the audience were universal themes, the perceptions being (a) that the audience was mostly elderly and female and (b) that the ideal target audience was girls of their own age. On this topic, the boys found common cause and appeared in some case to be relieved to hear of fellow sufferers who also got the grannies. On the topic of grannies and absent male audiences, the eleventh and twelfth of these unusually knowledgeable participants had added nothing new to the data contributed by the previous 10. That grannies are the audience appears to be the saturation point. However, another frequent theme was musical integrity and most of the performers were contemptuous of bubble gum or candyfloss pop in which a boy of their own age was deliberately imaged to appeal either to unsophisticated teeny girls or older women. Indeed, an embryonic patriarchal attitude emerged in several of the interviews. The examples below both show how boys construct the music they value as serious in opposition to the fodder they are required to perform to satisfy a commercial market of gullible females:
. . . you know, hes got the old grannies. Maybe theyre trying to get the younger parents and the younger generation. Do you think theyll succeed? I think they will because a lot of the population of Great Britain are quite gullible. (Chris, case study 3) Songs that are written by John Rutter and people . . . are targeted at ignorant people that dont know much about music. Theyre cheesy and cheesy songs are the ones that people mostly like. (Nigel, case study 12) Old people who go O wow, the voice of an angel! My mum would listen to him. Shes got really bad taste. (Dan, case study 4)

These perceptions correlated strongly with the results of the school surveys which revealed almost identical perceptions from the peer audience viewpoint. The most common reason given by peer audiences for not listening to the work of the boy performers, mentioned in over 90% or replies, was that the music was for old people and grannies (the word granny or similar words such as nan were used frequently and consistently). The second most frequently given reason, mentioned in 21% of cases was that the music was not created by the young singers themselves. School audiences appeared to place quite a high premium on originality and song writing. Commercial pop music was frequently derided by the young audiences, with girls as well as boys showing a surprisingly rapid tendency between the ages of 11 and 14 to discard bubblegum in favour of something perceived to have more integrity. However, coding of the qualitative data included categories that distinguished between voice, repertoire, genre and body and this revealed that whilst boys and girls offered comments in all of these categories, boys comments on body were infrequent and reserved, whilst girls were most frequently about the body. For example:

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All the songs are terrible. Tom said he was a rock singer but that was pop! (boy, Y9) Hes got a deeper voice and thats better. (boy, Y8) Its a really nice, sexy image and the clothes are lush. So is the hair. (girl, Y9) Hes better looking, cuter than the others. (girl, Y8).

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The word cute was used frequently and appeared to have two meanings in the study. It could, as in the above comment, be used by young girls to describe a nice boy they would like to go out with. It could also be used, in the words of one 14-year old, to market boys to aging mothers who might want to trade in their teenage sons. The boy performers had a clear view of this. They did not generally like the word cute, but could not resist being flattered by the implied interest of the former use. The latter usage worried them, in varying degrees up to the extent of quite terrified. I now present two extracts from the case studies of boy performers which illuminate the degree to which the innocence of the young people is manipulated and their cuteness exploited. It is my contention that these case studies reveal a process of unwitting conscription into the perpetuation of patriarchal hegemony in which boys are serious and girls fodder within the commercial music industry. Case study: cute and commercial (from case study 11) Grant (pseudonym) was a winner of the prestigious BBC Chorister of the Year award and a member of a treble boy band of some repute with two well-marketed pop/classical crossover CDs to its credit. I had been keen to include this particular group in the research because of the suggestion that their CDs had made the boy treble voice cool. It was already known from the survey work in school that the singing on the CDs was not considered cool by the peer group as represented across the 17 schools. In particular, I was struck by the marketing announcement that appeared on the bands official website:
So what are Bn band!? They are cute. They are commercial . . . They might sing like angels but they have discarded their traditional uniform of cassocks and surplices for Gap chinos, designer suits and trendy haircuts.

