Recently, a friend of mine started making music using an AI app, and to my mild horror, it equaled or outright surpassed a large portion of what currently passes for “modern music.” After spending time with her work – the lyrical depth, the stylistic range, the unmistakable presence of lived experience – it became clear that I couldn’t keep pretending this blog was heading anywhere productive in its original form. I was already struggling to find meaning in contemporary releases, and this was the final nudge. If an average human, armed with nothing more than life experience, musical literacy, and a laptop, can create something this visceral, then a lot of modern music suddenly feels… optional. Not revolutionary. Not rebellious. Just a quiet return to what music was always supposed to be: authentic expression without branding decks, market positioning, or unit targets.
So, naturally, I pivoted. Again.
I decided to retreat to what I consider the beginning of proper popular music, back when albums were first treated as an art form rather than a delivery system for singles. That trail leads straight to 1966, when I was four years old and blissfully unaware of cultural engineering. My original plan was simple enough: gather the most lauded albums from that year onward, select the ones I actually found interesting or enjoyable, and present them alphabetically. Along the way, I tripped over something I already half-knew but hadn’t fully reckoned with: feminine voices in 1960s popular music were not just rare…they were managed. Nearly everything of consequence was created by men (mostly white men), and when women did appear, their presence was carefully curated, contained, and controlled by a deeply entrenched patriarchal system.
What follows still technically fulfills my initial goal: a list of 18 albums that are largely listenable, though far less sacred or untouchable than “professional” critics have insisted for decades. But it also became impossible to ignore the larger pattern. At that point, another realization forced itself forward…one that’s less comfortable. I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a feminist, but I am now compelled to admit that I’ve practiced subtle, unexamined misogyny throughout much of my adult life. Rather than simply ranking albums YET AGAIN, this piece shifts focus to examining misogyny as it appears not just in music, but in film and television as well…the primary delivery systems of cultural instruction most of us have absorbed passively for years.
The intent here isn’t to discredit or disgrace the artists involved. Most of them were operating with the same blind spots I had and still grapple with, shaped by a constant background hum of normalized assumptions. But once those patterns become visible, they’re hard to unsee. My hope isn’t condemnation…it’s clarity. If recognizing these inherited distortions helps even a few people reassess how they relate to women, to each other, or more broadly to every living thing they encounter moment to moment, then this detour was worth taking.
With all that said, it felt appropriate to do the dangerous thing and actually listen. What follows is an alphabetical list of 1966 albums…not sacred texts, not cultural commandments, just records. Some endure, some merely survive, and all of them reveal more about the year’s assumptions than the liner notes ever intended.
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A QUICK ONE – The Who (UK)
The band’s legacy lies less in polish or consistency than in forcing rock to grow up loudly, awkwardly, and in public. Misogyny in The Who usually functions as a symptom of confusion, fear, and damaged masculinity, not swaggering control. Across much of the catalog women appear as sources of emotional threat, triggers for loss of identity, and mirrors exposing male inadequacy. Their music is introspective at times, but rather than preaching enlightenment they highlight the failure to live up to it.
AFTERMATH – The Rolling Stones (UK)
Whether designed or not, the band became an ideal vessel for sexual provocation without moral framework, rebellion without political direction and transgression as identity rather than transformation. Misogyny in the Stone’s catalog is often central to the persona they cultivated. Across much of their classic period, women appear as objects of desire, sources of downfall and targets of resentment or dismissal. The band’s misogyny and narcissism are not footnotes, they are foundational elements of their myth. They didn’t ask listeners to look inward, they taught them how to look cool while not doing so.
AND THEN…ALONG COMES THE ASSOCIATION (US)
The Association were marketed as clean-cut, articulate, and emotionally accessible…a West Coast alternative to Stones-style menace. The band’s most famous song is arguably “Cherish”, and I find it oddly disturbing. The song’s narrator is essentially saying, “I will preserve you forever exactly as you are”. That’s not intimacy, that’s fixation, as if his beloved is being placed on a pedestal and sealed inside glass. This isn’t passion, this isn’t lust, this isn’t even romance…it’s curation. I can imagine it playing in the background of some horrific torture scene in a Quentin Tarantino film. It’s the shadow side of harmony, when peace becomes control, and tenderness becomes a velvet-lined cage.
