Last fall, Kayla Phillips, vocalist and songwriter for Tennessee’s hardcore/grindcore band Bleed the Pigs, published a piece with Noisey about her experiences as a black feminist with a natural inclination towards extreme music (“I’m more of a womanist,” she told me recently, “just to differentiate that I address intersectionality to ensure that people are aware that there are two sides that make me who I am”). She wrote:

My anger as a Black woman fronting an aggressive, politically charged hardcore/metal band with DIY punk ethics is somehow too much for [some listeners]. White punks screaming about the same politics, the same fucked-up shit, and even about racial issues and injustices they don’t even particularly face, are wholeheartedly accepted, never questioned, never told to tone down, and never told to relax. No matter how justified I am, or how down for the cause they are, they’re put off by my very valid rage. Why is that? What is it about a Black girl doing the same shit white men do that makes them feel like it’s too much? How am I the only one being labeled too aggressive in a genre that is all about aggression?

Despite the global appeal and presence of heavy metal culture, widespread online distribution, and increasing awareness among a diverse audience, there remains great resistance to discuss ongoing sexism, racism, and other issues that can potentially dissuade fans from actively participating in the subculture. “I don’t know why it is so hard for people to understand that not everyone is just like them,” Phillips told me. And Phillips isn’t alone; other artists and journalists are questioning the pervasiveness of discriminatory practices and beliefs within a musical culture that, ironically, not only boasts of its “inclusive community” (in which membership is predicated on fandom and not gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation), but also, because of its underground status, places an emphasis on fan participation and economic support in order to create and distribute music that will never, and doesn’t want to, receive true mainstream commercial attention.

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Despite both carrying reputations for rejecting societal norms, more often than not, using “heavy metal” and “feminism” in the same sentence is bound to raise some eyebrows. For anyone who remembers the 1980s hair metal craze and the ensuing complaints about the representations of women in Motley Crue and Poison videos, or the impossibly high number of women KISS bassist Gene Simmons allegedly had sex with during the band’s heyday, it makes total sense that the genre and the ideology mix as well as oil and water. And metal’s tense relationship with female representation is hardly confined to the past: The fact that, in the 21st century, a national music magazine publishes an annual issue and sponsors a national tour dedicated to physically attractive female metal musicians, doesn’t bode well for the argument that heavy metal can be a liberating and empowering culture for women.