# Is Taylor Swift The Next Eddie Van Halen?



## couverdure (Jun 26, 2017)

I've been seeing these videos from guitar-based YouTubers lately about Taylor Swift supposedly being the next guitar hero, mostly among young females, and getting compared to Eddie Van Halen because of that and her huge popularity.

I really want to hear your opinions about it if you think it's a fair comparison or not. I know that YouTube comment sections are a huge vile cesspool and a lot of the commenters there are "le wrong generation" types so having a discussion about it on this site would be a lot more civil.

Here are some videos:





Also a kinda related video, I guess there's a correlation between having a lack of a cultural influencer like Hendrix/Page/Clapton in the modern age, and Swift being hailed as a guitar influence despite playing basic chords in a genre that isn't guitar-heavy (her early work would qualify but she's pure pop now).


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## Mathemagician (Jun 26, 2017)

Dude, if she gets young women (and men) interested in guitar, then all the better. Can't watch those videos because I'm at work. But her job is to sing and play guitar, she's probably decent at the very least. And entire genres of metal get away with the rhythm guitar just playing "chugs" so 3 chords is more than enough for a song, lol. 

Same as the singer from Maroon 5 playing expensive JEMs and the guitarist having his own EBMM. Or the Valentine EBMM. 

If there aren't exciting popular people doing something many people lose interest. Look around and see how popular skateboarding is now compared to the early/mid '00's. 

If young girls think she's a guitar hero and start playing? That's more people buying guitars and a larger market for manufacturers to justify taking risks for, and that's good business.


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## TedEH (Jun 26, 2017)

I came across that same article posted to talkbass last week.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/the-slow-secret-death-of-the-electric-guitar

Do I think the guitar is dying? Nope. And do I really care that there aren't enough millions of units being sold by the guitar-maker giants? Nope. Do I also think that the thing I enjoy doing loses it's value if less people are doing it too? Nope. But I do think there's something to be said of the idea that "guitar heroes" aren't really what they used to be. There are lots of great players to aspire to, but guitar playing isn't new anymore. There's very little of that sense of "wow, this person is doing something entirely new, and there's a whole musical world to explore, lots of directions to take this". I mean, there's new stuff happening in music, but I think we've exhausted most of the available exploration that can be done in the realm of "rock guitar". Minds are not being blown because it's all mostly been done already. And that's fine. Exploring guitar from an angle entirely separate from the rock-and-roll lifestyle and shreddy guitar heroes is just as good a use of the instrument.

And of course nobody in the article or videos touches on the idea that instrument sales don't really indicate anything when there's such a huge, saturated, active second-hand market. Why would anyone go out and buy a brand new strat what there's a dozen of them you can get used for less at any given time, from people who babied them because of the Fender name on it? And of course they didn't touch on the closing of gap in quality between big brands and smaller brands- maybe Fender/Gibson/Etc. sell less because Ltd, Schecter, Ibby, etc. are quality instruments picking up their share of the market?

Also, I have no problem with Taylor Swift being a "guitar hero". If people are playing guitar, then great. If they're not, then also great, who am I to tell people they should be playing guitar? If they're doing it because they want to be like Steve Vai, then awesome. If they're doing it because they want to be like Swift, then that's also awesome. People should just do what they want.


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## MFB (Jun 26, 2017)

In terms of being recognized holding a guitar? Sure.
In terms of technical ability to play aforementioned guitar? Absolutely not.


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## bostjan (Jun 26, 2017)

Mathemagician said:


> Dude, if she gets young women (and men) interested in guitar, then all the better. Can't watch those videos because I'm at work. But her job is to sing and play guitar, she's probably decent at the very least. And entire genres of metal get away with the rhythm guitar just playing "chugs" so 3 chords is more than enough for a song, lol.
> 
> Same as the singer from Maroon 5 playing expensive JEMs and the guitarist having his own EBMM. Or the Valentine EBMM.
> 
> ...



Excellent point.

I didn't know Buckethead nor Matthias Eklundh nor Ron Jarzombek when I first picked up the guitar. I think that kids need an accessible artist as an early influence, and then they will find more obscure (read: sophisticated) players as they develop into their own playing style. That's not to say that mainstream musicians can't tear shit up when they want to, they simply understand the musicianship skills behind when to play what's appropriate for the intended audience. Because Taylor Swift has a public image as a country singer turned pop musician to uphold, even if she could sweep pick 1200 bpm string skipping arpeggios effortlessly, she'd want to stick with what fits her intended mainstream audience very carefully.


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## squids (Jun 26, 2017)

its gonna be a no from me dawg

its not like shes the first female guitarist ever, and she is certainly not among the top ranks. id much sooner say the same general thing about St. Vincent or something, but i also am biased as im pretty sure taylor swift writes a very small amount of her songs these days and theres pop music today thats A LOT better than hers....
i also started playing because of Dave Grohl actually, so i dont have any input on the lack of role models, but i think thats just a part of popularity in music moving towards computer generated stuff


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## KnightBrolaire (Jun 26, 2017)

LOLLLLL St. Vincent or Orianthi would be better examples of female guitarists with great chops and writing ability (maybe less in the writing part for orianthi imo but both are more technical than swift). Hell the chicks in First Aid Kit are way better guitarists (plus they played some sabbath songs at the show I was at so I have a crush on them )
More power to girls that want to play because of swift, even though there's way better female guitar heroes to have.


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## squids (Jun 26, 2017)

KnightBrolaire said:


> LOLLLLL St. Vincent or Orianthi would be better examples of female guitarists with great chops and writing ability


dude st vincent is sick, im gasing for her sig EBMM


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## KnightBrolaire (Jun 26, 2017)

squids said:


> dude st vincent is sick, im gasing for her sig EBMM


yeah she's actually a great guitarist, a lot of people discount her because she plays more indie stuff, but I've been obsessed with her music since I heard her first album when it came out. I love the rosewood neck on her sig that I played.


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## Drezik27 (Jun 26, 2017)

bostjan said:


> Excellent point.
> 
> I didn't know Buckethead nor Matthias Eklundh nor Ron Jarzombek when I first picked up the guitar. I think that kids need an accessible artist as an early influence, and then they will find more obscure (read: sophisticated) players as they develop into their own playing style. That's not to say that mainstream musicians can't tear shit up when they want to, they simply understand the musicianship skills behind when to play what's appropriate for the intended audience. Because Taylor Swift has a public image as a country singer turned pop musician to uphold, even if she could sweep pick 1200 bpm string skipping arpeggios effortlessly, she'd want to stick with what fits her intended mainstream audience very carefully.



This sums it up pretty well. I got into guitar as a 15 year old watching MTV and seeing a Blink 182 music video and thought "shit that looks cool I want to do that". Another 16 years later and my tastes in music have evolved as my skill level has.


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## bostjan (Jun 26, 2017)

In hard rock, at least in the 70's and 80's and a little into the 90's, probably more guitarists were inspired to start playing by Ace Frehley (KISS) and Angus Young (AC/DC), than any more technical players.

Personally, it was stuff like Led Zeppelin, CCR, and surf rock that made me really want to pick up the guitar in the first place. Once I was able to play a little, I discovered Satriani, Vai, Kotzen, MacAlpine, etc., and then Dream Theater. If I had started out listening to Dream Theater, I honestly don't think I would have bothered to start playing, since, well, why bother?

If a female guitarist comes along to inspire 13 year old girls to play, then I would expect it to be whomever 13 year old girls listen to, not Jennifer Batten, or any of the other of the hundreds of thousands of technical wizard guitarists that can play circles around Taylor Swift.

And, maybe I didn't mention this before, because no one really implied it, but it doesn't really take a female guitarist to inspire potential other female guitarists. Like, I doubt that Nancy Wilson saw the Beatles performing and thought, "Wow, I want to play guitar in a band...but, oh, wait, I'm a girl, and those are boys. I can't be inspired to play by a person of the opposite sex...too bad."


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## TedEH (Jun 26, 2017)

KnightBrolaire said:


> better examples of female guitarists with great chops and writing ability



I don't think we've really had a shortage of women who play guitar in recent history, not in the way people like to say we do. Sure, there's probably more men in a lot of scenes (and I won't get into how I don't think that an actual problem, lest I be called "sexist" for some reason), but it's not hard to find examples of women who play guitar as well or better than men. Or who have achieved some level of success in music. There's not a ton of "women guitar heroes" when you look at music through the lens of pop-culture and certain parts of online-culture, disconnected a bit from reality, but realistically I know more women interested in learning instruments right now than men- and not because of Taylor Swift.


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## Mathemagician (Jun 26, 2017)

The thing is, whatever gets you into guitar playing gets you into it. And Taylor Swift has a WAY larger audience than anyone anyone on this board likes outside of Metallica. Seriously, look at her sales #'s. I'm sure there are tons of awesome female guitarists, but you have to go LOOKING for them. And if someone is inspired to pick up the instrument and sticks with it for a few weeks and then goes looking for more music - that's a good thing.

I thought Disturbed was the tightest shit ever when I was a kid. And "super heavy" now I know about bands that are so heavy I don't even like their music. But I had to start somewhere. Just like every judgmental metal head who still makes fun of pop music.

*hums despacito*


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## iamaom (Jun 26, 2017)

There won't be any more guitar heros in the forseeable future in the same way there aren't any modern Beehtovens or Chopins. Society just doesn't care about that type of music anymore; current pop music is almost all computer generated and the fure bands that have guitars seem to do it more for looks than actual music. These articles and videos seem to be pushed by the Guitar Industry hoping to generate sales, the combination of a celebrity + being female (untapped market) just ticks the boxes for corporate sponsorship.



bostjan said:


> And, maybe I didn't mention this before, because no one really implied it, but it doesn't really take a female guitarist to inspire potential other female guitarists.


Really hit the nail on the head there, I've seen the discussion of "why don't girls play electric guitar" on other forums and it always comes down to not enough female role models. This explination has always rung hollow to me; seems like a lot of adults don't remember being a starry-eyed kid and sex barley being a factor, I'd just as much watch powerpuff girls as I would batman. Right now society has an obession with trying to push girls to do everything boys do to fulfill some bizarre need to have the sexes equal in every respect.


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## KnightBrolaire (Jun 26, 2017)

TedEH said:


> I don't think we've really had a shortage of women who play guitar in recent history, not in the way people like to say we do. Sure, there's probably more men in a lot of scenes (and I won't get into how I don't think that an actual problem, lest I be called "sexist" for some reason), but it's not hard to find examples of women who play guitar as well or better than men. Or who have achieved some level of success in music. There's not a ton of "women guitar heroes" when you look at music through the lens of pop-culture and certain parts of online-culture, disconnected a bit from reality, but realistically I know more women interested in learning instruments right now than men- and not because of Taylor Swift.


I've met a pile of women that did start because of pop singers like swift, but I've also met some that just wanted to play metallica/ac/dc like I did (they're outliers though). Granted I've also met a fair number of guys that just want to play ed sheeran or john mayer songs and don't care about playing metal/more technical songs.


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## Andromalia (Jun 26, 2017)

I don't think so, because her music isn't guitar centric, really. A faire chunk of pop idols selling millions of records are guitarists - Prince comes to mind and he didn't become EVH either, while admittedly having shown more serious chops that Taylor Swift (Maybe she can shred, who knows ?) and having at least as large an audience.


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## Jacksonluvr636 (Jun 26, 2017)

TBH...I would say she is as close as it can ever get.

I do not think she is on that level. Eddie was an innovator, almost revolutionary.

She is not that however (I have not checked) She very well may have more fans and sold more. I do not know much about her. Does she even play guitar? Does she write her own music?

I do know that she is very very good and I can see how she could be compared to EVH but in reality its apples vs. oranges.


