Mark Versus Women

Pitchfork features more reviews by dudes named "Mark" than by persons of a female persuasion. This via Ann Friedman and Amanda Marcotte who provides a much longer commentary, including a list of myths that "run women out of insufferable music snobbery." Here's number one:

Women are born with bad taste and need men to set them straight. Therefore a woman with good taste probably got it from her boyfriend. I’ve mentioned this noxiously specific stereotype before, so now I want to address why it has a lot of staying power: Confirmation bias. Hey, our lovers have influence on our taste. If anyone’s worth dating for any stretch of time, he/she is going to be able to turn you on to new bands and new songs and show you stuff in a new light. And if a guy teaches a woman about some stuff, then that becomes a confirmation of the “women get their taste from men” stereotype. But because there’s no converse stereotype, a man’s acquisition of taste from women doesn’t get noticed—hell, most people probably assume straightaway that he gathered that knowledge himself in a female-free fashion. Women can internalize this, too. It took me awhile to get over feeling weird that my high school boyfriend got me into Bowie, even though I in turn got him into the Pixies, until I realized I was dealing with an internalized stereotype and that it wasn’t as one-sided as I assumed it was. But I’d gone so long with the assumption that I didn’t have native good taste that it was too late to really get into writing record reviews.

Eerily reminiscent of the time I was trying to tell Kathleen Hanna how awesome she is and she bitterly replied, "what, your ex-girlfriend had a lot of Bikini Kill records or something" which I guess was my brief taste of how the other half lives.