After all, since we were little girls, we’ve been taught to believe in a kind of fairy tale world—a world where good always triumphs over evil, and where the meek always inherit the earth. We learn early on that beauty is a woman who’s patient and gentle and kind towards even the most heinous beast. We’re taught that good girls get rewarded with good grades and popularity and a boyfriend and a job, and then, with true love and marriage. So we’re taught to equate good manners with good character, and good character with success. What on earth are we supposed to do when we realize that this equation does not in fact describe our real lives, that this law governs only our fantasies?

This is what I think to myself as I sit in a café in London and wait for the interviewer to arrive. The interviewer, a reporter who works for a popular British music magazine, has telephoned in advance to apologize for being late. He’s being polite. An interview is, after all, a kind of business transaction. It’s subject to the same rules as a meeting between the leaders of two separate companies contemplating a merger; each side holds something to gain.

Across from me, the four men who make up my band are sitting in a booth built for four. I’m the fifth member, and unfortunately, I’ve gotten stuck on a bar stool so tall and unsteady it seems to be modeled on the Eiffel Tower. My seat teeters back and forth as my bandmates down beers and trade lines from Family Guy. I imagine I am wobbling a thousand feet above the ground, balanced on a delicate web of wire and air. I can feel the imaginary wind, and suddenly, there are butterflies in my stomach.  I am beginning to get nervous about this interview. I’m nervous, but also strangely excited because somehow, during the course of my bandmates’ chat, the name of the interviewer has slipped, and I’ve heard that her name is Sasha. At once, I am overcome with a secret joy. “Thank God!” I think. “At last, I’m going to be interviewed by a woman!”

In all of my many interviews as a member of the band Titus Andronicus—dozens and dozens of interviews, more interviews than I can remember—I can count on one hand the number of times I have been interviewed by a woman. In fact, I know this number right off the top of my head, because the number is exactly two. Although I know that there exists other women who write, report, and work for major media outlets, judging from my experience in the indie rock world, music journalism might as well belong entirely to men. And since most indie rock bands are comprised entirely of men as well, most interviews simply become conversations among men. Can you imagine then how excited I was to finally meet a female reporter for a major music magazine—and then, how utterly crestfallen I was, how my heart sank deep down into my chest and hit the bottom with a hollow thud, when Sasha appeared in his white dress shirt, beige sports coat, jeans and pointed, black dress shoes—every inch a man. “I should have known,” I thought to myself. “I told you so,” replied my heart.

The interview proceeds as usual, with questions about the making of the album, and the meaning of the lyrics, and the touring we’ve been doing. There is nothing to render this interview strange. It is hardly the first of its kind. I do not talk much because I’m scared of interviews. I never know what to say, and when to say it. I worry that my words are not as interesting as they appear to me, or that I’ll say something stupid and end up regretting everything I do say. I think so much about what to say in the interview that it’s usually gone before I’ve said anything at all. It feels like a missed chance—like something I’ve wanted to grab that has slipped away from me.

—

II.

Sasha twirls the pen in his hand as he asks Patrick a question regarding the band’s future plans. Meanwhile, my mind is drifting far off into the past. I remember my first interview. I actually waited for the interviewer to ask me a question directly—not realizing that I was free to answer any question, or really, to talk about whatever I wanted. Before my first interview, I imagined that the whole experience would resemble high school, where the interviewer would call on those who raised their hands. When the interviewer did not look at me at all, and instead, focused his eyes on the men in the room, I was utterly confused by the foreign logic of the whole experience. I waited and waited to be given permission to speak, but permission never came.

That feeling of a missed connection, of waiting and waiting to be rescued by someone, to be given my chance, reminds me of what it felt when I was fifteen and just starting to play the guitar. One day, while I was strumming my way through a few Green Day riffs, I heard the sounds of a band practicing in the house across the street. Some powerful force, a kind of hidden magnetism, propelled me as fast as I could towards that door where a kindly mother wearing an apron appeared and asked what I wanted. “I want to join the band,” I said. Soon I was racing down the basement stairs, so close to those thunderous vibrations that I could feel them in my feet. I ran faster and faster and then, in a second, saw suddenly spread out before my eyes the entire land of opportunity as it was revealed to me, bathed in the beautiful, gold light that late summer promises to autumn. The basement rec room held a drum set, a bass amp, a P.A., guitars, mics, and three teenage boys.

I’ll spare you the gory details of what happened then. Let’s just say that I played my heart out—played Green Day and Weezer covers and a melody I’d wrote myself and even the entire solo from "Stairway to Heaven," which I had memorized meticulously over several months. The guys just stared at me, vacantly, with empty eyes. They said nothing and nothing and nothing until the weight of the silence hung heavier in the room than the entire weight of the end of summer. I gathered up my guitar and slowly walked back up the stairs, leaving that basement and those boys behind me. The whole time, they never said a word.