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## Demiurge (Jun 26, 2017)

"______ is the next ______" makes for fun articles and comments section content for music press- but mostly because it involves creatively mitigating differences.

I dunno- I think that most musician origin-stories are too variable while there's a fetishizing of tight stories like "I was watching MTV and the video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' premiered, and I knew I wanted to be a rock star!" Honestly, I can't remember who or what inspired me to play.


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## 7 Strings of Hate (Jun 26, 2017)

No. I didnt read, look, or listen to anything in this thread. And the answer is no.


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## Shoeless_jose (Jun 26, 2017)

It will come full circle, anyone inspiring people is whats key doesn't matter proficiency or anything. I got into it from Blink 182 like another poster said, and there are still guitarist blowing peoples minds just have to dig a little deeper, Tosin and people like that keep pushing it and someone else will find new ways to push it as well.

Also recession is still not fully ended hard times everywhere, when some more guitar oriented music comes back into the spotlight and people have more cash to spend it will bounce back. Good for Taylor Swift though if her music inspires people to play guitar instead of just inspiring me to kill myself then that's a plus.


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## squids (Jun 26, 2017)

iamaom said:


> . Right now society has an obession with trying to push girls to do everything boys do to fulfill some bizarre need to have the sexes equal in every respect.


This


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## USMarine75 (Jun 26, 2017)

KnightBrolaire said:


> Granted I've also met a fair number of guys that just want to play ed sheeran or john mayer songs and don't care about playing metal/more technical songs.



So I hate to be that guy... but... someone has to lol... Something wrong with John Mayer? He's a phenomenal guitar player, preeminent in his genre. And tech death is really not more "technical" than the blues or jazz. I would argue it is far easier to play warmup exercises, sweeps, and legato runs at light speed with max gain, and not have to worry about things like chord tones and voice leading. If you play fast enough and distorted enough, then everything is a passing tone and sounds ok lolz. Ok, now get off my lawn! /rant

Edit because OT... yeah ditto anything that gets kids interested in music is bueno. She has a ton of influence and this seems like a worthwhile usage of it.


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## KnightBrolaire (Jun 27, 2017)

USMarine75 said:


> So I hate to be that guy... but... someone has to lol... Something wrong with John Mayer? He's a phenomenal guitar player, preeminent in his genre. And tech death is really not more "technical" than the blues or jazz. I would argue it is far easier to play warmup exercises, sweeps, and legato runs at light speed with max gain, and not have to worry about things like chord tones and voice leading. If you play fast enough and distorted enough, then everything is a passing tone and sounds ok lolz. Ok, now get off my lawn! /rant


nothing wrong with mayer, he's a great guitar player, just most of the people I've run into who want to play his stuff don't want to play the fun songs like neon, they want to learn your body is a wonderland or such. I just don't understand why people would want to hamstring themselves and not try to better their technical chops. I think of being technical as having the full palette of colors to paint with instead of a few. Sure you can paint awesome stuff or write great music with basic colors/techniques, but I'd rather have the option to throw some technique around if I wanted to. Eric Johnson is a great example of that imo. He can write simpler bluesy songs but spices them up with nice technical riffs here and there that really make them shine (trademark is one of my favorite songs by him). Same with Joe Bonamassa, he has technical ability but knows when to turn it on and when not to.


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## USMarine75 (Jun 27, 2017)

KnightBrolaire said:


> nothing wrong with mayer, he's a great guitar player, just most of the people I've run into who want to play his stuff don't want to play the fun songs like neon, they want to learn your body is a wonderland or such. I just don't understand why people would want to hamstring themselves and not try to better their technical chops. I think of being technical as having the full palette of colors to paint with instead of a few. Sure you can paint awesome stuff or write great music with basic colors/techniques, but I'd rather have the option to throw some technique around if I wanted to. Eric Johnson is a great example of that imo. He can write simpler bluesy songs but spices them up with nice technical riffs here and there that really make them shine (trademark is one of my favorite songs by him). Same with Joe Bonamassa, he has technical ability but knows when to turn it on and when not to.



You need some Koch in your life! 



Him, Paisley, and Brent Mason would flat out embarrass about 90% of "technical" shredders.


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## marcwormjim (Jun 27, 2017)

Yeesh. This thread is shameless clickbait about shameless clickbait trying to be other clickbait:

Phil McKnight made a video in which he observed a trend of girls coming into his store to buy guitars, and how any he asked credited Taylor Swift. He likened this surge of sales to young girls to the Van Halen surge among young boys in the 1980s.

That is it, that is all. But his video title summary seemed clickbaity-enough for sites to spam it, then other youtubers with influencer-status had to compete with contrary or redundant clickbait as to the manufactured controversy of some guy's trite observation in which two disparate musicians were mentioned in the same sentence.

It's like a year later, and this is still being mined for recreational outrage. There is no dichotomy, or even a question.


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## JohnIce (Jun 27, 2017)

I think people are confusing guitar popularity with hard rock/metal popularity and especially shred popularity. Guitar is still everywhere, but big, loud rock guitar at the center of everyone's attention is niche and very annoying if out of context. Just as niche and annoying as a loud saxophone at the center of everyone's attention. That will probably never be as popular as it was in the 80's either. Let's not forget shred was dead in the 90's too and didn't really have much of a popularity boost until GuitarHero came along in 2005 with Dragonforce and Avenged Sevenfold and the like. Yet until then, all the grunge bands, Oasis, Radiohead, RHCP, Blink 182 and many more were ruling the world guitars in hand all along. You ever wondered how many guitars "Wonderwall" or "Basket Case" sold? Add Taylor Swift to that list, as well as Mayer and Ed Sheeran, Jack White and Imagine Dragons.

The fact that people still look at guys like John Mayer and say "Meh, it's not the same as Eddie" shows this whole debate has more to do with rock/metal fans being in a bubble where guitar has to be a spectacle, rather than guitar ACTUALLY being less popular than it used to cause it ain't. If anything, Ableton is allowing people who can't even play at all to record guitars and other live instruments onto their songs where they would've used midi 5-10 years ago. Guitars everywhere. Even The Chainsmokers have guitar riffs for hooks in 2017.


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## KnightBrolaire (Jun 27, 2017)

USMarine75 said:


> You need some Koch in your life!
> 
> 
> 
> Him, Paisley, and Brent Mason would flat out embarrass about 90% of "technical" shredders.



 always wanted to get into country and chicken pickin' just haven't found a ton of good resources for it.


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## TedEH (Jun 27, 2017)

iamaom said:


> Right now society has an obession with trying to push girls to do everything boys do to fulfill some bizarre need to have the sexes equal in every respect.


I missed this line the first time around- seems dead on. It's the same thing everywhere I go. I work in games and there's a HUGE push to turn gaming into this uber-inclusive, "socially progressive" kind of space where women MUST be at the forefront for some reason. Realistically once you get into production everyone stops caring about the demographics of who's doing the work, but there are circles who insist on checking all the diversity checkboxes for no reason other than appealing to some perceived imbalance.

I'm all for women doing whatever they want, playing guitar, getting into stem fields, etc., but IMO it should be because that's what they want to do, not because someone marketing-minded decided the industry would look better with psuedo-progressive policies enforcing a particular demographic balance. I'm all for opening doors for anyone who has a serious interest in something. In my very limited experience, the reality has just been that there are fewer women who want to do those things, or who take it seriously, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that, as long as it's not because we're actively discouraging someone from pursuing their interests. I mean, to me, selling this image of "women should be doing x" isn't any better just because "x" is something previously associated with men.

The bit I find odd is why anyone is surprised about Taylor Swift being cited as a reason to get into guitar. One of the most well-known/popular musicians of our time is in a position of influence?! Shocking!


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## vilk (Jun 27, 2017)

I think the big divide is that EVH isn't a singer _at all_ and Taylor is _primarily_ a singer.

EVH gets guest appearances in Michael Jackson song to play the guitar solo
Taylor gets guest appearances in [loads of stuff] but only to sing. I've never heard of "guest guitar solo by Taylor Swift"

I think it would make more sense to say "_Taylor Swift is the next Alanis Morissette_"


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## Floppystrings (Jun 27, 2017)

I am familiar with youtube click bait videos.

And I also strongly believe Taylor Swift is a better guitarist than Van Halen because of one fact: Money.

The earth is also flat, and tap water chemicals are why the Back Street Boys became famous.


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## brector (Jun 27, 2017)

KnightBrolaire said:


> nothing wrong with mayer, he's a great guitar player, just most of the people I've run into who want to play his stuff don't want to play the fun songs like neon, they want to learn your body is a wonderland or such. I just don't understand why people would want to hamstring themselves and not try to better their technical chops. I think of being technical as having the full palette of colors to paint with instead of a few. Sure you can paint awesome stuff or write great music with basic colors/techniques, but I'd rather have the option to throw some technique around if I wanted to. Eric Johnson is a great example of that imo. He can write simpler bluesy songs but spices them up with nice technical riffs here and there that really make them shine (trademark is one of my favorite songs by him). Same with Joe Bonamassa, he has technical ability but knows when to turn it on and when not to.



I think it has something to do with a hobby versus a passion. When I first started I just wanted to learn certain songs. I had no desire to learn chords, scales, etc.

-Brian


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## bostjan (Jun 27, 2017)

I think the comparison is bogus, but I think I get what the guy is saying in the video. Here are some random thoughts:

1. Are young/teen girls picking up the guitar because of TSwft going to stick with it?
- The reason I ask, is that,
A) She seems to more or less wear the guitar as a fashion accessory. You don't hear her playing on her own records. Most concert footage of her, except some rarer, low-key performances, are of her singing, sometimes wearing a guitar, which she sometimes randomly strums and other times neglects. In the instances where she is playing live without a bunch of session players playing over the top of her in the mix, her technique seems very timid and a little awkward (the way she holds a pick, for example). I'm all for weird techniques, but her technique, to me, seems more like "I don't know what I'm doing here," instead of "I like to play this way; if you don't like it, I don't care." My point is not to criticize her technique or whatever - I'm basically saying that I don't think she is a guitar player at heart. I hope she proves me wrong.
B) Pop musician. How many pop musicians stick with music as a career these days? A few, sure, but less so in the whole female powerpop idiom. If you are going to draw comparisons between EVH ans TSwift, then I'm going to draw a more appropriate, but equally bad comparison between Swift and the likes of Avril Levigne and Hilary Duff. I think it's actually pretty safe to say that Avril Levigne's career was on equal footing ten years ago to Taylor Swift's career now. Avril's music was supposed to be more sincere than your average pop-punk, and some people were making a big deal out of a female picking up a guitar and making "rock" music (I wouldn't have really called any of this "rock music," but other people did, so whatever). At any rate, Avril hasn't released anything with widespread popularity in almost 5 years now, and people seem to have moved on. Rewind another ten years and you are looking at a year when Gwen Stefani filled almost exactly the same role, but coming from an already established career from one of the most successful ska bands of the previous era. Ten years prior to that, Madonna was at a similar point in her career. Ten years before that, Van Halen was rocking it. But Van Halen's staying power has been far more impressive. People making the commitment to learn even the simplest VH songs are more likely to be more involved in guitar, and, I believe, music in general, for a longer amount of time than kids who want to learn to strum along with a couple of Taylor Swift/Avril Levigne/Gwen Stephani/Madonna/Blondie/Linda Rondstadt songs from whichever decade. Which leads me to-
C) There is a lack of depth of challenge in the music. I love playing the guitar for whatever song. I like jamming with people of all sorts of genres. But if I listened to pop and never branched out, I'd have gotten bored with music long ago. As @brector said above, some people play as a hobby, others as a passion. There is no doubt in any sane mind that EVH has held a lifelong passion for guitar. Can anyone say the same for Taylor Swift? Does that passion transfer in any way to fans? I believe it does.