BLONDE ON BLONDE – Bob Dylan (US)
Across much of Dylan’s catalog women are cast as withholders of love, agents of humiliation…essentially figures who expose male inadequacy. Many of his songs frame female figures as morally cold, manipulative, or dismissive. This isn’t domination, so in that sense he’s not “Like a Rolling Stone”, he’s more resentful. He doesn’t shout, he dissects. The danger here isn’t machismo…it’s intellectualized contempt, where rhetorical skill replaces emotional accountability. The songs dazzle even as they wound which makes the cruelty easier to excuse…and harder to challenge.
BLUES BREAKERS WITH ERIC CLAPTON – John Mayall’s Blues Breakers (UK)
Where Dylan fractures language and Townsend (The Who) interrogates selfhood, Clapton reduces emotions to simple pleas, rarely offering reflection beyond the feeling itself. His longevity came not from evolution, but from comfort…for artist and audience alike. Clapton’s misogyny is not aggressive or taunting. It’s dependent, idealizing, and quietly entitled…which makes it easier to overlook. In much of his catalog women function as sources of salvation, objects of fixation, and emotional stabilizers for male distress. His songs don’t ask who the woman is, they ask what she can provide. Her refusal becomes tragedy, her autonomy an obstacle. That’s where the misogyny quietly enters, when male pain becomes the whole story. Clapton didn’t use music to interrogate masculinity. He used it to soothe wounds without asking how they were made.
DA CAPO – Love (US)
This band’s misogyny appears to be born of fear, not entitlement. Unlike Clapton’s idealization or the Stone’s swagger, Love’s romantic language feels guarded, provisional, even shadowed by dread. Love is not conquest, it’s risk exposure. Women are not trophies…they’re points where the self might unravel. As with most ’60s bands the female is rarely granted a voice, functioning as emotional catalysts, not narrators. The lead vocalist doesn’t sing like a man in charge of desire. He sings like someone who suspects love might cost him his sanity. That tension is why Love’s music still feels modern, unresolved, and faintly unsettling.
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We are approximately one-third of the way through my list of the top albums of 1966, which makes this an appropriate point to examine another component of the period’s cultural ecosystem: television. Often dismissed as passive entertainment, the medium actually functions as a primary vehicle for social modeling and behavioral normalization.
Given the limited presence of female voices and perspectives in the music examined so far, it is worth asking whether television presented a different pattern. A review of the top ten television programs of 1966 offers a useful lens for assessing how women were positioned within the dominant narratives of the time…and whether those positions reflected expanding agency or reinforced existing constraints.
#1 Bonanza #6 The Andy Griffith Show, #8 The Beverly Hillbillies #10 Green Acres
BONANZA: The Carwright ranch is a male-only household run by a benevolent patriarch. Women are almost always temporary romantic interests, moral lessons, or victims. In Bonanza women never remain. They die, leave, or fade out so the male order can continue undisturbed. The show treats masculinity as stable, rational, and rightful, while femininity is transient and disruptive. Bonanza presents patriarchy as natural law.
THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW: Andy Taylor is the moral, emotional, and civic authority. Women exist mostly as caretakers, love interests, or comic foils. Aunt Bee is indispensable domestically but excluded from decision-making power. Yes, Andy listens to her politely, but he rules absolutely.
THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES: Jed Clampett controls wealth, direction, and final authority. Granny is sharp but framed as backward. Elly May is intelligent and capable, but desexualized and infantilized to keep her non-threatening. The show reinforces patriarchy by mocking any deviation from it.
Back at the bank, Jane Hathaway is demonstrably smarter and more capable than Mr. Drysdale in nearly every practical sense. She understands finance, she grasps social reality better than he does, and she frequently anticipates consequences he ignores. Yet she remains subordinate, unpromoted and infantilized. Unlike Aunt Bee or Ellie May, Miss Jane is not domestic, is not rural, is not naive…she is a working woman in a professional environment, which makes her treatment especially revealing. If The Beverly Hillbillies is about money without merit, Miss Jane quietly embodies merit without power…and the show never allows that imbalance to be corrected.
