Why Chicks Don’t Rock Very Often

Once upon a blog entry dreary, I pondered weak and weary as to why girls aren’t as fanatically geeky about irrelevant minutiae and guitar whizbangery. Finally the Washington Post delivers an answer. Their article, “No Girls Allowed,” covers all the bases and talks to many expert sources (they even dug up The Great Kat, the single greatest Exception That Proves the Rule you’re likely to find). Best of all, they talked to your hero and mine, Camille Paglia. She had this to say:

“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.”

Another aspect of it is that many boys start playing rock instruments to impress girls, while girls already have ways of impressing boys – namely, by being girls (already the most beautiful form Nature has devised), and the vast world of fashion available thereunto.

For the record, I started playing guitar to make weird noises. Perhaps in hope that I would find a weird girl impressed by them. So far it’s worked out a few times, actually. Still looking, though.