2. Is Taylor Swift the cause or part of the effect?
- Really, honestly, after watching videos of her singing and playing, Is the correct correlation Music -> TSwift -> Guitar? I think not. I think it's TSwift -> Music -> Guitar. That is to say, the guitar is associated with music in general, which, in turn, is associated with Taylor Swift, which these teens and young'uns are idolizing. So what? Well, in one case the person is the catalyst, and in the other case, music itself is the catalyst. A person might like music and therefore be more prone to take up guitar. When asked what that person likes, that person may well answer with whatever music is trending at that moment. Not to devalue Swift's music, but if you replaced her with Avril Levigne and called it 2007 instead of 2017, you could have made exactly the same argument that was presented in the video, and it would have the same issues.


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## man jerk (Jun 27, 2017)

my 9 year old daughter is currently learning guitar. You want to know her main musical inspiration? Freakin Taylor Swift. I think its awesome. Ill sing/play Taylor swift with her all day long if it inspires my daughter to play guitar. I dont care what she listens to as long as she loves music the way I do.


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## JohnIce (Jun 27, 2017)

TedEH said:


> I missed this line the first time around- seems dead on. It's the same thing everywhere I go. I work in games and there's a HUGE push to turn gaming into this uber-inclusive, "socially progressive" kind of space where women MUST be at the forefront for some reason. Realistically once you get into production everyone stops caring about the demographics of who's doing the work, but there are circles who insist on checking all the diversity checkboxes for no reason other than appealing to some perceived imbalance.
> 
> I'm all for women doing whatever they want, playing guitar, getting into stem fields, etc., but IMO it should be because that's what they want to do, not because someone marketing-minded decided the industry would look better with psuedo-progressive policies enforcing a particular demographic balance. I'm all for opening doors for anyone who has a serious interest in something. In my very limited experience, the reality has just been that there are fewer women who want to do those things, or who take it seriously, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that, as long as it's not because we're actively discouraging someone from pursuing their interests. I mean, to me, selling this image of "women should be doing x" isn't any better just because "x" is something previously associated with men. I believe gaming is the exact same thing.
> 
> The bit I find odd is why anyone is surprised about Taylor Swift being cited as a reason to get into guitar. One of the most well-known/popular musicians of our time is in a position of influence?! Shocking!



I don't think it's nearly as simple as that. When I was a guitar teacher, the majority of my pre-pubescant students were indeed girls. But past age 18 they were all dudes. My sister is also a great guitar player, firmly in the rock/metal category, and guess what all these girls have in common? People simply treat them like inferior, not serious, in it for attention from boys, etc. etc. year in and year out until many of them simply don't see the fun in it anymore. For me, as someone who's still pursuing music with no problem, seeing my sister slowly say "Fuck these guys!" and stop playing rock clubs or even jamming anymore, is heart breaking. If guys don't change their attitude towards women in male-dominated careers or hobbies, then this isn't going to change no matter how much the girls "want it". I know too many female guitar players to know the girls are NOT the problem. They are deliberately shut out, or left to fend for themselves against the ones who deliberately shut them out with no help from the rest of us who say we are "all for" them pursuing the same things we are. I believe gaming is the exact same thing.


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## vilk (Jun 27, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> I don't think it's nearly as simple as that. When I was a guitar teacher, the majority of my pre-pubescant students were indeed girls. But past age 18 they were all dudes. My sister is also a great guitar player, firmly in the rock/metal category, and guess what all these girls have in common? People simply treat them like inferior, not serious, in it for attention from boys, etc. etc. year in and year out until many of them simply don't see the fun in it anymore. For me, as someone who's still pursuing music with no problem, seeing my sister slowly say "Fuck these guys!" and stop playing rock clubs or even jamming anymore, is heart breaking. If guys don't change their attitude towards women in male-dominated careers or hobbies, then this isn't going to change no matter how much the girls "want it". I know too many female guitar players to know the girls are NOT the problem. They are deliberately shut out, or left to fend for themselves against the ones who deliberately shut them out with no help from the rest of us who say we are "all for" them pursuing the same things we are. I believe gaming is the exact same thing.



You don't think that anecdote speaks to the opposite of your assertion? That how she's perceived by others affects her desire to play to the degree that she stops playing--isn't it more suggestive that she was playing for superficial reasons rather than personal passion? 

I mean, as a guitarist that only practices metal, I'm also my whole life met with negativity towards my playing. "That doesn't even sound like music". I'm sure you've been told as much... though you are Swedish and I've heard that metal holds a bit more mainstream popularity in Scandinavia. (Not that I even know that you play metal, I'm just assuming because it's SSO)

I'm not disagreeing that women get discriminated against as performers more than men are--but I don't feel that it's somehow contained or exemplified only in musical performance. Sports, comedy, acting, even real non-performance related work, women are always evaluated in a different way than men are. Not that that makes it OK. I'm just sayin'.


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## GuitarBizarre (Jun 27, 2017)

Vilk that's absolute horseshit. 

Dudes are constantly told to compete, excel, get aggressive, fuck the haters, be your own man, disregard what anyone else things, forge your own path, prove 'em wrong, show em who's boss etc. 

Their entire fucking lives. 

You know what women get told? 50% of that, and 50% "That's not very ladylike" "Fake girl gamer" "Just doing it for attention" "Don't build up too much muscle, people will think you're mannish" "Wow isn't that a little aggressive" etc etc.

Every male dominated pursuit, it's the same thing - Dudes literally don't see the level of encouragement and support they get, that women don't.


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## vilk (Jun 27, 2017)

Why don't you re-read what I wrote.


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## TedEH (Jun 27, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> If guys don't change their attitude towards women in male-dominated careers or hobbies, then this isn't going to change no matter how much the girls "want it".


I think that attitude is changing. Maybe slowly. Doesn't negate my opinion though. I just mean to say that I don't think we need to "boost the numbers" until they're even. Does it fall on a community to be welcoming to whoever might want to join it? Sure it does.



GuitarBizarre said:


> Dudes are constantly told to compete, excel, get aggressive, fuck the haters, be your own man, disregard what anyone else things, forge your own path, prove 'em wrong, show em who's boss etc.
> 
> Their entire fucking lives.


I think that's an oversimplification of the social pressures that, I agree with Vilk on this one, more or less apply to everyone, albeit in different ways. Both group have to bear all kinds of strong messaging, unrealistic expectations, social pressures, etc., and I don't buy that it's necessarily worse for women. Different yes, but not worse - and that sort of leads up to the point I was trying to make - that trying to actively recruit women into otherwise "male" pursuits just adds another layer of social pressure / expectations, instead of just letting people do what they want. I'd rather that any person pick up a guitar because they dig playing guitar, as opposed to doing it because they think that's what someone from their walk of life should be doing, or because they want to shift some demographic numbers, or because social pressures have been applied to push them in that direction.


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## bostjan (Jun 27, 2017)

Like it or lump it, the world is competitive. You beat life or it beats you. Anyone telling girls that it's not ladylike to be clever or to excel at something is risking that girl thumping them up side the head for promoting that notion.

Music, in particular, is a terribly competitive career field. How many classical musicians do you think there are in the Philharmonic versus how many lived their entire lives with the goal of playing with the philharmonic? It's probably one in a hundred, if not more bleak than that. Wherever there is a chance to flaunt a little sex appeal to make it one step further, why not use it? Sadly, in pop music, sex appeal is fifty times more important than talent. And I don't mean that Taylor Swift is not talented - she's a very talented singer, and may be decent at writing songs (I honestly don't know any of the songs she's written by herself), but if I wrote those exact songs and could sing at the same level, I can guarantee that no one would care, but if I had a couple of hot body parts that I could flaunt around, and I sold my soul to the pop machine, I could autotune and autocorrect myself into a successful career.


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## man jerk (Jun 27, 2017)

here is what listening to / playing taylor swift gets you


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## Five Ten (Jun 27, 2017)

TedEH said:


> I think that attitude is changing. Maybe slowly. Doesn't negate my opinion though. I just mean to say that I don't think we need to "boost the numbers" until they're even. Does it fall on a community to be welcoming to whoever might want to join it? Sure it does.



The attitude is changing, and that's a good thing. We don't need to "boost the numbers" per se, but we do need to not treat it as some sort of taboo thing. Women are taught growing up to be "ladylike." Clean, non vulgar, modest, etc. Rock/metal guitar playing is very much so seen as a man's thing, which I think is not right. When it gets to the point where people aren't all "OMG A GRIL GUITAR PLAYER," then we are where we should be. That is not a quantifiable number, but a frame of mind. Female guitarists need to be normalized. Nothing more and nothing less. Women need to not feel turned away from such activities. 

Taylor Swift is someone for female guitarists to look up to regardless of how technically proficient she is. I think a lot of people are mistaking "technically proficient" with "guitar hero." Some of my favorite guitar work is from a band called Circus of Dead Squirrels. Go ahead and listen to them. They are not complex or exceedingly talented, but it is guitar playing that got me interested in learning guitar.

The problem now is just that guitar playing is not as shunned as some seem to say. When I told my father I wanted to learn guitar, he was more than happy about it. When he found out I wanted an explorer to play heavy music, he was less happy. Women are more than encouraged to play guitar. Women are much less encouraged to play heavy music though which I think is a shame.

In that sense, I am perfectly fine with Taylor Swift being a role model for female guitarists, but she doesn't exactly push boundaries for what a female musician is. I do think it would be nice to see more play heavy music. Not so the numbers are greater, but just to normalize it. I want it to get to the point where your average joe sees a woman on stage rocking the fuck out, and gender doesn't even cross their mind. It's just another guitarist playing heavy guitar music. We are a ways off from that I think.

So to answer the "is she the new Van Halen?" I don't think so, not even for females. She is not exactly known for her guitar playing, but her singing. To be perfectly honest, I never really knew she played an instrument until now. If she is the gateway for anyone to learn guitar, then that's great. I just do not think she is getting many people, regardless of gender, into guitar.


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## 5dollarbrownie (Jun 27, 2017)

I don't disagree with the idea that she is giving inspiration to kids to pick up the guitar just as Ed did. But I think it is in a different way. All these youngsters picking up guitar (and judging strictly by her fan base, probably mostly teenage girls) are likely using it as a songwriting instrument rather than learning to outright shred. Of course she isn't on the same playing level as Ed but that's not what she does. That's just the direction popular music has gone. I think it's great honestly. It will keep manufacturers in business.


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## TedEH (Jun 27, 2017)

Five Ten said:


> That is not a quantifiable number, but a frame of mind. Female guitarists need to be normalized.


A lot of people (not myself) do see it as a quantifiable number. I suppose I don't blame them for coming to that conclusion, the question becomes how do you normalize something outside of just boosting those numbers?


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## Five Ten (Jun 27, 2017)

TedEH said:


> A lot of people (not myself) do see it as a quantifiable number. I suppose I don't blame them for coming to that conclusion, the question becomes how do you normalize something outside of just boosting those numbers?



Boosting the numbers is a byproduct of the normalization. Perhaps it's all about the end game? The end game shouldn't be "more girls need to do this" but "girls shouldn't feel like they have a third eye for doing this." In the short term you want more high profile women doing things so it encourages kids to do things that old society deemed inappropriate. I suppose it is difficult to put into words for me. English isn't my strongest point.

Basically, I want to see more people do what they love. Some women are held back by invented standards. More high profile females means more women are shown that it's doable. It's dumb that that's how influence works, but it is what it is.