The word cute, as described above, had emerged as significant in the previous 10 case studies and the survey work in school. The word commercial was newly introduced to the study by this announcement, unfortunately too late to test against previous case studies the degree to which data saturation might be reached. Nevertheless, it had immediate significance because of the tensions between commercial exploitation and the presentation of singing as a freely available social activity with the potential to promote boys well-being. Boys in previous case studies had made comments suggesting that they were aware of being exploited, though powerless to do anything about it. Here, we had a brazen example of the record company making a virtue, if not of exploitation, certainly of commercial. Would Grant be in agreement that it was virtuous to be both cute and commercial? I met Grant in his home, one or other of his parents being present throughout the interview. We began with exploring a set of cartoon figures that I had used in all the school-based research (Figure 1).

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Figure 1. Cartoon representation of pubertal growth stages.

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The figures are designed to show the stages of physical growth that correspond to stages of vocal maturity and most boys of Grants age (13) when asked to choose the figure that represents their current physical status of growth tend to choose the centre one. Grant did too, but when asked whether his actual choice would be his ideal choice he chose the figure to the right. I asked him whether he was content with being a boy or whether he wished to leave childhood behind and was anxious to grow up. Contrary to the moral panic of toxic childhood (Palmer and Leaman 2006) he affirmed several times that he was content with being a boy. His idealisation of the figure to the right was due to its apparent possession of physical capital, not its status of more nearly approaching adulthood:
Its great being a kid, but Id like to be taller, bigger, stronger, muscly with a jutting out chin. I hear a boy talking here! This is about sport isnt it? Yes! (face lights up). I like lots of sport (he reels off a long list which seems to include everything except tennis, which is singled out as not particularly liked). I dont feel pressured, I love being a kid, rolling around in the mud, free to do what you like, playing in the paddling pool and getting all your clothes soaked. Getting in trouble with the teachers is the best part! (said with a broadening grin). Messing about and annoying the ones who cant shout properly . . .

In this extract, three stereotypes of normal boyhood are confirmed in one go: plays sport; gets muddy; annoys teachers. I presented Grant with a tabulation of the words used to describe his band on the marketing site and asked him to indicate on a scale of 1 10 how happy he was with each of the words (Figure 2).
CUTE COMMERCIAL ANGELIC TALENTED CHEEKY PURE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Figure 2. Boy singers contentment with cute and commercial labels.

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It is clear here that he shares the doubts about calling a boy cute. It is not an appropriate word for Grant any more than it is for his fellow performers or the peer audiences in schools. Angel is similarly uncertain, though less objectionable than cute.
Well, youve only given yourself a 9 for talent! Suitably modest! No one gives a 10! Its nothing to boast about. Its good to know you have it, but you dont go round shoving it in peoples faces. So what about cute? I can deal with it. I wouldnt call myself cute, but, well, older people say when I sing, Oh, youre so cute (imitative voice) but it doesnt bother me that much. Im angelic sometimes, but most of the time probably not.

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So youd say its an occupational hazard? Yes.

Cheeky, however, meets with his approval. It is part of what normal boys are supposed to be like-slightly rebellious, liable to leave their bedroom in a mess or cheek teachers the patriarchal dividend of boys will be boys (Reay 2001, Jackson 2006). The new finding is that to be commercial, unlike cute is perceived as virtuous.
What about commercial? Why is it quite good to be commercial? Well, Im with UMG. They make money if people buy the CD. Thats fair and its good for them.

Here, Grant seems defensive of the music industry because it is seen to be ethical. Its practices are fair. This is in contrast with some of the other case studies where the boys were explicitly critical, recognising a degree of exploitation of both themselves and audiences. The way each boy had been treated would seem to be a variable here (see Ashley 2008b, 2009 for fuller expositions). The second case study now reported, which was the next in sequence after that of Grant, takes the commercial theme further and shows how a 14-year old learns the hard way about the bottom line of commercialism and piracy in the music industry. It also shows the degree to which sexual and economic innocence exist in proportion in the life of a young person who is evidently in transition from a mother son relationship to a relationship with the adult males who both control the music industry and lurk on the internet as potentially part of the homoerotic underground in boys singing.

