We live in a culture where the electric guitar, at least when it's played at full and distorted blaze, is considered unladylike. The logic of this is just as circular as the role model problem -- 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. The paradigmatic rock pose belongs to Chuck Berry: legs apart, the instrument pointed straight at the crowd, turned upward a little. Symbols don't get more phallic. To Camille Paglia, a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, this isn't just because a guitar is longer than it is wide.
David Segal investigates.
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