GREEN ACRES: At first glance, this show seems different. Lisa Douglas is independent, strange, and imaginative. Oliver on the other hand is rigid, controlling, and often wrong. But here’s the twist: She’s allowed autonomy only because she’s eccentric and unserious. Oliver still controls money, legality, and “reality”. Lisa just gets to be whimsical.
These shows are rarely misogynistic in the Rolling Stones sense. But they are deeply patriarchal and women are valued for stability, support, and softening. These programs didn’t argue against women. They simply could not imagine women outside supportive roles. That’s more insidious than overt misogyny because it normalized exclusion, made hierarchy feel comforting, and framed male authority as benevolence rather than dominance. They weren’t telling women to stay in their place, they were quietly arranging the furniture so there was nowhere else to sit.
#3 THE LUCY SHOW #7 BEWITCHED
Both The Lucy Show and Bewitched represent real advances in female visibility on 1960s television, but they do so inside carefully managed patriarchal boundaries.
THE LUCY SHOW: Importantly, Lucy is not defined by a husband. That alone was a meaningful break from earlier sitcoms…including I Love Lucy. In this show Lucy drives plots. Men react. Lucy’s power is expressed almost entirely through chaos, emotional excess, and comic incompetence. Authority figures (bosses, bankers, executives) remain male, rational, and structurally secure. Her independence is framed as funny, messy, and non-threatening. Competence would have been dangerous. Comedy makes it safe.
BEWITCHED: Samantha Stephens is literally more powerful than every man on screen. She is also intelligent, ethical, and consistently right. Samantha is a feminist figure when it comes to capability, but the show’s premise still undercuts that power. Samantha must hide her abilities and her magic is framed as a threat to masculinity rather than a shared resource.
Despite their limits, these two series normalized female autonomy and exposed patriarchy as fragile rather than inevitable. They didn’t overthrow the system, but they revealed the cracks.
As an aside, GOMER PYLE U.S.M.C. (#2) and HOGAN’S HEROES (#9) functioned as cultural anesthesia. They weren’t crude propaganda, but strategic softening agents that made the military feel familiar, humane, and even lovable at the exact historical moment when the image most needed repair. These shows are not recruitment ads. They don’t glorify combat or celebrate violence. What they do is normalize the institution, sentimentalize hierarchy and drain war of existential weight. They don’t tell viewers what to think about Vietnam. They tell them how not to feel. Two shows with different tones but the same outcome…The military is never the problem.
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DAYDREAM – The Lovin’ Spoonful (US)
The Lovin’ Spoonful specialized in emotional low pressure. The songs rarely escalate into drama, ideology, or confrontation. This made them immensely appealing and critically easy to dismiss. Unlike many peers, the Spoonful’s songs usually frame women as equals and co-participants in affection. Here we have one of the least misogynistic bands of the ’60s, not because they were radical, but because they didn’t equate masculinity with dominance.
EAST-WEST – The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (US)
This band’s historic role was to translate Chicago blues into a loud, integrated white rock context without sanitizing it. The band’s playing is formidable…tight, aggressive, and disciplined. Yet that discipline often functions as emotional containment. Much of the misogyny associated with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band is inherited from traditional blues conventions rather than authored anew. Classic blues frequently frames women as sources of betrayal and causes of male suffering. The misogyny here is passive and structural, not performative.
FIFTH DIMENSION – The Byrds (US)
Vocals are airy, arrangements controlled, and emotional temperature regulated. Even when the subject is turmoil, the presentation remains composed. This yields beauty and accessibility, but also emotional remove. Across much of the Byrds catalog, women appear as muses or emotional backdrops. They are rarely antagonists, but they’re also rarely subjects with interior lives. Like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Byrds cover traditional material with male-centered grievance and quest narratives without much reframing. This is misogyny by default, not design.
