Kathleen-The Great!
By: Lakotah Battle
Tags: Metoo, Music, Santa Monica, BlackLivesMatter

Despite this epic civic uproar, Kathleen Wirt and her 4Th Street Recordings studio stand strong today and seem to be built to endure throughout the ages. Not looters nor the male-dominated music industry evidently have the power to take down one of Los Angeles’s top recording destinations.

Kathleen became the sole owner of 4Th Street Recordings in 2001. After arriving in Los Angeles armed with a BA in English from Missouri State University and publishing credits in poetry, Wirt hit the ground running as a working actress. She soon realized her extraordinary abilities to not only act and to write but to also communicate, organize, and curate musical talent as the co-owner of a top-rated recording studio in the mecca music city of Los Angeles. When she became the sole owner of the studio (after an amicable divorce with her co-owner husband at the time) Kathleen took note that women in power positions in the industry were extremely rare- more like..non-existent.

Two decades before the #metoo movement took hold in the civic literature of today’s culture, Kathleen often found herself being the only woman in the room.

“ I tell you when I saw the change, is when all the guys who worked for me-were hired by me. We stopped having sexual harassment in the place. We stopped having any kind of creepiness, all the guys had a lot more respect for women because of that.”

It is worthy to take note that Kathleen explains she has endured years of sexual harassment and has endless stories of how she would counteract these advances. She goes on to reveal that she, like millions of other women, had to adopt a “tough policy” to simply survive the oppressive sexual environment that dominated the workplace and entire culture at the time. Kathleen’s ability to take it right back to the offenders stems from her observations as a young woman growing up in a culture where girls and women were unfulfilled in their perceptions of what they could be.

“It took me many years to know that I didn't have to be a man to have what I wanted.”

Kathleen has many tales of her aggressive verbal and physical responses she threw back to the harassers to counteract the endless systemic sexual harassment that she has endured since her early twenties. Kathleen readily admits that not all women have this “ tough policy” function as she does and says that women should not have to do this just to get through a day. It is just how she chooses to handle these situations.

“It was about twenty tears ago that I started to provide a safe place for women.” Kathleen continues,“ It was an interesting dance to keep from being harassed”.

Kathleen believes that the #metoo movement facilitated an unprecedented amount of awareness in this country and the world to the true plight of women in every society on the planet and is arguably the most significant shift in the social justice of women's empowerment awareness in decades.

When asked how she sees the situation today in terms of the #metoo movement, Kathleen says...

“I think that because of social media, and the heightened awareness galvanized by the#metoo movement, I don't think anybody is getting away with anything anymore. Peoples’ mothers are more enlightened now, I think women and mothers are more self-realized and that boys and young men see women more as people.”

Kathleen’s indestructible recording studio has been deemed one of LA’s 17 Temples of Sound.

http://www.4thstreetrecording.com/l-a-s-temple-of-sound/ Hollywood Reporter — LA’s 17 Temples of Sound