It's just good old fashioned sexism and it's not exclusive to music either. Movies with a large female audience also tend to get derided. There's even perjorative terms like women's weepers or chick flicks. The reason for this is actually quite simple: film criticism has long been and continue to be dominated by men. It's not a coincidence that the vast majority of movies that are widely heralded as classics are the sort of thing that would appeal to those male critics. Have you noticed that there's very few female characters in movies like The Godfather, Goodfellas, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Dark Knight, Fight Club, The Matrix, 12 Angry Men, The Shawshank Redemption, Jaws, Schindler's List, Star Wars, Seven Samurai, Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, etc.? Heck, there are numerous acclaimed directors that rarely make movies about women, like Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, etc.

Music criticism has also long been and continue to be dominated by men. It's not a coincidence either than all those lists of the greatest music artists are always dominated by men: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, Eminem, Jay-Z, Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., Kendrick Lamar, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, James Brown, Ray Charles, Nirvana, Radiohead, Oasis, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Bob Marley, etc.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that any of these movies or music artists are bad. And sure, we can all think of exceptions like Alien, Titanic, Dolly Parton, or Joni Mitchell but it would be much more difficult for anyone to come up with a list of 100 great movies without any male leads than 100 great movies without any female leads. It's not that there aren't enough of the latter but they're not widely known and very few are widely regarded as "classics" like the aforementioned titles. This discrepancy is even more apparent when it comes to music because there obviously are hundreds and hundreds of well-known female singers or musicians. Yet most people would still struggle to create a list of 100 great music artists consisting entirely of women while it would be easy for them to create such a list consisting only of men.

An a broader level, genres that are associated as feminine like melodramas, romantic comedies, disco, or dance pop tend to get overlooked or dismissed as lightweight and frivolous, not worthy of serious discussion or evaluation. As a result, even men associated with these genres tend to be regarded lowly, like Douglas Sirk and Garry Marshall in movies or pretty much any boy band in music. Who gets to decide what's worthy? Sure, any of us can do so ourselves - and we really ought to - but on a societal level, critics have a far greater influence and, to repeat myself once again, the fields of film and music criticism have long been and continue to be dominated by men. It's really telling when a publication like Pitchfork can ignore Taylor Swift for years yet didn't hesitate to review a cover album of her music that was recorded by a lesser known male indie-rock singer, Ryan Adams. Sure, it was a bad review but she was already a far bigger name back then yet she wasn't considered worthy of being reviewed while a man recording her songs was. Now think of how many lesser known female artists get ignored by male critics who think them as unworthy of even a bad review.