Case study: weirdoes and the theft of intellectual property (from case study 12) Nigel, though middle class in terms of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) was not from a wealthy home. He had been a full-time chorister, attending a choir school and singing daily. At our first meeting, he described to me how he was shortly to record a CD album, capturing his treble voice before it disappeared for ever. It later emerged that this, unlike most of the other albums in the case studies, was a self-financed

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venture, incurring significant costs in the hire of a professional studio. In order to raise money to pay off the debt incurred, he had come up with the ingenious idea of creating his own website, from which tracks from the album could be downloaded and donations made. These donations were to be split between paying off the debt to the recording studio and giving to the charities that had supported his musical education. The website was also to be used to communicate to a wide public the benefits and enrichment that a boy could enjoy through singing, and encourage more boys to sing. He perceived (correctly) that such a website would be of considerable interest to me. Doubts soon surfaced, however, about the degree to which the issue of child internet safety had been considered, particularly when I saw some of the innocent pictures he had chosen of himself. In accordance with the ethical protocol for the study, I felt obliged to raise my concerns with his mother. Thus began a lengthy correspondence in which all sorts of problem did emerge. One uncomfortable meeting was held between the three of us at which he showed some signs of distress at the scale of the problem to be solved and the amount of effort he had put in to date. Innocence was clearly evaporating fairly rapidly. At this stage, the situation could be summarised as:

Nigel recognised that he might be in some kind of (unspecified) danger from weirdoes (his word) accessing his website. He and his mother both recognised that various solutions in the form of controlled access and password protection might be tried. Neither he nor his mother possessed the technical capability to achieve this and were thus disempowered in a relationship in which those (older males) who understood web design were the powerful.

Persistence and determination eventually resulted in some form of password protection, but this appeared to be unreliable with regard to who could and could not access the site. The degree to which the boy understands the homoerotic interest in his voice and image and interprets it as a threat to his safety is encapsulated in this interview, which was videotaped because Nigel had agreed to contribute to a university inter-generational seminar.
When I heard you were doing this, I thought it was great, but I did raise a few issues of concern, with your Mum, didnt I? Yes, well, weve looked at the issues of concern and weve worked on them. What do you understand the issues of concern to be? Well the main one, obviously, is to keep weirdoes out. We dont want any strange fifty year olds with beards wanting nice cool, not cool as in, cute fourteen year old boys, Im not saying anything but, um, (pause) just to keep weirdoes out.

Elsewhere in the interview, a brief reference is made to setting the weirdoes pulses racing at the sight of the 14-year old but, as with case study 1, I did not probe any further to find out the thoughts suppressed during the pause. Knowing that being the potential object of the weirdo gaze is clearly distasteful to him is probably sufficient. Further interest might be gratuitous.

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Later, the issue of the technical problems with keeping undesirables out and allowing access to those with benign motives in crops up:
Even though me and my mum know nothing about creating websites, my brothers too involved in creating a car and things to be able to help at the moment and I need help myself and my Mum need help because we dont know how or what to do

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Not insignificantly, an adult female and a younger boy are equally subordinate in power to an older brother who belongs to the community of adult males empowered by their mastery of web technology (Oakley 1994). Later, during the course of the case study, a new problem rapidly emerged. A Google search by Nigel and his mother revealed that certain agencies had been downloading some of his songs, creating fake album covers from images pirated off the website and passing the work off as their own intellectual property. Various commercial companies (or pirates posing as such) had apparently been charging 99p a download as though these were legal. The mother estimated from the number of hits recorded on these sites that the boys debt to the recording company would have been paid off three times over. In this extract from a later interview, the concept of intellectual property theft is introduced and the conversation is not constrained by the taboos with regard to sexual innocence that inevitably dominate the relationship between an adult male researcher and a 14-year-old boy:
OK, now, moving on, what is intellectual property? Ive no idea! Right. You will have by the end of this interview! Er, now theres a song, there are several songs on your website, The Angel Gabriel, is that one of them?

The answer here is bold and the researcher assumes a different stance, unconstrained by the taboo of sexuality. An innocent 14-year old is about to be initiated into the adult world of intellectual property and the interview assumes an authoritarian dimension that is both pedagogic and pastoral. The balance of power shifts to the adult male as the territory shifts to the safer one for a man/boy relationship of economics. First, the extent of the innocence is explored by simply asking the boy to tell the story of what happened to his Angel Gabriel recording. He explains at some length how there was confusion over the cost of the recording, resulting in his incurring an additional 250 of debt due to a genuine misunderstanding. After some time, when it is clear that Nigel is not going to draw on such concepts as intellectual property, a question is finally planted:
Who does your voice belong to? Me. Right. So your property? My property, and my property is in Bn! studios as well because the main CD is in Bn! studios which is the recording studio and, um, so I can, I should be able to charge people for using it but what weve found out is . . . .

