FROM ROCK 'N 'ROLL TO HARD CORE PUNK - UKZN ...

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relationship of women to the genre, ,both as fans and musicians.
Three categories of gender relations explored in the genre: viz.
exscription of women; misogyny; and romance.
Insofar as this study is concerned, the most pertinent category
of these three is that of the exscription of women, and thus it
is only this category that will be discussed here. Walser argues
that men are intrinsically threatened by the power of women to
seduce, and therefore control them. The power of mutual sexual
pleasure as a means of weakening male independence and freedom
is consciously exscripted, along with women, from the image of
heavy metal music and music videos. Instead, male bonding and a
goal-centred instead of a relationship-centred dependency is
promoted.
Walser goes so far as to argue that heavy metal music relies on
the exscription of women for its appeal:
Even in many nonperformance metal videos, where
narratives and images are placed not on a stage but
elsewhere, the point is the same: to represent and
reproduce spectacles that depend for their appeal on
the exscription of women... In Judas Priest's 'Heading
Out to the Highway', a song from 1981 ... performance
is not literally represented. The band's two guitar
players drag race on an empty highway in the middle of
nowhere, flagged on by the singer, whose macho
stances, gestures, and singing are the only elements
of the real performance retained in the fantastic
setting. The song and images are about freedom and
adventure, and we don't even need the initial 'Hit 'em
boys' to know that we're talking about a specifically
male kind of freedom. There are no women to be seen in
this video, and what there is to be seen - the cars,
the road, the leather, the poses - have long been
coded as symbols of male freedom, linked as signs of
aggressiveness and refusal to be bound by limits ...
Not only [Rob Halford's] voice but the singer's
writhing and posing provide a spectacle of male
potency for a male audience, including both the band
on-screen and the presumed male viewer of the video. 6
6 R. Walser Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy
Metal Music, p. 115.