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## JohnIce (Jun 27, 2017)

vilk said:


> You don't think that anecdote speaks to the opposite of your assertion? That how she's perceived by others affects her desire to play to the degree that she stops playing--isn't it more suggestive that she was playing for superficial reasons rather than personal passion?
> 
> I mean, as a guitarist that only practices metal, I'm also my whole life met with negativity towards my playing. "That doesn't even sound like music". I'm sure you've been told as much... though you are Swedish and I've heard that metal holds a bit more mainstream popularity in Scandinavia. (Not that I even know that you play metal, I'm just assuming because it's SSO)
> 
> I'm not disagreeing that women get discriminated against as performers more than men are--but I don't feel that it's somehow contained or exemplified only in musical performance. Sports, comedy, acting, even real non-performance related work, women are always evaluated in a different way than men are. Not that that makes it OK. I'm just sayin'.



First of all, she didn't stop playing. She stopped gigging, and that's a very different thing.

You're comparing apples to oranges. Negativity towards heavy music is fair, and not at all what I'm getting at. It's the musicians and sound engineers, audiences, venue owners, promoters etc. all giving my sister more shit and lack of respect than her band members or the other bands, simply because she's a girl. It's as simple as people assuming she can't plug in her gear correctly, anything going wrong on stage is assumed to be her fault for not knowing how stuff works, something's out of tune everyone assumes it's her etc., it has nothing to do with the genre she'd play. People just treat her like an amateur or a child by default, even now and she's almost 30. She might have won some people over at the end of the gig but that doesn't mean she didn't have to fight 5x as hard for it. Believe me I've played all the same places with the same staff and the same audiences and they're always cool people, they don't mean to be assholes to women... but they are.

Your second paragraph I agree with, women are discriminated against in general. If you think that's bad, the first step should be to pay more attention in your immediate surroundings, which for a lot of us here is the live music/rock/metal scene. Guys who claim to be supportive of women in rock bands yet completely shrug off or ignore the discrimination they face right under their noses, that's just hypocrisy to me.



TedEH said:


> A lot of people (not myself) do see it as a quantifiable number. I suppose I don't blame them for coming to that conclusion, the question becomes how do you normalize something outside of just boosting those numbers?



Seems like your argument is that boosting numbers is bad, but the reason it's done is good. If you flip it around and come at it from an angle of "how do you normalize something?" and treating that as the important thing, then maybe boosting numbers would be the best thing you could come up with too. Just because it has downsides doesn't mean it's not the best way towards a greater good.


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## Dcm81 (Jun 28, 2017)

Well f**k no she's not!! What an asanine comparison!
If she can influence someone into picking up the guitar then great but she's got f**k all to do with Eddie.
Unfortunately and more likely than not, girls that idolize Swift and want to emulate or be her won't have aspirations of being the next female guitar god - instead they'll want to be just another a (pop) singer - as that is all she is.


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## Demiurge (Jun 28, 2017)

Just to throw it out there, but how much does accessibility matter when it comes to inspiring people to pick up an instrument? As I noted in my prior comment, I don't care much for the "so-and-so inspired me" narrative, but "so-and-so showed that you don't need to be a virtuoso to make music" can certainly mean something.

To that end, is EVH really EVH in terms of the hypothesis here? Christ, the internet if full of videos of jabronis artlessly noodling around who get reactions like "OMG- I should just give up playing now since this guy's so good!"  Any senior members here have a recollection of his initial impact, if he was more inspiration than intimidation?


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## bostjan (Jun 28, 2017)

Demiurge said:


> Just to throw it out there, but how much does accessibility matter when it comes to inspiring people to pick up an instrument? As I noted in my prior comment, I don't care much for the "so-and-so inspired me" narrative, but "so-and-so showed that you don't need to be a virtuoso to make music" can certainly mean something.
> 
> To that end, is EVH really EVH in terms of the hypothesis here? Christ, the internet if full of videos of jabronis artlessly noodling around who get reactions like "OMG- I should just give up playing now since this guy's so good!"  Any senior members here have a recollection of his initial impact, if he was more inspiration than intimidation?



I was just a little kid when Van Halen hit their most popular, so I wasn't playing at the time, but here's my observation:

Both.

EVH's solos were crazy technical for as mainstream as the band was in the early 80's, but the main riffs were just cool. Some were tricky, but most of the main framework riffs were pretty easy for more serious beginners. A lot of the songs focused on one gimmick for the main riff, which makes them downright pedagogical to learn a technique. Want to learn picked out arpeggios? "Ain't Talkin Bout Love" Want to learn how to use a flanger pedal? "And the Cradle Will Rock" Want to learn artificial harmonics? "Dance the Night Away" To be frank, "Hot for Teacher" sounds crazy to anyone who never tried tapping techniques, but the intro is basically just a finger tapping exercise, and the verse and chorus are power chords with different hammer-ons. My point is that most beginners don't really try to learn a song front to back right away, instead, they start with the main riffs then try to learn the fills and solos once the main framework is tight. Pretty much every Van Halen song is set up to be easy-ish main riffs with cool gimmicks in them, then crazy over-the-top (compared with songs of the same era) fills and solos. It's really not that different, in spirit, to learning a Led Zeppelin song or a Black Sabbath song. If anything, EVH's amazingly clear guitar tone makes it easy to pick out what he's doing. Some of Jimmy Page's solos have these flurried (read sloppy) moments where you can even slow it down and still can't tell what is going on - probably Jimmy Page didn't even know what was happening on his guitar at that moment. 

So, I think, in a lot of ways EVH intimidated conventional lead guitar rock guys of his time, but inspired a lot of newcomers to up the game.


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## TedEH (Jun 28, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> Seems like your argument is that boosting numbers is bad, but the reason it's done is good.


That's not reaaaaaaaaally what I mean to say. I think that people's intentions are good, but boosting numbers doesn't actually solve anything. It's not "bad" per-se. I don't really know how to put my viewpoint into words. My original comment on the subject was basically just to say that I can't get behind the big push to make everything demographically "equal", because I don't see the difference in numbers as being an actual problem. And I think the differences in attitude and pressures are exaggerated. Even if you remove the differences in attitudes, and managed to accomplish "normalizing" women playing guitar, whatever that would realistically mean, I still think think there would be more men playing, even if just in certain genres of music. On top of that, some of these pushes seem to do more to separate the sexes, rather than unify/normalize them.

Look at it this way maybe- this whole discussion comes about because someone has decided that Taylor Swift is a "guitar hero for women", because they "need that hero" because "we need more women guitar players", and I think all of that does more to damage the image of women playing guitar than to help it. It damages that image because Swift is NOT a guitar hero. We're sort of saying that the image of a woman guitar player should be someone who is popular for their looks and marketing team and isn't really all that good at guitar, but good for them for doing something men have always done. While men get the "real" guitar heroes like VH. Calling Swift a guitar hero sort of says to women "don't look at male guitarists for your inspiration, you can't be that... but you CAN be Swift, who wears a Les Paul like a fashion accessory!" I think it would be much better NOT to have "women guitar heroes", and instead just leave women alone to look up to either the same men that men like to look up to like VH, or to find their own heroes in women who are actually good at playing- the same women who are also already appreciated by men, because if the playing is good, people stop caring about the gendered issues. I mean, when people identified Swift as the reason they're playing, they didn't say "she's a guitar god!" they just said it's why they were playing. And that's fine. Nothing wrong with that. But let them move on and discover the rest of the world of guitar playing instead of reinforcing that Swift should continue to be their idol in terms of guitar.

I don't think we're ever going to hit the ideal "normalized" situation that people like to talk about, because it ignores the overlying reality that men and women are different. But I also don't think we're as far from a good situation as people say we are, if that makes any sense. I say that as someone who has been in several bands or musical situations with women- who played guitar, bass, who sang, who were front-people, who were the "sound-guy/sound-person" for certain gigs, etc. The band I'm playing most often with lately has a woman as a singer, AND it's in a death metal context, and the band has not lost any respect when she replaced a guy as our singer. If anything we've been received much better in some circles.


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## vilk (Jun 28, 2017)

I'm surprised you don't hear about more women guitarists inspired by Heart




Also, the guitarist for one of my very favorite groups, Boris, is a woman (Wata)



Also the lady from Gonin-ish. This might be more up to speed for SSO since she rockin' a 7


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## bostjan (Jun 28, 2017)

I'm not a female (I think you guys know that about me), but Heart was definitely an inspiration for me early on.

One that kind of strikes me is Jennifer Turner, who recorded lead guitar on Natalie Merchant's first solo album, then toured with her and, at the time, she was on the cover of Guitar Player magazine, but after the tour was over, it was never mentioned again.


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## KnightBrolaire (Jun 28, 2017)

When I first started playing guitar, one of my idols was Sharon Isbin (who's a fantastic classical guitarist). Between her and Paco De Lucia, they were the reason I wanted to learn guitar. Once I'd been playing for a bit and got into electric, I started trying to learn songs from Heart (that intro in crazy on you still throws me off sometimes) and Ozzy. I remember reading about Jennifer Batten/Lita Ford in my uncle's old guitar world magazines and looking them up too. For me personally, it never mattered whether a man or woman wrote the riffs, only if the riffs spoke to me and were fun to play. Hell, I didn't even know that the lead guitarist in Heart was nancy until I saw some videos on youtube.


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## JohnIce (Jun 28, 2017)

TedEH said:


> That's not reaaaaaaaaally what I mean to say. I think that people's intentions are good, but boosting numbers doesn't actually solve anything. It's not "bad" per-se. I don't really know how to put my viewpoint into words. My original comment on the subject was basically just to say that I can't get behind the big push to make everything demographically "equal", because I don't see the difference in numbers as being an actual problem. And I think the differences in attitude and pressures are exaggerated. Even if you remove the differences in attitudes, and managed to accomplish "normalizing" women playing guitar, whatever that would realistically mean, I still think think there would be more men playing, even if just in certain genres of music. On top of that, some of these pushes seem to do more to separate the sexes, rather than unify/normalize them.
> 
> Look at it this way maybe- this whole discussion comes about because someone has decided that Taylor Swift is a "guitar hero for women", because they "need that hero" because "we need more women guitar players", and I think all of that does more to damage the image of women playing guitar than to help it. It damages that image because Swift is NOT a guitar hero. We're sort of saying that the image of a woman guitar player should be someone who is popular for their looks and marketing team and isn't really all that good at guitar, but good for them for doing something men have always done. While men get the "real" guitar heroes like VH. Calling Swift a guitar hero sort of says to women "don't look at male guitarists for your inspiration, you can't be that... but you CAN be Swift, who wears a Les Paul like a fashion accessory!" I think it would be much better NOT to have "women guitar heroes", and instead just leave women alone to look up to either the same men that men like to look up to like VH, or to find their own heroes in women who are actually good at playing- the same women who are also already appreciated by men, because if the playing is good, people stop caring about the gendered issues. I mean, when people identified Swift as the reason they're playing, they didn't say "she's a guitar god!" they just said it's why they were playing. And that's fine. Nothing wrong with that. But let them move on and discover the rest of the world of guitar playing instead of reinforcing that Swift should continue to be their idol in terms of guitar.
> 
> I don't think we're ever going to hit the ideal "normalized" situation that people like to talk about, because it ignores the overlying reality that men and women are different. But I also don't think we're as far from a good situation as people say we are, if that makes any sense. I say that as someone who has been in several bands or musical situations with women- who played guitar, bass, who sang, who were front-people, who were the "sound-guy/sound-person" for certain gigs, etc. The band I'm playing most often with lately has a woman as a singer, AND it's in a death metal context, and the band has not lost any respect when she replaced a guy as our singer. If anything we've been received much better in some circles.



First of all, 80's hair metal bands in particular but popular rock bands in general, have ALWAYS maximized their sex appeal. Whether it's putting tubesocks into their spandex, playing without a shirt on or making a grossly underqualified blonde surfer dude the lead singer, the idea that Taylor Swift is more about looks than VH, GnR, Aerosmith, Zeppelin etc. is a terrible argument in my opinion. This is not accounting for every rock star who got into music just to get laid, which I'm pretty sure was not the case for Taylor Swift.