FREAK OUT! – The Mothers of Invention
Zappa and the Mothers did not aim to refine rock, they aimed to dismantle it. From Freak Out! onward the project was aggressively anti-sentimental, anti-hippie, anti-romance, and anti-comfort. This was rebellion as contempt. In Zappa’s catalog, women frequently appear as groupies, sexual caricatures, and symbols of stupidity and manipulation. Unlike inherited blues misogyny (Butterfield) or anxious masculinity (The Who), Zappa’s misogyny is authorial and explicit. He didn’t inherit misogyny, he retooled it as satire. The irony is that his critique of mass culture is often correct, while his treatment of women replicates the very simplifications he despised elsewhere.
IF YOU CAN BELIEVE YOUR EYES AND EARS – The Mamas and the Papas (US)
This is the eleventh album on the list and the first where women are central to the sound and visibly present, yet they are not central to authorship or governance. On the surface, this looks like a democratic vocal group, but structurally it was not equal. John Phillips (an alleged incestuous pedophile) was the primary songwriter, arranger, and authority figure. Much of the band’s lyrical world revolves around longing, regret, and desire for escape. But the perspective is overwhelmingly male-authored. Women speaking, but not speaking for themselves. Cass Elliot’s presence complicates any simple misogyny claim since she is vocally dominant, yet subject to body-based ridicule in media. To this day much of the public still believes that she died while choking on a ham sandwich.
MOODS OF MARVIN GAYE
In 1966, Gaye was still positioned as a suave romantic lead, but he grew increasingly resistant to that containment. His career swings wildly because he followed feeling rather than strategy. He lacked the emotional armor that sustained more narcissistically organized artists. Marvin Gaye’s misogyny, where it appears, is neither hostile nor dismissive. It is romantic, idealizing, and emotionally demanding which makes it harder to name and easier to excuse. This framing elevates women, but also burdens them. They are asked to heal, redeem, and absorb male conflict. His music doesn’t diminish women through attack, but it does risk diminishing them through expectation. Marvin Gaye doesn’t ask women to submit. He asks them to hold him together.
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We’ve officially reached the two-thirds mark of the album list, which means it’s time for another scheduled interruption in the form of mass-market storytelling. Let’s briefly step away from the turntable and into the movie theater to examine the year’s top-grossing films…those comforting, beautifully lit exercises in social engineering where cultural norms were gently reinforced.
The #9 film was “Alfie” and its misogyny level is off the charts. Alfie treats women as interchangeable emotional utilities. Pregnancy, abortion, and commitment are framed as inconveniences to male freedom. What makes Alfie especially dangerous is its seductive charm. The film critiques Alfie intellectually…but emotionally aligns the audience with him for most of the runtime. Misogyny through charismatic narcissism, softened by self-awareness but never structurally undone.
At #10 was another quietly brutal British film titled “Georgy Girl”. Georgy is kind, capable, and emotionally generous, yet the film treats her body as something to be solved and positions male approval as the ultimate prize. The message underneath the whimsy? A woman may be warm and competent, but she must still be chosen to matter.
In “The Sand Pebbles” at #4, female characters exist as emotional respite for male trauma or symbols of innocence amid chaos. Their deaths or suffering primarily serve male character development. Women as emotional infrastructure.
The #1 film, Hawaii, depicts female desire as something to be disciplined, redirected, or redeemed. Misogyny intertwined with colonialism and moral absolutism.
Films like “A Man for All Seasons” #5 and “Grand Prix” #7 are male-centered, but not hostile. Women are peripheral rather than punished. The year’s most “positive” female depiction was probably Elizabeth Taylor’s role in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” #3…female rage, intelligence, and cruelty are fully realized. But there is no moral high ground on display, just mutual destruction.
As usual, 1966 culture doesn’t hate women loudly. It absorbs them quietly…as lessons, supports, or rewards, while authority remains steadfastly male.