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This question releases another lengthy recount in which Nigel tells the story of how he and his mother have tracked the illegal downloads. His body language as revealed by the video recording reveals considerable animation and suppressed anger at the way he has become a victim. It seems clear that the issue uppermost in his mind is the debt he has to pay off:
Well, I dont like it, huh, whilst it is, whilst it is flattering, it may be flattering but its not nice. I dont like Bindistinct! when I could be making money

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The final meeting with Nigel occurred when he visited the university to give a presentation on his website experience at the symposium on inter-generational relationships, designed to facilitate dialogue between young people and adults. Also presenting in this symposium was a male police officer specialising in child protection and internet safety. I received the following thank you letter after the event:
. . . it was also very useful to me, both for the website, and for life skills in general, hearing everyones point of view was extremely interesting, and the truth that the police man (sic) showed was very scary

The scary truth presented by this police officer to this choirboy is that he is indeed right to assume that the sex of weirdoes is male, but that the weirdo threat is considerably worse than he had imagined. Nevertheless, Nigel talked in a relaxed way about weirdoes. It was not this which elicited the animated response in the video recorded interview. It was the fact that IP theft was not nice because I could be making money. Discussion Connells point is that that men and boys have a role to play in achieving gender equality. The argument I have advanced in this paper is that boys involved in the commercial music industry, though possessed of a certain degree of innocence, are also undergoing socialisation into what Connell would call complicit masculinity. They may be unlikely to embrace a non-complicit masculinity as to do so would mean to relinquish the patriarchal dividend and to render themselves vulnerable to further subordination in the gender order. It may be helpful to reiterate at this point Connells terminology and how it applies to boy singers. Marginalised masculinities are those performed by social groups subordinate to the hegemonic mainstream, for example black or working class. Subordinate refers to relationships within the gender order. Gay masculinities are most commonly cited as exemplars, but singing, as a performance associated with emotional leakiness (Thompson and McGrellis 2001) and low physical capital (Bourdieu 1986) would be subordinate in the gender order to performances in sport that more closely approach the hegemonic ideal. Complicit masculinities are those that do not act in ways prescribed by the hegemonic model but passively sustain it in order to reap the patriarchal dividend (Connell 2005). Masculinities, in Connells scheme, may also be authorised (for example, successful black athletes may rise beyond marginal status) and it is clear that

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strongly heterosexual performances by male singers such as Tom Jones may allow the authorisation of an otherwise potentially subordinate masculinity. Connell is also keen to stress that exemplary masculinities such as that of Sylvester Stallone also change and adapt to new conditions that permit the continued domination by patriarchy. Complicit masculinities play a key pivotal role in this process. The boy singers have a heavy personal investment in this process. We have already seen how they move on a daily basis between different constructions of masculinity, some hegemonic (the playing of sport, roughhousing and having a laugh) some subordinate (singing) and some complicit (enjoying the patriarchal dividend offered by the music industry). They often talked openly and in some depth about such matters as being positioned as gay, explicitly articulating an understanding of multiple identity and describing their own identities as shifting and context specific. From some of the other case studies:

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Im a different person at school, I play football and I dont talk about singing. In choir surrounded by people who are doing the same thing, it is different in school, its seen as strange. I much prefer to sing in head voice in choir, but I did a Queen number at school in tummy [sic] voice. I wouldnt use head voice at school.

Collins (2006) too has noted that boys are careful to differentiate between situations where they know other boys will understand their singing and situations where they know they will be ridiculed. It is asking them a lot to side explicitly with the gender equality project. Chris explicitly articulates here how he reaps a patriarchal dividend with girls through his own careful management of his image as a worker in the music industry:
If you met some girls your age that you didnt know well, would you tell them that you were a singer? Would you be absolutely truthful and say Im a chorister and I sing in church? The more Ive told girls the more they, they dont seem to mind. Um, erm, and they seem to, they seem to even respect me more . . . I wouldnt say I was a chorister and I wear a frilly frock, but I would say I am a singer and I work professionally. If I said it to one girl and it didnt turn out well, well! then maybe I wont say it to the next. Blong pause!But if they like that, then they go and tell their friends that are there. (Chris case study 3)

