I love our music scene. I spent more than half my life going to shows. I booked the bands, worked the bars, scanned the tickets. I’ve created the merch, created the connections, and made things that felt impossible happen time and time again. Sometimes on my own, sometimes with the help of friends.
Yet I still feel like an outsider.
It’s not just me. Every few years, another woman steps away. Maybe they were dating someone in a band and it ended badly, had a falling out with someone everyone else adores, or had someone pursuing them too aggressively. Rarely is it for a positive reason like having kids or finding a career they love. It always circles back to the same thing: men.
I can guarantee that most women have had a text conversation along the lines of:
“Hey, sorry to bother you with this, but something happened between me and this guy. Can you help me decode this and tell me if I’m in the wrong?”
I don’t often talk about what it was like growing up as a woman in our scene. Like many others, I learned the unwritten rules and adjusted the persona I put on to fit around them. I pushed against the “all men are shit” rhetoric.
I still believe that. No one is the “good guy” by default. Life has shades of gray. What matters is what happens after the fuck-up.
Every woman in our scene has stories about boundaries that got crossed and emotional fallout, and can name moments where they let it slide. Hell, I’ve got a few myself. Flirting that goes too far, sleeping with someone and learning he’s married with kids, drunk proposals that have no place within a friendship; at one point it feels like just another story.
We collect these stories, meet a trusted friend for a drink, and laugh them off. We learn to play our own feelings off as laughable because that’s how we survive that world.
Most of these stories stay buried in private chats with close confidants. When one does go public, it usually means someone was hurt enough to warn others. That hurt implies trust, often someone close. It means it wasn’t only about the incident but the aftermath. It’s what comes after the text: “Am I the crazy one?”
The scene revolves around alcohol, and many of these stories start with a drink. We can’t talk about them without acknowledging the power imbalance built into that. Men carry more responsibility when drinking with women, even if only because their bodies handle alcohol better. And with men as the majority in the scene, their conflict style becomes the default. Detached reactions get read as sensible, while direct ones get written off as emotional. That’s what ends up deciding which narratives people believe.
From what I’ve seen, women want the hurt acknowledged. They want to know the trust they placed in someone wasn’t misplaced. This applies to small hurts and severe ones. Women also tend to carry the guilt. The internal dialogue becomes:
“This person wouldn’t hurt me, so it must be my fault. Something I did. If only I could fix it. What did I do that made this happen, and how can I resolve it?”
For women in a masculine-coded scene who constantly monitor their own emotions and reactions to avoid toeing the line, the instinct is to adjust ourselves to keep others comfortable. That’s how we’re allowed to stay part of it.
To men, that level of emotional processing reads as dramatic. They wonder where all the emotions that weren’t expressed earlier are suddenly coming from. Many handle crossed lines by acknowledging them internally and moving on. Their style is introspective. The scene reinforces that this is the “reasonable” way to react; anything louder gets labeled dramatic.
Eventually, both sides talk to their friends. That’s where our little scene absolutely fucks up.
Women talk to each other, compare patterns, and say the behavior isn’t okay. Men talk to each other and decide it’s all too emotional and unstable, and maybe taking space is the best option.
Both sides project their past experiences onto the situation. Both end up feeling like the hurt party. And because they run in the same circles, stepping back cleanly is almost impossible. When you keep seeing the person who hurt you, how do you heal?
That’s why women often step back. They’re used to adjusting themselves to the emotional tone men set. They stop going to shows, booking shows, working events. Or they go public and try to warn others, hoping to put distance between themselves and the person who hurt them. Some will believe the story; others will dismiss it as dramatic. Even the “middle ground” of quietly moving on requires the woman to adjust yet again, accepting that her hurt will never be acknowledged.
Not every mistake needs to become a character assassination. Life is messy, people screw up, and lives don’t need to be destroyed over every misstep. But there is no clean path through this.
“Believe women” isn’t always about the incident. It’s about recognizing that the man often held more social, physical, or situational power. It’s about understanding that the aftermath wasn’t handled with accountability.
I don’t have an answer. I love both the men and women in this scene. But looking at the patterns – women stepping back to make room for the emotional withdrawal of men – it’s not a great picture. Withdrawal and refusal to acknowledge harm are emotional reactions. They just get framed differently.
Supporting women isn’t enough if the emotional language remains one-sided. Calling all men potential predators doesn’t fix anything either. We need to learn to communicate, to hold each other accountable, and to listen when someone is hurt.
More importantly, we need to call each other out on behavior that has no place in a scene that calls itself a community. Too often men fuck up and then withdraw from the situation, with their friends looking at that as the emotionally correct response. “He stepped away, why are you still bothered?” becoming the line said to the women. That’s not doing the work. That’s not accountability. That’s minimizing and patronizing. That’s reinforcing the rulebook you already wrote.
We should be able to exist in the scene we love without constantly questioning our place, our feelings, or our reactions. We should be allowed to show emotion without having it dismissed as drama. We shouldn’t have to make ourselves smaller to make room for the overblown emotional withdrawal of men. As long as our reactions are treated as hysterical and their avoidance gets framed as reasonable, nothing will change.
Note: This reflects my personal perspective within cisgender relationships and friendships, and it is generalized. It doesn’t always hold true, but it’s a pattern I’ve seen repeat. Take from it what you will.