I don't think Taylor Swift tries to be a guitar hero and I doubt many of her fans see her as that either, so I agree with you there. However, that comes down to how you define "guitar hero" vs. inspiring musician and in my opinion that's a discussion I couldn't be less interested in. However, the idea that calling her a guitar hero sends a message to girls that they have to settle for playing like her, I think is false too. Growing up I've disagreed with male artists being called "guitar hero" more times than I can count and I'm sure you have too, so I think you might be reaching here. I wasn't ruined by hearing Tom DeLonge be called a guitar hero.

Either way, I think you and I both agree there are hurdles for women who want to be taken seriously as guitar players, however it seems to me like you're going to great lengths to debate against the methods people use to get there, which to me seems like a defense mechanism or a sign of laziness, no offense intended. Maybe it's because this "overlying reality that men and women are different" is where we disagree, I think it's been proven time and time again that in the field of music and playing instruments, men and women have equal potential. Rock instruments just happen to be over-represented by men, but on the other hand virtuosos of traditional asian instruments are more often female. This leads me to believe that the difference is purely societal, and thus I think "overlaying differences" is a cop-out argument.

Also, for what it's worth, this "big push to make everything democratically equal" you're talking about is not something I've seen myself, but I am familiar with affirmative action in theory and I assume that is what you're arguing against. Just clarifying. We do live in different countries after all.


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## TedEH (Jun 28, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> the idea that Taylor Swift is more about looks than VH, GnR, Aerosmith, Zeppelin etc. is a terrible argument in my opinion


I disagree with that assessment. I see Taylor Swift as a product of marketing heavily supported by the music, whereas I see those other bands as being music, heavily supported by marketing. It's a small difference but it's a difference. Looks are definitely an element of both, but it think it would be fair to say that it's more of the focus in a pop act than a rock act.



JohnIce said:


> Either way, I think you and I both agree there are hurdles for women who want to be taken seriously as guitar players, however it seems to me like you're going to great lengths to debate against the methods people use to get there, which to me seems like a defense mechanism or a sign of laziness, no offense intended.


Replying to some forum comments is hardly "going to great lengths", I'm simply stating my opinion that I don't think those methods are doing a very good job of solving any actual societal issues. I have no alternatives to suggest, so I dunno how much value there is in that opinion, but it is what it is. In a music context it's not something that bothers me, but the conversation of "hurdles for women" often extends much farther than music.



JohnIce said:


> in the field of music and playing instruments, men and women have equal potential.


Sure, I don't doubt that, on a very base level, if you're talking about literally just being able to play music. Men and women are not exactly the same though. It wouldn't surprise me if there are differences in physiology that lend to slightly different techniques or something, or maybe psychological differences that might result in different music being played. I mean, you can see it sometimes, just in the way that either holds the instrument juuust a little differently. That obviously doesn't mean that women aren't as capable as playing instruments as men, but that's not at all what I was suggesting. I meant it more in terms of your next point:



JohnIce said:


> Also, for what it's worth, this "big push to make everything democratically equal" you're talking about is not something I've seen myself, but I am familiar with affirmative action in theory and I assume that is what you're arguing against. Just clarifying.


That is more or less what I'm arguing against, I'm just doing a poor job of putting it into words. I just don't think playing the numbers game works, in the sense that it's addressing the wrong thing. It addresses the numbers, which I see as a not being the issue, instead of the attitudes. If women do have interest in playing guitar but we're discouraging them, then yeah, we should stop doing that. On the other hand, what if women just have less interest in playing sheddy metal guitar? What if women legitimately have less interest overall in fast cars and football and video games and all this stuff we're trying to push them into doing because "there's not enough women doing manly things"? I know women who like all of those things, and I agree that they should be as welcome and comfortable doing those things as any man. I know women who drive better than me, and play guitar better than me, and TONS of women who are in better shape than me, better at sports, etc. In some cases they'll get there and realize there aren't as many other women doing those things, and I think that's fine. In other cases, maybe they'll spark a surge in womens interest in that thing, and that's also fine. A good example maybe is the big surge of women getting into body building lately, at least in some circles I've seen. A whole bunch of women I know basically said "fk it, I don't care if it's a manly thing or how I'll be viewed, I want to get ripped", so they went and did it, and nobody thought any less of them, and the odd person who didn't like it usually got put in their place pretty quickly. They did it cause they wanted to, not because they were told the gyms needed more women. Why is playing guitar any different? What I think makes more sense is adjusting the community attitude when needed to make its very clear that music is for everyone- and that's it.

Maybe another way to put it is that the message should be "do what you want to do, and we'll take you seriously" (of course it continues to fall on the existing community to follow through and take them seriously), as opposed to "here's a list of things that are traditionally male, women please go try those". I'm not against encouraging people to do whatever they actually want to do. But I don't think there's any reason to push for 50/50 representation all the time.

To be fair, don't take the amount I typed about be any indication of how seriously I take anything. I'm not "offended" by the idea of more women playing music or anything like that.


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## JohnIce (Jun 28, 2017)

TedEH said:


> - plenty of stuff -



While there are things in your post I could nitpick on with disagreement, I think there's one main thing we seem to see differently. When you say "what if women are just less interested in..." and proceed to name things that are very male-centric, what I see is you naming things that while mostly enjoyed by men, also actively shut out or belittle female influence. In sports it's at its most divided because the players are men, and at best you have female cheerleaders. Surely you can see why such an arrangement doesn't exactly inspire women to want to become a quarterback? This thread is not about sports though so that's a side note, but my point is if you look at things that are male-dominated and try to imagine what about those things would steer women away, you could probably find quite a lot of things. Me taking parallel steps with my sister as rock guitar players has certainly opened my eyes and made me stop thinking "what if women are just less interested..." when dudes are actively pushing them away, willingly or not.

I don't think men in general try to be sexist or shut women out, and the guitar community is no different. The problem has more to do with a lack of attention than ill will. If we sort out the things shutting women out as priority one, THEN we can start a discussion of what women are interested in. Preferably with the actual women.


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## TedEH (Jun 29, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> what I see is you naming things that while mostly enjoyed by men, also actively shut out or belittle female influence.


I get the sense that we see things from very different angles. Maybe I'm just lucky to be in a place where there's not much of that kind of thing, but I see very little of any active shutting-out of women in anything coming from inside of the actual communities they might be trying to enter. There are lots of women in this areas music scene, and they're well accepted- they're taken as seriously as they take themselves, just like the men. Same goes for gym-goers, or car enthusiasts or whatever else have you.



JohnIce said:


> If we sort out the things shutting women out as priority one


I think treating women like they're some sort of different type of person that needs to be singled out and brought into the community separately is exactly one of those kinds of things- and all the affirmative-action-y-type pushes do just that- they separate women into a group that needs to be treated differently, which I think accomplishes the opposite of what it intends to. You normalize a group by NOT giving special treatment. Just let people be people. Segregating our guitar heroes into "ones that encourage women" and "actual guitar heroes" is, in my opinion, potentially one of those things that pushes women away. Saying "Taylor Swift is just like VH but for women!" to me comes across as exactly the kind of patronizing voice that would discourage someone from wanting to play.



JohnIce said:


> Preferably with the actual women.


I think we agree at least on that part.


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## bostjan (Jun 29, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> While there are things in your post I could nitpick on with disagreement, I think there's one main thing we seem to see differently. When you say "what if women are just less interested in..." and proceed to name things that are very male-centric, what I see is you naming things that while mostly enjoyed by men, also actively shut out or belittle female influence. In sports it's at its most divided because the players are men, and at best you have female cheerleaders. Surely you can see why such an arrangement doesn't exactly inspire women to want to become a quarterback? This thread is not about sports though so that's a side note, but my point is if you look at things that are male-dominated and try to imagine what about those things would steer women away, you could probably find quite a lot of things. Me taking parallel steps with my sister as rock guitar players has certainly opened my eyes and made me stop thinking "what if women are just less interested..." when dudes are actively pushing them away, willingly or not.
> 
> I don't think men in general try to be sexist or shut women out, and the guitar community is no different. The problem has more to do with a lack of attention than ill will. If we sort out the things shutting women out as priority one, THEN we can start a discussion of what women are interested in. Preferably with the actual women.



I know that it's not what you were saying, but just a general statement: hobbies don't disparage women, people do. Other women can disparage women just as much as men can.

Women are not the same as men. Anybody going for that idea can go ahead, but I'll still call it wrong. Each person is an individual, but groups of people behave according to certain rules. It's not just social, but chemical as well. So, like, one woman can be a football player or a wrestler or a shred-metal guitarist or a fireman or whatever she wants to be, but don't go expecting there to be *as many women in a career field as there are men.* Different chemistry, different wiring, and different social responsibilities are not necessarily a bad thing. If opportunities are stripped away from a specific person, that's a bad thing. If there are not as many of a specific race or gender involved in a particular activity, and no one has any specific complaints, then you are just looking for problems.


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## Five Ten (Jun 29, 2017)

It is all societal upbringing. Again, women are brought up in general to like "feminine" things, and men "masculine" things. Blue vs pink. Cooking vs factory work. Ice skating vs football. Acoustic vs metal. While maybe not the norm, there is no reason you could not have a woman who actively worked towards it be a quarterback on an otherwise all male team. The reason we need more women doing typically men things is, again, to normalize it. You do not need to try to make things "equal," but you need to make it so women are not discouraged from these things. It has nothing to do with "forcing" inflated numbers, and everything to do with not discouraging people from doing things. The end game is that we see more women doing it by choice because they were brought up not thinking it was weird. Not make more women do it so things are equal.

Women musicians would help show people that it is okay to do things not typically female. Among many other bands, I really like Arch Enemy, Jinjer, Lacuna Coil and Halestorm. They all have good music that don't entirely treat their female members as a gimmick, with the exception of maybe arch enemy that always seems to but her way more front and center. Their music would hold up perfectly fine with all male members, and that is fine. They are inspiring though. I know they inspired me personally to do things I was initially shy to do. I have always liked heavier music, but I always felt like I did not belong as an artist. Even now I feel a bit like the black sheep, but it is encouraging to see more artists popping up that don't adhere to the "typical." It makes me feel less out of place.

Perhaps it's just a lack of perspective. I can understand why someone who lacks the perspective of the marginalized might think there is nothing that needs fixed or changed. I am sure there are things I lack perspective on and as such hold an opinion that can be changed.

On the topic of Taylor Swift though, she is a pop singer first and a guitarist second. EVH was known for pushing boundaries with his guitar playing first and foremost. Taylor Swift is not that, and that is what this thread is about. Men vs women in music aside, that is really the bottom line.


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## ramses (Jun 29, 2017)

Five Ten said:


> It is all societal upbringing. Again, women are brought up in general to like "feminine" things, and men "masculine" things.
> 
> ...
> 
> On the topic of Taylor Swift though, she is a pop singer first and a guitarist second. EVH was known for pushing boundaries with his guitar playing first and foremost. Taylor Swift is not that, and that is what this thread is about. Men vs women in music aside, that is really the bottom line.



A drummer friend teaches regularly. In more than one occasion he has had to sit down with parents of new female students, to explain them that they should not be worried that their daughter wants to learn drums, because drum playing is not a masculine thing.