These boys have invested heavily in those hegemonic masculinities that counterbalance the subordinate ones in their identities and are complicit in reaping the economic rewards that accrue through their unique, transitory assets their angel voices and the authorisation of their bodies as legitimate gaze objects through the dividend of conformity to compulsory heterosexuality. There have been criticisms of Connells theory. Ellis (2008) draws on authors such as Mac-an-Ghaill and Haywood (2006) to argue that Connells emphasis on hegemony and hierarchy underestimates the extent to which the formation of masculine identity is characterised by fluidity, fragmentation and contradiction. Ellis continues to argue that Connells pro-feminist stance and preoccupation with the concept of gender oppression results in insufficient attention to other cultural

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markers such as age, class and ethnicity, which all combine with gender to interact in the complex process of identity formation (Mac-an-Ghaill and Haywood 2006, p. 120). It is certainly true that age (or generation) emerged as a highly significant factor in the present study and that gender could not be understood without at least equal consideration of generation. The power relationships were significantly more than those simply of gender, not least through the degree in which younger boys exercised power over older women through their apparently greater cultural capital, itself associated strongly with social class. The boys also exercised power over both younger girls and older women through the cuteness of their bodies, a reversal of the traditional direction of the gaze, engineered by adult male power brokers associated with the recording industry. Though adult males were the main power brokers in this relationship, the generational subordination of younger males to older males occurred as a power struggle within the power struggle. Older males exercised power not only through their cultural domination of the music industry but also through their technological domination of internet activity. Other adult males, however, were potentially disempowered by their positioning as possible weirdoes associated with a homoerotic underground interest in boy singers. This potentially empowers the young boys as having rights to protection and the older women as the natural protectors of children in the face of the evidence that weirdoes are likely to be adult males. Demetriou (2001) has also seen potential limitations in Connells theories and prefers the notion of a hybrid bloc which unites practices from diverse masculinities to ensure the reproduction of patriarchy. He cites the Promise Keepers as an example of a hybrid masculinity that combines traits of both sensitive and tough man. It is, he argues, the adaptability that comes through this hybridisation that ensures the continued dominance of patriarchy through strategic alliances of masculinities. Connells theory may be limited in contrast because it sees non-white or nonheterosexual elements in hegemonic masculinity as a sign of weakness and contradiction. Many of these features are indeed consistent with the findings of my own study. The singing boys demonstrate agency, hybridity and strategic alliances within their masculinities. What is interesting in the present study is the degree to which the particular hybrid combinations of masculinities and strategic alliances which seem to characterise the case studies in this paper are the result of an agency that results from innocence, a complicity that is unwitting, at least in its earlier stages. The point was made earlier that data saturation with regard to grannies and cute occurred early on in the study with no confounding cases. The issues of the commercial exploitation of cute and the associated economic innocence occurred too late in the study for data saturation similarly to be reached. There are good grounds, however, to continue a similar line of enquiry, building in such concepts to the questioning. Not least is the need to involve both boys and girls in critical reflection on the practices of the music industry and this alone prevents foreclosure on Connells call to involve boys and men in the gender equality project. Economic innocence itself is a significant concept for further study, given the degree to which young people are on the one hand significant consumers of music and fashion but on the other hand innocent of such economic considerations as mortgage repayments or, indeed, the true cost of insuring on the road the first car bought for the bargain of 500.

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Innocence remains a significant issue, but this discussion has shown that neither boy performers nor their girl audiences are innocent in the sense of a romanticised blank slate. They are, by the age of 14, already stakeholders in the patriarchal dividend. Where there is still a lack of knowledge or experience, it permits young people to engage in what might be called honest rhetoric. By this I mean that they are able to state a na ve commitment to equality of opportunity that is able to co-exist with the ongoing enculturation into complicit masculinity with some degree of integrity. By the time a reflexive knowledge of gender relations has developed, stakes in the patriarchal dividend may have become so high that only the most committed will respond to Connells call for men and boys to play an active role in the gender equality project. Education about the gendered practices of the music industry may yet be a significant means of advancing this particular cause.

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