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PET SOUNDS – The Beach Boys (US)
The band is defined by a fracture between early Beach Boys and Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys. These identities coexist uneasily. Even at their most sophisticated, the songs are haunted by the earlier fantasy of effortless male pleasure. With Pet Sounds Brian Wilson reframed masculinity as vulnerable, yearning, and unsure. Much like The Association their misogyny is sentimental, possessive, and infantilizing, which makes it deceptively easy to miss. Across much of the catalog, women function as objects of longing and proof of male worth. The question is rarely who is she? It is almost always will she make me whole? Brian Wilson’s genius reframes masculinity as fragile, anxious, and exposed. That vulnerability feels genuine, but it quietly assigns women the role of emotional stabilizers. Similar to Eric Clapton’s approach, if the man is wounded, the woman must heal him…or at least tuck him in after he drinks too much at a party. Care without reciprocity is a soft form of misogyny. The Beach Boys are not villains. They are a case study in how sensitivity does not automatically equal equality.
REVOLVER – The Beatles (UK)
This album is often credited with abolishing pop music as being solely adolescent entertainment. Although remembered as a democratic unit, The Beatles operate through competing authorial centers.
JOHN LENNON: His writing often channels male grievance, “Run for Your Life”, “You Can’t Do That”, and “Norwegian Wood” are typical examples. Here, women are framed as withholders, provokers, and threats to male authority. This is not symbolic…it’s explicit emotional violence. Lennon exposes misogyny, but also enacts it.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: His songs often appear gentler…but gentleness can still center power. Women in his catalog are loved, protected, and advised. He writes about women more than with them. Female suffering becomes a problem to be solved by reassurance or time. This is soft patriarchy…care without equality.
GEORGE HARRISON: He often avoids gender conflict by transcending it. His turn toward Eastern spirituality dissolves specific relational responsibility. Women recede into the background as part of worldly illusion. This isn’t misogyny through harm…it’s misogyny through disappearance.
The Beatles didn’t ask women to submit. They assumed women would orbit male transformation. That assumption is quieter than Stones-style dominance…and more influential.
RIVER DEEP, MOUNTAIN HIGH – Ike & Tina Turner (US)
Despite the billing, Ike & Tina Turner were never equals. Ike Turner controlled song selection, arrangements, studio access, and touring schedules. Tina carried the sound – vocally, physically, visually – but not the authority. Ike directed, Tina delivered. The tension we hear in the music is not metaphorical. In Ike & Tina Turner’s case, misogyny is not primarily in the lyrics…it is in the power structure. Ike Turner exercised control that extended beyond professional boundaries in documented physical and psychological abuse. Tina is allowed to be loud, sexual, and commanding but only under supervision and punishment. Tina Turner’s greatness does not emerge despite the system…it emerges through surviving it, which is not the same thing.
SOUNDS OF SILENCE – Simon & Garfunkel (US)
Songs like “The Sound of Silence”, “I Am a Rock”, and “Richard Cory” present withdrawal as insight. This produces haunting art, but it also romanticizes isolation and renders relationship as secondary to self-containment. Across much of the catalog, women function as figures of departure or memory and causes of sadness or longing. They are rarely granted interior lives. Rather than confrontation or accountability, the songs choose withdrawal. The problem isn’t contempt, it’s absence. The duo’s work teaches listeners how to feel deeply without risking reciprocity…a powerful lesson and a limiting one. Their masculinity is humane, but insulated. They don’t diminish women through aggression. They diminish them through elegant omission.
THE EXCITING WILSON PICKETT – Wilson Pickett (US)
Pickett’s music ages well because it never pretended to be nuanced. It captures bodily urgency…movement, sweat, release. In much of Pickett’s catalog women are recipients of instruction and figures to be moved or corrected. In “Mustang Sally” the woman’s autonomy is framed as a problem to be managed. The narrator does not negotiate…he issues terms. Unlike Dylan (who intellectualizes resentment) or the Stones (who aestheticize cruelty), Pickett offers no irony. There is no wink, no confession, no critique. The posture is sincere. That sincerity gives the music its power…and makes its gender politics unmistakable. His music doesn’t ask permission, it assumes it already has it.
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