Recently, a radio station in the United Kingdom decided to change its name to Radio X, a radio station with a ''male focus''.
The station will have all male hosts and will largely play ''guitar music''. Thankfully, people don't seem to be on board with this little bit of rebranding.
Obviously, men are not the only people who enjoy listening to music with guitars, and music with guitars is not made only by men. And most people seem to feel uncomfortable with the idea of women being deliberately excluded from something in such a shameless manner.
The sad reality, though, is that this station is only putting into words what other radio stations and other media platforms are too slimy to put into words.
When you're a woman, almost every piece of mainstream media looks like this radio station, because you are always underrepresented, or are forgotten about entirely, or, if you're really lucky then you are mocked and ridiculed on a daily basis with a combination of casual sexism, racism and transphobia.
It seems hard for people to understand men are not the only people who consume media, mainstream or otherwise. In fact, most people who listen to commercial radio stations are in fact women from across a range of ages.
To deliberately market your station to men is to cut out a whole lot of revenue, and it makes you look like a total dick. Even on stations that don't claim to be gender exclusive, women only get a tiny slice of the pie.
But even that slice is too much for some men to bear and so the pie gets expanded but the slice we have remains the same size, so men get more and we still get stuck with the same tiny crust.
New Zealand has more radio stations than I can be bothered to count, but even our national radio station seemed perfectly happy to cut out the only woman on drive time radio in favour of John Campbell.
It's not a question of whether or not John Campbell deserves a job in the mainstream media, but rather a question of how much or little we value women having any voice in the mainstream media.
Even Dunedin, a city that is full of people of all genders contributing to their political and creative community, the student radio station is overrun by men in positions of power while paid members of staff who are women are nowhere to be found.
It is exhausting to explain to people that even if you don't mean to cut people out, you don't mean to discriminate and you really only hire people based on merit, if your project isn't diverse, then it's just not representative.
It's easy to forget, especially when we are so used to listening to and watching media that represents only one group of people. Most things we consume just pretend they aren't exclusive and we buy it without question.
While I appreciate seeing men consider that this particular radio station isn't OK and needs to change, I'd really love to see them applying the same logic to other media that they unquestioningly consume.
When I explain that I don't feel like watching a movie because it doesn't have any decent women characters, that should provoke the same response as a radio station that deliberately only markets to men.
I don't know how many times one person can insist that men is not the neutral or the default market. No one should have to explain to anyone that men already have enough, even if we don't always explicitly say it.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