Back to Swift ... It would be awesome if her producers gave more screen-time to her guitar in her music videos, instead of so much silly dancing — that's how guitar heroes are made


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## bostjan (Jun 29, 2017)

Five Ten said:


> It is all societal upbringing. Again, women are brought up in general to like "feminine" things, and men "masculine" things. Blue vs pink. Cooking vs factory work. Ice skating vs football. Acoustic vs metal. While maybe not the norm, there is no reason you could not have a woman who actively worked towards it be a quarterback on an otherwise all male team. The reason we need more women doing typically men things is, again, to normalize it. You do not need to try to make things "equal," but you need to make it so women are not discouraged from these things. It has nothing to do with "forcing" inflated numbers, and everything to do with not discouraging people from doing things. The end game is that we see more women doing it by choice because they were brought up not thinking it was weird. Not make more women do it so things are equal.



In general, no. The specific argument you give is particularly bad. 

There are actual reasons why things are the way they are. Some of those reasons are stupid, but a lot of them are perfectly logical.

Again, each person is an individually unique person. If specific person X wants to be in the NBA, then person X should have the opportunity to reach his or her dreams. But if person X has no skills at basketball, then the dream of being in the NBA is stupid.

I know some millennials will have a difficult time swallowing these ideas, but you can't use statistics one way to prove a point and not use them the same exact way when it seems discriminatory.

There *are* reasons why you could not have a woman who actively worked toward being a quarterback on an otherwise all male team. Some of them may not be good reasons, but they are reasons nonetheless. I would point out the fact contained in the statement as the most damning: "all male team." There are biological facts that women do not typically have the bone durability and muscle mass that men typically have. That's just a fact. There may be an individual woman who has stronger bones and stronger muscles than a particular man, but that particular man isn't an NFL quarterback, either, now, is he? For example, I could have worked my ass off to become an NFL quarterback, but, if I am simply not genetically predisposed to being a good quarterback, then it's not going to happen. And I've seen some women throw a mean football longpass, but I have yet to see one who can throw a mean football longpass who could also survive getting sacked by a 250 pound linebacker. If there is a woman who meets all of the physical criteria to be an NFL quarterback, there is still the more political issues, which don't go away, even if they seem stupid on the surface. There are nuances that I think people just don't understand, and you can call it sexist, but I call them practical. I'm all for coed sports, but if you get to the top tier professional level, I'm against it.

This comes back to a comment that John McEnroe got into so much trouble for:



John McEnroe said:


> Well because if she was in, if she played the men's circuit she'd be like 700 in the world. That doesn't mean I don't think Serena is an incredible player. I do, but the reality of what would happen would be I think something that perhaps it'd be a little higher, perhaps it'd be a little lower. And on a given day, Serena could beat some players. I believe because she's so incredibly strong mentally that she could overcome some situations where players would choke 'cause she's been in it so many times, so many situations at Wimbledon, The US Open, etc. But if she had to just play the circuit — the men's circuit — that would be an entirely different story.



Wow. That's pretty shitty for him to say. But, is he correct? I'd say that he's probably not entirely accurate, but not entirely wrong, either, on a factual basis. Do a little research, because this has been tested over and over again. In "Battle of the Sexes" matches, the man is almost always penalized with heavy handicaps, and still wins fairly often. In other cases, the man is 20 years older than the woman, and still wins. In other cases, the man has lost, only to be later proven to have bet against himself and likely thrown the matches...



Five Ten said:


> Women musicians would help show people that it is okay to do things not typically female. Among many other bands, I really like Arch Enemy, Jinjer, Lacuna Coil and Halestorm. They all have good music that don't entirely treat their female members as a gimmick, with the exception of maybe arch enemy that always seems to but her way more front and center. Their music would hold up perfectly fine with all male members, and that is fine. They are inspiring though. I know they inspired me personally to do things I was initially shy to do. I have always liked heavier music, but I always felt like I did not belong as an artist. Even now I feel a bit like the black sheep, but it is encouraging to see more artists popping up that don't adhere to the "typical." It makes me feel less out of place.
> 
> Perhaps it's just a lack of perspective. I can understand why someone who lacks the perspective of the marginalized might think there is nothing that needs fixed or changed. I am sure there are things I lack perspective on and as such hold an opinion that can be changed.
> 
> On the topic of Taylor Swift though, she is a pop singer first and a guitarist second. EVH was known for pushing boundaries with his guitar playing first and foremost. Taylor Swift is not that, and that is what this thread is about. Men vs women in music aside, that is really the bottom line.



I am with you there. Music is not gender-specific. Women and men both like music, and both have all of the necessary mental wiring and biological hardware to play most instruments equally well. You don't see many female DM vocalists, because that is a specific case that provides additional challenges, biologically. It'd be the same as a male singer trying to do Soprano arias or something.


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## JohnIce (Jun 29, 2017)

TedEH said:


> I think treating women like they're some sort of different type of person that needs to be singled out and brought into the community separately is exactly one of those kinds of things- and all the affirmative-action-y-type pushes do just that- they separate women into a group that needs to be treated differently, which I think accomplishes the opposite of what it intends to. You normalize a group by NOT giving special treatment. Just let people be people. Segregating our guitar heroes into "ones that encourage women" and "actual guitar heroes" is, in my opinion, potentially one of those things that pushes women away. Saying "Taylor Swift is just like VH but for women!" to me comes across as exactly the kind of patronizing voice that would discourage someone from wanting to play.



I see your logic, as this is how I used to think too. However, thinking a marginalized group doesn't need special treatment and will just naturally become less marginalized if we all just stop caring, has very little evidence to support itself. If that was the case, they wouldn't _be_ marginalized. It does seem logical and respectful and benevolent, I totally get that, but it's been historically disproven for thousands of years all the same. Whether it's women's rights or POC rights or gay rights etc. Change doesn't just come naturally, it _does_ require action, it always has. It requires leaders and speeches and legislation but most of all it requires action. Affirmative action sounds stupid if you believe that a) women and men have the same opportunities in life, and b) men outnumbering women is just a natural outcome of the men being more qualified. If however you believe that women are marginalized (which you seem to agree with) and odds are that the amount of qualified men and women for a generic profession is likely around 50/50 (which you also seem to agree with) but that marginalization is what's keeping women from getting those jobs, then affirmative action makes a lot of sense. It has also, when implemented in corporate settings, proven to have little impact on the success of those companies, meaning that hiring 50/50 of each gender didn't show any signs of a less qualified workforce. Sure it's quite new data, but it does mean that the main criticism against affirmative action, which up until now has been entirely hypothetical, hasn't really shown to be warranted once it's been implemented.

This went way off topic, but I'm glad we're having the discussion and that we're all taking it seriously 



bostjan said:


> I know that it's not what you were saying, but just a general statement: hobbies don't disparage women, people do. Other women can disparage women just as much as men can.
> 
> Women are not the same as men. Anybody going for that idea can go ahead, but I'll still call it wrong. Each person is an individual, but groups of people behave according to certain rules. It's not just social, but chemical as well. So, like, one woman can be a football player or a wrestler or a shred-metal guitarist or a fireman or whatever she wants to be, but don't go expecting there to be *as many women in a career field as there are men.* Different chemistry, different wiring, and different social responsibilities are not necessarily a bad thing. If opportunities are stripped away from a specific person, that's a bad thing. If there are not as many of a specific race or gender involved in a particular activity, and no one has any specific complaints, then you are just looking for problems.



I'm glad we agree that's not what I'm saying  I think what you're getting at is a chicken vs. egg argument. If we believe men and women to be different, we will treat women and men different and assume and expect different things from them. Growing up with those assumptions and expectations placed upon you based purely on your gender (like we all did), you will react and adapt accordingly, make friends and form groups accordingly. Voíla, different opportunities for different people! So the circle continues, but you have no way of knowing where those differences originate from. Are they cultural or genetic, which is the chicken and which is the egg? Unless you're a geneticist it's safe to say both you and I and virtually everyone else in society is unqualified to accurately judge the differences between men and women by any other means than what we observe and extrapolate from our own society. That is incredibly unscientific. So we can make blanket statements like "men and women are different" with about as much accuracy as saying the ocean is mostly water, and it's about as useful.


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## bostjan (Jun 30, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> I'm glad we agree that's not what I'm saying  I think what you're getting at is a chicken vs. egg argument. If we believe men and women to be different, we will treat women and men different and assume and expect different things from them. Growing up with those assumptions and expectations placed upon you based purely on your gender (like we all did), you will react and adapt accordingly, make friends and form groups accordingly. Voíla, different opportunities for different people! So the circle continues, but you have no way of knowing where those differences originate from. Are they cultural or genetic, which is the chicken and which is the egg? Unless you're a geneticist it's safe to say both you and I and virtually everyone else in society is unqualified to accurately judge the differences between men and women by any other means than what we observe and extrapolate from our own society. That is incredibly unscientific. So we can make blanket statements like "men and women are different" with about as much accuracy as saying the ocean is mostly water, and it's about as useful.



Are you serious?! You think you have to be a Ph.D. geneticist to observe that men are chemically different from women?! Do I need to be an electrical engineer to change a lightbulb? Do I need to be a senior mechanic to fill the gas tank of my car? Do I need to be an NFL coach in order to route for my favourite American football team?

These are very basic facts:

A) Women have ovaries instead of testies.
B) Ovaries and testies produce totally different concentrations of hormones like testosterone and estrogen.
C) Testosterone and estrogen have vastly different effects on the developing body, in terms of muscle mass and bone strength.
D) If something develops at a much faster rate, it will develop more than something that develops at a much slower rate.

Your conjectures above are not scientific at all. You are trying to say, it seems, that you don't know what two things are, so therefore, they must be equal. Non sequitor.

Society doesn't determine who has which organs at birth, genetics do. I don't have to be a professional geneticist to be able to say that in a discussion.


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## mdeeRocks (Jun 30, 2017)

She can't play. Period.
Abut her "inspiring". She is using a guitar like a bag. The girls who are "inspired" by her want the same bag. Playing, if they ever attempt it, will end after first broken fingernail. That's all about it.

Comparing her to Van Halen doesn't make any sense.


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## JohnIce (Jun 30, 2017)

bostjan said:


> Are you serious?! You think you have to be a Ph.D. geneticist to observe that men are chemically different from women?! Do I need to be an electrical engineer to change a lightbulb? Do I need to be a senior mechanic to fill the gas tank of my car? Do I need to be an NFL coach in order to route for my favourite American football team?
> 
> These are very basic facts:
> 
> ...



If that's how you interpreted my point, then you misunderstood it. All that you said, I agree with. So with that knowledge, would you read my post again?

You don't have to be a senior mechanic to fill gas in a car, nope, but is the topic of inequality and discrimination in modern society as uncomplicated as filling up gas or changing a lightbulb? I've seen your posts in the P&CE section and I know you to be a lot smarter than that, so take that as a rhetorical question. That's a very trivializing way to look at the struggles of billions of people. Knowing the difference between ovaries and and a nutsack does very little to explain why women aren't expected to know how to start a lawnmower or lead a country, or be a competent guitar player. If you want to find genetic reasons for why women are marginalized in a digital society (where physique matters less than it ever has), you WOULD need that Ph.D. and then some. Hence my comment that saying "men and women are different" is quite a useless bit of trivia in a discussion like this. So again, with this out of the way, do take another look at my last post and see if you read it a little differently now that I've clarified myself.


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## iamaom (Jun 30, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> Hence my comment that saying "men and women are different" is quite a useless bit of trivia in a discussion like this.


Let's be honest, this article and this thread are tapping into something much deeper than simply how many people with vaginas play a musical instrument. This entire conversation is about gender politics and women's supposed oppression, even in a post-feminist movement society. There seems to be a very politically correct Zeitgeist where women are always perpetual victims if they demonstrate the slightest statistical difference in a socially prestigious role, and anyone who goes against the narrative are labeled misogynist. I've seen this exact dialog carried out in person and online, and I've been both a passive observer and an active participant. It always goes the same way, once we finally shed this facade of talking about guitars or video games or senate seats or whatever the gloves come off and accusations start flying as deeply held societal ideologies are revealed and arguments become very personal, and everyone leaves with a burn on their internet skin. While I'm not saying we should not have this conversation on this board, I refuse to continue on this conversation as if it was really just about guitars. It's not that I'm trying to be rude or tart, just frank.