—

III.

I’m back at the London café, where I sit with Sasha and my band and my glass of water and all my fear and self-doubt. Nothing has changed in the time I’ve spent in my own memory, and yet, now some tiny instrument inside me is more keenly attuned to the dynamics of this particular interview. I can feel more naturally the way in which men relate to each other, can hear the rise and fall of their voices and the pitch of their laughter. I can see the way they look into each other’s eyes. Some part of me is beginning to register their behavior, just as a scientist would note the smallest and most imperceptible movements of a creature under the microscope.

What I realize, suddenly, is this: Men are creatures who interrupt each other. That’s it. It sounds simple—so simple, I almost laugh out loud. Of course men interrupt each other. Why would they wait for each other to finish? They have a lot to say. They are confident. They are eager to express their opinions. They are not worrying about whether they’ve cut the interviewer off, whether they’ve just said something that reeks of bragodoccio, or whether they’re deeply lacking in musical skill. They are feeling comfortable, surrounded by familiar equals. They are simply talking, man to man.

Now the question settles deeper into my heart: Why has it never occurred to me that I should interrupt anyone? Who taught me to patiently wait my turn, to consider myself wrong, and to defer to the better judgment of others? Why do I always assume that I am the least interesting person in the room? Why did I think that those dumb high school guys not wanting me in the band was my own fault, and not theirs? An endless parade of parents, teachers, lovers, classmates, coworkers, bosses, bandmates, and friends marches by my closed eyelids. They march right by me, leaving me alone.

The conversation with Sasha turns to politics. Perhaps it is because of the sneaking feeling that women are not supposed to challenge men in this domain that the rebel in me whispers this is the perfect time to speak my mind. I focus hard on a blank spot on the white wall behind me and imagine that I am a woman crafted entirely out of string, with boundaries that weaken and stretch—a woman of limitless possibilities. I feel at once that I am empty inside, and yet that I envelop ideas and memories that might one day wrap themselves around the world. I think about my voice and imagine that it is very loud and clear. I take a deep breath and, in the midst of the conversation around me, just start shouting my own words—more and more of them, until they flow in a long, clear stream.

Soon, the conversation around me stops. Sasha turns his head and looks me in the eye, in a way he hasn’t before. I start to talk about what it is to be young in America and the way I have grown up in a post-911 world that values division, isolation, and fear. I tell Sasha what it’s like to live in a country that thrives on dualities, on inequalities between races and genders and sexual orientations. Sasha listens, and so do my band members. I feel elated, strange, and light inside, as if I’ve leapt off the side of an airplane and am floating, strangely, ten thousand feet above the ground. I do not imagine myself to be falling, but rather as existing in a new reality I’ve created for myself. There are no laws of gravity because there are no laws. All of the rules I’ve learned, all of that bullshit about being a woman, seems to be slowly drifting away, falling back down to the world I used to live in.

This same elation is what I feel whenever I stand on stage and play my guitar, when the powerful sense of freedom sweeps all the way down my body from my head to my feet. Crunching away on my chords above a blurry sea of fist-pumping bros, I feel myself to be utterly alone, outside of any kind of social context, like a sailor who’s setting foot on a strange new continent. I wonder if all those guys in the audience really see me for who I really am, and then, immediately, I realize that it does not matter to me in the least how anyone sees me. I know this is the kind of freedom that women have to find for themselves. It feels like I am interrupting the historical continuum, just by being myself.

Have you realized that women are always getting written out history? Did you know that it was Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, a black R&B songstress from Alabama, who wrote and first recorded the song “Hound Dog?” Elvis released it three years later, but for reasons relating to the social structure of our society, he got all the credit. It’s the exact same story they told me at Harvard, when “Major British Writers I” covered eleven hundred and fifty years of literature without mentioning so much as a single work written by a woman. High culture or low culture, our culture rewards the artistic pursuits of men over those of women. History, as we’re taught it, exists as little more than a conversation among famous men.

It’s no easy feat to pierce the fabric in which the great threads of our collective memory are woven. Women with the courage to interject their opinions into the historical conversation are remembered years after they have stopped releasing albums: Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Belinda Carlisle, and Kathleen Hanna, we remember because they were pioneers. They carved out a home for themselves in a world that was often hostile and unfair. They barged in awkwardly one night, during a great, hushed campfire chat, and interrupted all the cowboys on the frontier. These women lived, like great explorers, in places that did not truly exist before they led us there. Whenever I remember what it felt like to be fifteen, and scared and alone and searching for something I did not understand, I try to imagine that Nina Simone is walking ahead of me. She’s leaving the basement and climbing up the stairs towards the light.

Amy Klein is a freelance writer and musician living in Brooklyn. She plays in the bands Titus Andronicus, Solanin, and Hillii. You can follow her adventures on the road by visiting her online tour diary, amyandronicus.tumblr.com