DJ Mag’s list of the top 100 DJs has not a single female DJ listed. Not one. And it’s pissed off everyone from Peaches to Hanna Hanra, who wrote a fantastic response to DJ Mag in The Guardian this afternoon.
Hanra describes the “glass ceiling” she’s hit after 10 years of DJing, something she says she only thought happened to “women in skirt suits in big, windowed office blocks – not those whose working day starts at 11pm and involves sticky floors and a disco ball.”
There are plenty of female DJs with radio shows and acts like The Broken Hearts that should have grabbed DJ Mag’s attention. Annie Mac, despite her current Annie Mac Presents mix tape sitting at number one on the electronic charts, is probably the most shocking exclusion from the list. While I would argue that the "celebrities" and the wannabes who get paid to show up and "DJ" at a party with a pre-mixed CD and don't know how to properly mix songs are doing the rest of the female DJs a disservice, there are more than enough legit female DJs that damn well deserved to be on that list.
While I would never go so far to call myself a DJ, my husband was a DJ when we first met, and I’d always go along to gigs. I started doing my own set at the beginning of the night (when no one was paying attention and were all too sober to dance), and even from standing behind the decks, I got a glimpse of what it would be like to be a proper female DJ...and it wasn't exactly fun. I got called a "fat cunt", I had my ass grabbed plenty of times, and after I told a a particular 18-year-old boy to never touch me or my equipment, he got in my face and caused such a scene the police had to be called and the mother of the girl whose party it was threatened to kill me. (Seriously.)
Putting up with people when you're a DJ isn't easy, and unfortunately it gets even more complicated when you're a female DJ. So, here’s to the women like Hanna Hanra and Annie Mac who not only continue to put up with the bullshit, but, gender aside, are incredibly talented in their own right.
In the eloquent words of Peaches, “Your Top 100 DJ boy club list can eat a dick.”
Image via TheArches's Flickr