All 5 Brit nominees for Artist of the year (Gener neutral) are……..

This was quite predictable, as others have stated. The default human being is still very much a male person, and we humans have an astonishing ability not to notice that this is incorrect (think of that 'ascent of man' picture which is supposed to show how we came about in the sense of evolution, by a series of walking creatures which slowly morph into a (white) male homo sapiens).

Something similar probably lies behind the way the female se is busily being erased from language while the male sex is not affected at all. The female sex doesn't really count, isn't quite visible or easily heard (as many of us know from meetings where others get credit for what we said earlier in the same meeting).

I bet next year there will be a token woman among the five, just to prop up this system.

I've not heard Sam Smith before. Has they done anything good?

Nope. I mean, they did a cover version of “I won’t back down” by Tom Petty, which they pretended they’d written themselves, by changing the words and title, before eventually having to add Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne as writers.

Other than that, there’s always their tattoo, which is one of the funniest things ever.

I don't disagree with you on any of that Roses, but I believe it would be even worse for female artists were this to happen with film awards than with music awards, so I'm concerned the trend will move over into that area. In music the male dominance is different and in different areas, less visible on the front face of things, and it's at least possible for a woman to be acknowledged as the biggest act of the moment, the biggest possible commercial draw, like Madonna or possibly Adele, whereas you almost never see that with a female movie star, that they're the biggest name right now full stop, male or female. It's mostly men's names you would see at the top of movie posters over the last century or so to draw in audiences, where people would say "Are you going to see the new Tom Cruise/Will Smith/Bruce Willis film". Closest you got for that kind of name power was maaaybe Sharon Stone?

I'm not saying this is great, I'm saying I hope it doesn't leach over into film/TV awards where female performers are rarely even given the opportunity to play the same kind of roles with the same prominence as male performers, let alone have equal opportunity to show what they can do or be the most celebrated.

I'd like a journalist to ask Sam Smith about it - isn't it amazing that one single person can ruin it for half the population. I'm so bloody angry - spoilt, entitled, stupid man grrrr

If it's 5 women next year (the female kind) I'll give you my first born child. And there are long standing structural and cultural reasons why women are less represented in music. The power players in the music industry are male dominated, etc etc

TBH I think it probably doesn't matter as much in music as it does in something like films. Quite a few music awards have mixed sex categories where both men and women have won for years, and the charts show that female artists can have great success in a mixed field. It's possible it's pure chance that it's five men this year, and it might be five women next year or the year after. I don't like that they've moved to a mixed category and almost immediately it's an all-man field, but it's not nearly as bad as the situation would be if a set of film awards went over to best acting-person, because it would be far harder for great female performers to get the recognition they deserve in that field, for longstanding structural and cultural reasons that no individual can really change.

I dunno. I can envisage scenarios where Sam got to write the article, because Sam really wanted to? It's less preposterous than removing an entire category of award.

Quite surprised at the Guardian article. If you sign up for belief in Gender Ideology, surely you have to pretend sex isn't important?

ENTIRELY MALE

Call the cops, hate crimes are going down at the Graun!!!

It is lucky that Sam Smith wasn't nominated, because otherwise they wouldn't have been able to write the article.

(They being the Guardian, not Sam Smith, for clarity. Sigh).

I know very little about any of these guys but I'm wryly amused that Harry Styles appears to be a somewhat gender nonconforming bloke whereas Smith appears to be a bloke with a beard and very modest amount of eye makeup.

"In the second year of non-gendered categories, the five nominees for artist of the year are entirely male"

ENTIRELY MALE

Call the cops, hate crimes are going down at the Graun!!!

Predictable and inevitable.

Im furious

ive just had a rant at dh who’s backed out of the room because the swearing got too much for him

he completely agrees with me…but he’s not as angry as me. Though he did say that maybe people would look at this and rethink, I’d like to admire his optimism but im too angry

Which is this tedious, tawdry, semi of a song:

I've not heard Sam Smith before. Has they done anything good?

Gender neutral= fucking over women every team. But at least it's given a bloke the good feels about his identity, eh.

'This year, Smith received a nomination for song of the year for Unholy – their collaboration with German pop star Kim Petras – and pop/R&B act, one of the genre categories first introduced in 2022, which will be decided via a public vote on TikTok from 19 January.'

Language mangling failure - despite the massive commercial success of the prizes?

The point being that you can't just blindly substitute "their" for "his", because there are lots of cases where "his" is unambiguous, but "their" would render it at best ambiguous, but sometimes leaning to initially misleading and needing a re-read.

So the Brit Awards threw every single female artist under the bus on behalf of SAM SMITH who hasn’t even been nominated?

And who absolutely would have been eligible for the 'best male' award - smiths 'nonbinary' identity is gender, the awards were according to sex. Smith hasn't unsexed themself (), that's not actually possible.
Prat. Smith was probably hoping for a special nonbinary category to be added.

The awards ceremony, run by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) did away with the best British male and best female awards in 2022 following criticism that the non-binary pop star Sam Smith would not be eligible for either prize despite their massive commercial success.'

Language mangling failure - despite the massive commercial success of the prizes?

I also thought they might pretend for a couple of years, but just to go straight back to 100% male dominated after one year is quite shocking. All because just one male artist had a strop.

So the Brit Awards threw every single female artist under the bus on behalf of SAM SMITH who hasn’t even been nominated?

This is going to be a great subplot in the eventual movie about The Time Everyone Pretended to Not Know What a Woman Was!

I was following the Golden Globes live Twitter thread a few days ago, and wondering how long it will be before the best actor categories are made gender neutral...?

Has Sam Smith been nominated for Best Group? I hear they're quite talented.

I genuinely thought they’d make an effort for a few years at least.

It really makes no sense at all, does it. Up to now lots of awards ceremonies have had separate categories for Male and Female performers of various types, so you might have (say) five women on the Female shortlist and five men on the Male shortlist. Now presumably it's five people, who could in theory be male or female, on the one shortlist. So half the number of awards for performance. Given these are the super high profile awards at any ceremony, doesn't that mean they're reducing the PR impact of their own event?