Spread the News - Women and Beatbox PDF

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spread the news 21st century style assignment...

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Jeremy Carandang Dr. Robin Persad Em203-OC4 December 8, 2021.

Spread the News 21st Century Style - Women in the Beatbox Community

The problem I initially wanted to choose for this project was how women are treated in male dominated communities. As a student in the community music program here at Laurier I decided to look into women in music. Being a professional beatboxer as well, I have been following the beatbox community for several years and have been a part of many beatbox events in Canada. Recently the Grand Beatbox Battle 2021 took place in Warsaw Poland which I was quite excited for. After the event, on November 15th, the community spoke up about several sexual assault and sexual harassement allegations and the mistreatment of women at the event. The beatboxing community states that we are a welcoming community open to all people no matter what gender, sexual orientation, race, and class. To hear about these allegations was truly heartbreaking especially since it has been happening for many years. I decided to address this problem in my assignment because it is something that has been swept under the rug for many years and something that I am passionate about, beatboxing. How can we use social media to raise awareness to the problem? As mentioned earlier, this problem has been happening for years. At Grand Beatbox Battle 2019 prior to coivd, a similar situation happened where a beatboxer was cancelled and banned from being at any beatbox events due to a sexaul assault and rape allegation. The problem goes further than just live events in the beatbox community, the problem is consistent especially in the online community with beatbox videos of female beatboxers being objectified and disrespected in the comment sections and other social media content.

In many male dominated communities, this problem exists and so I decided to research about other communities that are mainly male dominated to compare and contrast information. I found out that in the music production community, many females feel the same way and their work/art is lost and their face, body, and image become the main focus in a negative way. I had to understand what toxic masculinity meant and how this connects with people in the music industry and other communities who use their fame and power to act in an abusive manner towards the opposite and non-binary genders. Misogynistic men seem to be entitled because of the power dynamic between them and women. This is prominent in male dominated communities such as the beatbox community where in a competitive environment (similar to sports), men view women below them and this is consistent through the information that I found researching about communities that predominantly consisted of more male figures over females. It is quite common for men to act this way and having that power that is ignited by fame because of the art they are able to perform and inspire their fans with, gives them more incentive to view others below them. You can see how this is a problem if an artist with a big following and influence spreads negative information and acts a certain way to the opposite sex. So what can we do to move towards a better community where women can feel safe and appreciated? After thinking about the problem over the past few weeks I believe that to begin thinking about a solution we must start with ourselves, our responsibility to improve our views and actions towards women. This also means holding our peers and friends accountable for their actions. If we see something, say something. This applies to the online community as well. If we see inappropriate comments and slurs towards women, delete them, try to contact the creator of the video or content that you are viewing to delete them. You can even reply to these comments and say we do not tolerate negative comments in our community. For many years, women have felt this way in our community, they are hurting. Listen to the female voices in our community and actively listen, respond to them with supportive words such as, “I am here to listen”, “what can we do to help?”, “what do you need?”, “I understand”. Lastly, show your support, raise awareness, and educate others.

This can be done through social media as many beatboxers use online platforms to share their beatbox art and other related content. Some suggested platforms are twitter, instagram, and YouTube. For example, after I created my prezi presentation on “Women and Beatbox”, I decided the best way to share this information is through an instagram post as most beatboxers use instagram to share their content. I also have a large following of beatboxers on my instagram so it made more sense to post it there. My prezi had three main points and this was translated through the multiple image post option on instagram into three images in one post. This worked well because I got a lot of comments from other beatboxers who gave very kind words to the post and really appreciated the information I posted. This assignment helped me learn more about the power of technology in the 21st century and how fast information can be spread to people. From hearing what happened in just a few days after an event that took place in Poland to providing information and raising awareness to the issue within a few weeks shows how powerful the technology that we have is and how we can use it to better our communities and ultimately our society. Seeing the comments on my posts were a huge eye opener for me and to see that people can digest information easily and even challenge different opinions online is quite incredible. I learned a lot in just a few weeks about the problem and was able to come up with solutions that I believe are a step in the right direction to improving the Beatbox Community.

Work Cited WOLFE, P. A. U. L. A. (2021). Women in the studio: Creativity, control and gender in popular music sound production. ROUTLEDGE. Park, J. (2020, July 11). Sexual misconduct within the beatbox community: We must do better. HUMAN BEATBOX. Retrieved December 9, 2021, from https://www.humanbeatbox.com/articles/sexual-misconduct-statement/. Ashley Morgan Researcher and Senior Lecturer. (2020, December 17). The real problem with toxic masculinity is that it assumes there is only one way of being a man. The Conversation. Retrieved December 9, 2021, from https://theconversation.com/thereal-problem-with-toxic-masculinity-is-that-it-assumes-there-is-only-one-way-of-beinga-man-110305.

Link to prezi: https://prezi.com/view/nF1BXzGYLKmgIQGSYZr6/ Infographic:

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