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The perpetuation of hegemonic male power and

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from the music industry

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The perpetuation of hegemonic male power and the loss of boyhood

innocence: case studies from the music industry
Martin Ashleya
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Faculty of Education, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK

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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; final version received 23 April 2010)

It has been argued by R.W. Connell that gender equality requires the willing co-
operation 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
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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
 60 M. Ashley

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 poststructur-
alist perspective on performing or doing the masculinities that are available to
children from the gender discourses they encounter. Connell and Messerschmidt
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(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 nave 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.
 Journal of Youth Studies 61

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
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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-year-
old 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
 62 M. Ashley

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.
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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?
 Journal of Youth Studies 63

Methodology
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 inter-
generational 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
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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 inconsider-
able 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).
 64 M. Ashley

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
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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.
 Journal of Youth Studies 65

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
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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:
 66 M. Ashley

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).

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
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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).
 Journal of Youth Studies 67

Figure 1. Cartoon representation of pubertal growth stages.

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
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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 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

COMMERCIAL 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ANGELIC 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

TALENTED 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

CHEEKY 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

PURE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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

 68 M. Ashley

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.
So youd say its an occupational hazard?
Yes.
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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
 Journal of Youth Studies 69

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.
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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.
 70 M. Ashley

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

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
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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 . . . .
 Journal of Youth Studies 71

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

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:
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. . . 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
 72 M. Ashley

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 under-
standing of multiple identity and describing their own identities as shifting and
context specific. From some of the other case studies:

Im a different person at school, I play football and I dont talk about singing.
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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
pauseBut 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 counter-
balance 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
 Journal of Youth Studies 73

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
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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 non-
heterosexual 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.
 74 M. Ashley

Conclusion
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 nave 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.
Downloaded By: [Ashley, Martin] At: 14:34 25 November 2010

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