This "Thigh Gap" YouTube Channel Proves That House Music Has a Misogyny Problem

Cut the crap, right now.

by Sam Wolfson

July 7, 2014, 5:57pm

Okay, you get the idea.

One of the most heinous things about the increasing popularity of pop-house has been the rise of YouTube channels that use the logic of lad magazines to gain attention. In the 80s, girls in bikinis were strewn across sports cars in motoring magazines, and in the 00s, they straddled Sony Ericssons on the covers of tech magazines. These days, they lie face down and ass up, under a sunset and a Sierra Instagram filter, and they are the visual placeholders for this vanilla, high street house.

It doesn't say much about dance music's supposed egalitarianism when tracks, nearly always by male producers, have to be marketed with girls with their waps dangled over an infinity pool. Majestic Casual are of course the worst offenders, but almost every house music channel of this ilk uses this cheap tactic (UKF and Eton Messy are two notable exceptions, but it's utterly rife). Things have got so shitty that this new channel, Gap Beats, has only two rules: that it will only upload the baitest house music (which I'd be shocked if they have the rights to), and that every track will be accompanied by a woman displaying her thigh gap.

If you don't spend your time tracking fourth-wave feminist skirmishes on Twitter, you might not know that the thigh gap is a small space that appears between your legs if you stand one foot next to the other, and are sometimes pretty skinny. It's become a sort of badge of pride, although most people reckon it's camera angle bullshit. Either way, it's a pretty damning indictment of the sort of base-level misogyny that is dominating high street clubbing at the moment. It was only yesterday that we learnt about girls in Magaluf nightclubs giving 20-odd blowjobs for free drinks - we'd link to it, but it's pretty terrible - and a recent study looking at student nightlife found experiences of sexual molestation were so common, that groping in nightclubs was viewed by some women "as part of a normal night out."

This recent crop of pop-house has to accept that it's picking up a lot of the lads that, a few years ago, could be seen tub thumping to 'Mr. Brightside' at Propaganda. If artists don't want to encourage this kind of shit, then they should stop working with channels that promote their tracks with boobs, and take legal action against ones like Gap Beats.