Men and women are different. There is no such thing as separate but equal. Women and men are not equal, and they never will be. It is an inherent property of our species.

Humans are sexually dimorphic: we were naturally selected to take on different roles to ensure the survival of the species. The very fact that two sexes evolved (and sex has evolved independently many times) shows there is some evolutionary value in having two classes of a species with different properties. While the exact properties of a species' genders may differ, the sexes are never identical. Some species have a big strong female and a small, meek male. Humans are not that species. Men are big and strong and hunt and protect and build. Women are small and weak and have babies and nurse children. These roles are etched into our very consciousness, and even with a lifetime of nurturing otherwise it remains ingrained in a lot of people in one way or another.

These differences will manifest themselves over large numbers of people as unequal statistics. While human individuals can have massive variation in personality and behavior, and are able to buck a gender role/stereotype or two, the vast majority of the population conforms with their gender role/stereotype. If there is something inherent to an electric guitar or the music it produces that females naturally do not like as much as males, then it will be a male dominated field. This doesn't have to be due to some sort of active where men conspire to keep women out of guitar, nor a passive societal standard against women strumming strings attached to wood. Notice how it's not just guitar itself, but the genres of music women vs are looking to play. There isn't a conspiracy to keep women from playing metal (far from it, usually women in metal get A LOT of positive attention they wouldn't otherwise get as a male, see: baby metal). Metal is loud, it is harsh, it features mainly negative emotions with minor scales, it is often not very dance-able, it's lyrical content is usually vividly negative and violent and deals with complex and esoteric subjects, it's rebellious and usually looking to go against the musical and societal grain, and it's often associated with nerdy unpopular young people. Women as a whole just aren't as attracted to these properties, and other ventures that share them (horror movies for example) are also usually male dominated. It also works vice-versa, there aren't as many men into bubbly Taylor Swift pop or romantic comedies. The sexes often have different, polar opposite tastes in all aspects of life.


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## vilk (Jun 30, 2017)

I'm not sure how this is going to fit into the discussion but it feels relevant:

people not having the expectation that a women know how to operate a lawnmower =/= people thinking women ought not to be operating lawnmowers


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## bostjan (Jun 30, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> If that's how you interpreted my point, then you misunderstood it. All that you said, I agree with. So with that knowledge, would you read my post again?
> 
> You don't have to be a senior mechanic to fill gas in a car, nope, but is the topic of inequality and discrimination in modern society as uncomplicated as filling up gas or changing a lightbulb? I've seen your posts in the P&CE section and I know you to be a lot smarter than that, so take that as a rhetorical question. That's a very trivializing way to look at the struggles of billions of people. Knowing the difference between ovaries and and a nutsack does very little to explain why women aren't expected to know how to start a lawnmower or lead a country, or be a competent guitar player. If you want to find genetic reasons for why women are marginalized in a digital society (where physique matters less than it ever has), you WOULD need that Ph.D. and then some. Hence my comment that saying "men and women are different" is quite a useless bit of trivia in a discussion like this. So again, with this out of the way, do take another look at my last post and see if you read it a little differently now that I've clarified myself.



You still lose me on the last three sentences of your paragraph. Up to that point, sure.



JohnIce said:


> Unless you're a geneticist it's safe to say both you and I and virtually everyone else in society is unqualified to accurately judge the differences between men and women by any other means than what we observe and extrapolate from our own society. That is incredibly unscientific. So we can make blanket statements like "men and women are different" with about as much accuracy as saying the ocean is mostly water, and it's about as useful.



I expect that the context I laid out was what you were carrying on.

Plenty of women are competent guitar players and, I believe, are widely recognized as just that. Plenty of women are spectacular athletes, and are recognized as just that. I don't see how these sorts of things are really a problem in the Western World anymore. There are tons of women world leaders, but that might yet have some ways to go...

Where I draw my line in the sand, and where we seem to disagree, and where I clarified my position, was within the idea that there need to be balances in the statistical distribution of sexes in different professions. That's utterly wrong, IMO, and I think I have a pretty sound explanation as to why I think that's rubbish.

So, to zoom in on the statement that caught me by surprise:



JohnIce said:


> Unless you're a geneticist it's safe to say both you and I and virtually everyone else in society is unqualified to accurately judge the differences between men and women by any other means than what we observe and extrapolate from our own society.



First off, the "unless you're a geneticist" qualifier means nothing. If you are a geneticist, then you observe and extrapolate anyway. The idea that a geneticist is more qualified than a sociologist to make conclusions about social science is also weird and misguided, which is basically what you are saying, unless your lack of punctuation has somehow misconstrued your meaning. Also, the biological differences between men and women are not social constructs, they are clear distinctions that are 99% of the time obvious on the surface. The statement that men grow more facial hair than women, generally speaking, is a simple and true statement. Some women might grow more facial hair than some men, but you can't go forcing equality.



JohnIce said:


> That is incredibly unscientific.



Which part?



JohnIce said:


> So we can make blanket statements like "men and women are different" with about as much accuracy as saying the ocean is mostly water, and it's about as useful.



Hmm. If you are suggesting that there should be the same number of men as women in any given profession, then you are missing the entire point of what I said.

Right. So, take a deep breath, and let me choose an example.

Example: computer programmer.

Here's a profession where the differences between men and women are not clearly understood on the surface, and a profession where 19 out of 20 positions are held by men.
In the advent of computing, there were actually a lot more women than men. Socially, computer programming in the 1960's was seen as clerical work. By the mid-1980's the idiom had shifted, and the computer programmer was pictured as a guy with thick glasses and a pocket protector, and the profession became heavily male-dominated. So, what happened?

A lot of things.

One thing was the sudden ubiquity of the home personal computer. One thing was a shift in social pressures, a major aspect of which was the stereotype.

According to some women programming professionals interviewed, many of their peers did not want to join a college program where they'd be the only girl in some of their classes. In fact, there were many reasons, but this was the predominant one.

That brings me back to how women and men are wired differently. It's a simple observation, and there, of course, are plenty of exceptions, but, as a group, men and women, generally follow these behaviours in the given situation:

Situation: You are the only representative of your gender in a classroom with a large number of students.

Guy's typical reaction: "Sweet!"
Girl's typical reaction: "Get me out of here!"

Obviously, the girl exceptions go on to persevere and usually, end up being highly successful, due to the extra drive necessary to overcome the adverse situation.

There could be a detailed discussion about why the typical reaction is such as I listed above, and it's difficult to separate the biological from the social influences, but I think most people who have had time to think deeply enough about the status agree that both influences exist. My argument is that as long as there is a biological tendency for something to be a certain way, we shouldn't necessarily fight it, unless we can truly prove that it is a negative attribute of society.

So, back up a step and let's think briefly about how men took over the profession of computer programming from women. Now add in the typical behaviours of men and women in the situation above and you can see how men would be comfortable infiltrating the profession, and, once the balance shifted beyond 50% men, women's general interest in the profession would wane quickly.

Should we encourage women to be computer programmers? Abso-fucking-lutely. Should we encourage a 50/50 split in the profession? If yes, then how? If no, then why not? Yes/how - you would have to get rid of the men in the profession to make women more comfortable, and that's simply neither right nor fair to the men who worked hard to be in that profession. No/why not - because women don't have the general interest in the profession anymore. It makes sense, to me, after weighing out the options, to encourage individual women to be computer programmers, but, if they don't want to, even if it is for the reason that there are just too many men in the profession, then we shouldn't try to force the change any more than that.

Is that a clear enough example?

Ok, you're probably not reading at this point anymore, but let's go back to the main discussion anyway. Women playing guitar...

Why aren't there more women guitar players?

Well, to answer this question, we first have to understand the question.

#1 What's stopping women from picking up the guitar?

A) Lack of role models.
B) Lack of interest.
C) Lack of performance.
D) Too much competition.
E) Too little reward.

Picking apart each option:

A) Lack of role models - there are plenty of role models in the guitar world, but granted, fewer than there were ten or twenty years ago. I would dismiss the idea that it's sexist that there are not enough female role models on guitar as hypocritically sexist itself, since the gender of a role model should not disqualify a role model unless you are sexist about who your role models are. Anyway, Jennifer Batten exists, therefore the argument is missing a leg to hold it up.

B) Lack of interest - why should a girl want to play guitar? Because it's fun, of course. It's fun for guys and it's fun for girls.

C) Lack of performance - Again, Jennifer Batten exists. You also have Sarah Longfield. There are plenty of girls out there who have achieved the highest level of guitar skill.

D) Too much competition - I think this might be a good candidate. Guitarist is a difficult profession to achieve success, even with the highest level of skill possible.

E) Too little reward - Another good candidate. How many excellent guitarists are out there who never get recognition, never get financially stable, and never get any real reward for their contributions to music? I think there are a lot. One of the greatest guitarists I had ever seen died at 49 without ever having become well known. His wikipedia article is a stub. Chet Atkins called him the best fingerpicker. I found out about him after a VHS tape being passed around made it to me. I immediately made a copy and dubbed it on cassette so I could listen to it in the car, then passed the original on.

Anyway.

If D is the primary reason, then there really isn't anything society can do. If E is the reason, then society needs to reward guitar players more. Either way, I don't think there is any real sexist here preventing women from playing guitar, only perceived sexism.

Also, boo hiss on you reiterating that a person's opinion is only relevant to an online forum discussion if that person holds the highest professional qualification, despite that person's logic.


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## wankerness (Jun 30, 2017)

Women are just as able as men to play a frickin stringed instrument, just look at the classical world with practically any strings. There are even women playing classical guitar that can blow away nearly any male playing electric. Electric guitar is entirely social, and any "biology" that comes into it is the fact that a lot of players are playing guitar cause they think it shows off how big their dick is. So yeah, there's not going to be women that want to do it for that reason. They're technically able to play the damn thing just as well. So all this talk about women not being biologically capable on the level of men seems insane to bring into this. Of course changing society's perspective on why and who should play the electric guitar would result in more women playing, and if they have role models that aren't Taylor Swift plenty of them could be legitimately great.

And yeah, Taylor Swift basically sucks at guitar.


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## vilk (Jun 30, 2017)

^Idk if you're familiar with these posters, but none of them are those things. At least I know bost and Johnice arent. Sorry it's getting too deep for you but it isn't off topic imo


----------



## wankerness (Jun 30, 2017)

vilk said:


> ^Idk if you're familiar with these posters, but none of them are those things. At least I know bost and Johnice arent. Sorry it's getting too deep for you but it isn't off topic imo



Yeah, that's true, I know he isn't. Knee-jerk reaction. I've seen that too much on guitar forums over the years.


----------



## wankerness (Jun 30, 2017)

KnightBrolaire said:


> When I first started playing guitar, one of my idols was Sharon Isbin (who's a fantastic classical guitarist). Between her and Paco De Lucia, they were the reason I wanted to learn guitar. Once I'd been playing for a bit and got into electric, I started trying to learn songs from Heart (that intro in crazy on you still throws me off sometimes) and Ozzy. I remember reading about Jennifer Batten/Lita Ford in my uncle's old guitar world magazines and looking them up too. For me personally, it never mattered whether a man or woman wrote the riffs, only if the riffs spoke to me and were fun to play. Hell, I didn't even know that the lead guitarist in Heart was nancy until I saw some videos on youtube.



