ENGL 680M: New Media

I wanted to add a couple of comments to Morgan's fabulous discussion of women and music.

I recently read an article in the Washington Post about female guitarists (or lack of them, actually). The article, "No Girls Allowed?", was in response to Rolling Stone's only including two female guitarists in their list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time: Joan Jett and Joni Mitchell. (Both the Rolling Stone and Washington Post articles are from 2004, by the way, so maybe new lists have emerged, I don't know). Read the article. The guy writing, David Segal, it isn't an idiot, nor is he sexist. (He does seriously rip on Bonnie Raitt fans, which hurt me personally, since I came across this article after checking out her latest tour dates. According to him, my music tastes firmly plant me in the middle-aged set. How can this be, when I don't even remember the Challenger explosion?)

To return to my point, Segal presents a number of possible explanations for why there are few great female guitarists. (If you aren’t comfortable accepting that there are few great female guitarists, by the way, at least acknowledge that there is a serious imbalance between successful male and female guitarists.) Segal begins by dismissing the moronic possibilities that he knows sometimes get thrown out there:

“And let's quickly ditch one possibility: Women aren't great electric guitarists because they lack innate talent or discipline or musical intuition. That's silly….So all you chuckleheads out there who were thinking, This is simple: Chicks can't rock because, you know, they can't rock, take out your blue books and try again. Something else is going on here.”

We could end the whole debate, as some have, by arguing that most women simply don’t have the upper body strength to do what Hendrix was able to do with the guitar. Is it just that, though?

A more realistic and complicated explanation, Segal writes, is that “We live in a culture where the electric guitar, at least when it's played at full and distorted blaze, is considered unladylike.” This leads to a vicious cycle in which “girls don't see women play the guitar, which stigmatizes the instrument a bit, further discouraging girls from taking up guitar, and so on. But it's not just unladylike because girls, as they grow up, get the hint. It's unladylike because the electric guitar is traditionally an almost cartoonishly macho instrument…Symbols don't get more phallic” (Segal). He goes on to quote Camille Paglia, a humanities professor:

"Rock is a male form…For an adolescent boy, your guitar speaks for you, it says what you can't say in real life, it's the pain you can't express, it's rage, hormones pumping. Women can be strangers and all of a sudden have an intimate conversation. Boys can't do that. The guitar for a boy speaks to an aggressive sexual impulse and suppressed emotionality, the things that boys can't share, even with other members of the band. It's a combination of rage and reserve and ego."

Segal argues that the guitar is simply not an accepted medium for female musicians. Paglia takes his argument further by saying that male musicians need the guitar to express feelings that they can’t express on their own, because it is considered unmasculine. I would add to her argument that it is considered unfeminine for women to express the loud, aggressive emotions that are often expressed through the guitar.