Yeah, Sharon Isbin is one of my go-tos for these kinds of topics. I saw her live at some point in my teens without having a clue who she was. She was one of the first classical guitarists I'd ever seen.



bostjan said:


> This comes back to a comment that John McEnroe got into so much trouble for:
> 
> 
> 
> Wow. That's pretty shitty for him to say. But, is he correct? I'd say that he's probably not entirely accurate, but not entirely wrong, either, on a factual basis. Do a little research, because this has been tested over and over again. In "Battle of the Sexes" matches, the man is almost always penalized with heavy handicaps, and still wins fairly often. In other cases, the man is 20 years older than the woman, and still wins. In other cases, the man has lost, only to be later proven to have bet against himself and likely thrown the matches...



She'd actually made earlier statements about this kind of thing in which she basically said the same thing. Of course since he's a piece of shit her response to his actual statement just fed more flames to the outrage-o-sphere, though.


----------



## bostjan (Jun 30, 2017)

Yeah, I have a tendency to push these sorts of topics off track. 

In my defense, though, while I was away, there were plenty of other people here that carried that tradition on for me. 

There are a few more tangents I have to spout off, though:

1. "Guitar heroes" tend to be a rock/metal thing. Women aren't typically discouraged from listening to rock or metal by anything other than the facts that they sound like rock and metal and that they are musical styles men particularly like. I don't see any outside-imposed sexism there, in terms of what women typically like to listen to.
2. Lots of women play guitar in other genres. Those genres, in my opinion, don't idolize their musicians nearly as much as rock and metal.
3. Men, in general, tend to glam onto the whole role model thing much more publicly than women do. Not that women don't have role models, or that women don't publicly acknowledge people for their skills, but the whole "guitar hero" thing doesn't resonate with women, in general, the same way as it does with men, in general. I do not believe this is an externally imposed set of values, either.

I think we've already said it a half dozen times here, but the video title is meant to make you go "WTF?!" and click on it. Taylor Swift is a particularly terrible example to compare to EVH.

Being a group of people who tend to over-analyze everything (mostly me), the discussion quickly went from "(scoff) That's a stupid comparison" to basically the scene in _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_ with the peasants covered in filth working in a muddy field hotly debating politics. Nothing we discuss here really has any effect on the way society behaves anyway, and nothing we do outside of the board really has any notable effect on how backwards society is at any rate, yet we come in here and argue about it anyway, because it makes us feel good on some weird level.


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## wankerness (Jun 30, 2017)

bostjan said:


> I think we've already said it a half dozen times here, but the video title is meant to make you go "WTF?!" and click on it. Taylor Swift is a particularly terrible example to compare to EVH.



It was an idiotic comparison, for sure. If they'd compared her to Kurt Cobain or the guy from Green Day I don't think there'd have been an issue with anyone reasonable. I'm sure those two inspired at least as many kids to pick up guitar as EVH.


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## jephjacques (Jun 30, 2017)

lmao at that dude who said "testies"


----------



## beerandbeards (Jun 30, 2017)

TLDR


Chuck Schuldiner rules!


----------



## bostjan (Jun 30, 2017)

wankerness said:


> She'd actually made earlier statements about this kind of thing in which she basically said the same thing. Of course since he's a piece of shit her response to his actual statement just fed more flames to the outrage-o-sphere, though.



Her response? Yes, I saw it. She was outraged and told McEnroe to STFU, basically. Or are you referring to statements she made previously that agreed very closely with what he said?

But, as pointed out, this is an entirely different discussion.



wankerness said:


> It was an idiotic comparison, for sure. If they'd compared her to Kurt Cobain or the guy from Green Day I don't think there'd have been an issue with anyone reasonable. I'm sure those two inspired at least as many kids to pick up guitar as EVH.



I know a handful of people who picked up a guitar to be like Billy Joe or Kurt, and most of them are still playing. I think I personally only know two people who picked up the guitar because of EVH, but granted, I'm much closer in age to the younger of those two groups.

There may well be a sort of trigger-factor. Like, someone inspired you to start out, then, once you started, you discover so many other things.

In that case, clearly my dad was my inspiration to pick up the guitar in the first place. He played in a band, then got busy with life and other adult-y things, but he could still play "House of the Rising Sun" perfectly, and seeing him having such a blast singing and playing got me motivated to pick up the guitar. Of course, at 9 years old, I was more interested in learning how to play the theme songs to my favourite Saturday morning cartoons than anything from the Animals.



jephjacques said:


> lmao at that dude who said "testies"



And your user title is "BUTTS LOL" - you win the thread!


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## jephjacques (Jun 30, 2017)

T-Swift is kind of dumb for a whole bunch of reasons but playing guitar is not one of them and arguing over a clickbait headline is pointless


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## jephjacques (Jun 30, 2017)

Also I sure fucking hope we get more women playing guitar because the last thing the world needs is more overweight dudes writing bedroom metal on $3000 37-strings*



*like me


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## TedEH (Jun 30, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> If however you believe that women are marginalized (which you seem to agree with)



As a blanket statement, I wouldn't say that's necessarily true. In certain contexts, yes, but overall I think the story of "women are always marginalized by society" is an exaggeration when you're talking about the western world. Maybe Canada is just better for women than other places and I lack the perspective to comment on any other place. You can pick out scenarios that "marginalize" any given person if you look for them, and I'll give you that women probably encounter these situations more often than most men do, but music is not an area that I see as marginalizing to women. 

Until we've identified a concrete reason why there are less women playing guitar, outside of just some anecdotes on the internet, I don't jump immediately to "it's because we've marginalized them".


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## bostjan (Jun 30, 2017)

jephjacques said:


> Also I sure fucking hope we get more women playing guitar because the last thing the world needs is more overweight dudes writing bedroom metal on $3000 37-strings*
> 
> 
> 
> *like me



The more the merrier. I still appreciate inter-species bands like Hatebeak, though.


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## jephjacques (Jun 30, 2017)

TedEH said:


> As a blanket statement, I wouldn't say that's necessarily true. In certain contexts, yes, but overall I think the story of "women are always marginalized by society" is an exaggeration when you're talking about the western world. Maybe Canada is just better for women than other places and I lack the perspective to comment on any other place. You can pick out scenarios that "marginalize" any given person if you look for them, and I'll give you that women probably encounter these situations more often than most men do, but music is not an area that I see as marginalizing to women.
> 
> Until we've identified a concrete reason why there are less women playing guitar, outside of just some anecdotes on the internet, I don't jump immediately to "it's because we've marginalized them".



Women are definitely always marginalized by society and it is 100% a significant contributing factor to why they are less present in music, particularly guitar-driven music.


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## jephjacques (Jun 30, 2017)

I guarantee you every single female guitar player has been told she's "pretty good for a girl" more times than you would think plausible


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## stevexc (Jun 30, 2017)

marcwormjim said:


> Yeesh. This thread is shameless clickbait about shameless clickbait trying to be other clickbait:
> 
> Phil McKnight made a video in which he observed a trend of girls coming into his store to buy guitars, and how any he asked credited Taylor Swift. He likened this surge of sales to young girls to the Van Halen surge among young boys in the 1980s.
> 
> ...





jephjacques said:


> T-Swift is kind of dumb for a whole bunch of reasons but playing guitar is not one of them and arguing over a clickbait headline is pointless



These are literally the only two responses in this thread that actually matter. This whole discussion is dumb. Jeph has the right of the bigger picture in his other posts as well.


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## TedEH (Jun 30, 2017)

jephjacques said:


> Women are definitely always marginalized by society and it is 100% a significant contributing factor to why they are less present in music, particularly guitar-driven music.


[citation needed]


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## jephjacques (Jun 30, 2017)

here you go my dude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism


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## wankerness (Jun 30, 2017)

bostjan said:


> Her response? Yes, I saw it. She was outraged and told McEnroe to STFU, basically. Or are you referring to statements she made previously that agreed very closely with what he said?
> 
> But, as pointed out, this is an entirely different discussion.


She was outraged at him, and rightfully so. She'd said something earlier in an interview that aligned with what he'd said, though.

"“For me, men’s tennis and women’s tennis are completely, almost, two separate sports,” Williams said. “If I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose 6-0, 6-0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10 minutes. No, it’s true. It’s a completely different sport. The men are a lot faster and they serve harder, they hit harder, it’s just a different game. I love to play women’s tennis. I only want to play girls, because I don’t want to be embarrassed.”"

(it was an interview with Letterman 4 years ago)

Sorry about more OT especially after I was bothered by it, just tying up loose ends!!



bostjan said:


> I know a handful of people who picked up a guitar to be like Billy Joe or Kurt, and most of them are still playing. I think I personally only know two people who picked up the guitar because of EVH, but granted, I'm much closer in age to the younger of those two groups.
> 
> There may well be a sort of trigger-factor. Like, someone inspired you to start out, then, once you started, you discover so many other things.
> 
> In that case, clearly my dad was my inspiration to pick up the guitar in the first place. He played in a band, then got busy with life and other adult-y things, but he could still play "House of the Rising Sun" perfectly, and seeing him having such a blast singing and playing got me motivated to pick up the guitar. Of course, at 9 years old, I was more interested in learning how to play the theme songs to my favourite Saturday morning cartoons than anything from the Animals.



Yeah, I have no issue whatsoever with people getting into playing guitar because of someone extremely...superficial? in their playing. I am disappointed when people learn Brain Stew and leave it at that, of course, but what can you do? I personally started because of Megadeth cause I'm a HUGE NERD. I'm glad that people are inspired by Taylor Swift, even if I don't like her. 

Not guitar-related, but I was forced to listen to that 1989 album several times by friends. It was remarkable in that literally every song on it would have been improved by having a different singer on it. Her voice was like if Microsoft Songsmith had a pop singer voice generator on it. The songs themselves were pretty good, but man. If she didn't write them anyway, they should have given it to a real singer! It had practically no guitars on it, so I'm sort of surprised to hear that she's still playing. I know she used to back in the day.


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## bostjan (Jun 30, 2017)

wankerness said:


> She was outraged at him, and rightfully so. She'd said something earlier in an interview that aligned with what he'd said, though.



How was McEnroe's statement outrageous, though?! Lulu saw an opportunity to call him out on his wording, but he defended himself pretty well.



wankerness said:


> "“For me, men’s tennis and women’s tennis are completely, almost, two separate sports,” Williams said. “If I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose 6-0, 6-0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10 minutes. No, it’s true. It’s a completely different sport. The men are a lot faster and they serve harder, they hit harder, it’s just a different game. I love to play women’s tennis. I only want to play girls, because I don’t want to be embarrassed.”"
> 
> (it was an interview with Letterman 4 years ago)



Like I said, that was not a response, but a previous thing she had said. Her response to McEnroe was not congruent with the quote you posted.



wankerness said:


> Sorry about more OT especially after I was bothered by it, just tying up loose ends!!
> 
> Yeah, I have no issue whatsoever with people getting into playing guitar because of someone extremely...superficial? in their playing. I am disappointed when people learn Brain Stew and leave it at that, of course, but what can you do? I personally started because of Megadeth cause I'm a HUGE NERD. I'm glad that people are inspired by Taylor Swift, even if I don't like her.
> 
> Not guitar-related, but I was forced to listen to that 1989 album several times by friends. It was remarkable in that literally every song on it would have been improved by having a different singer on it. Her voice was like if Microsoft Songsmith had a pop singer voice generator on it. The songs themselves were pretty good, but man. If she didn't write them anyway, they should have given it to a real singer! It had practically no guitars on it, so I'm sort of surprised to hear that she's still playing. I know she used to back in the day.



I had not even heard of Megadeth until after I started playing, and mainly because I was playing. But then, at 9 years old, I wasn't really that interested in metal. I wanted to play the Gumby theme song. Growing up with a guitar in my hands made me grow up the way I did. I am certain that I would have turned out way differently otherwise.

I honestly knew of maybe two Taylor Swift songs before happening upon this thread. I don't think knowing any of the others has enriched my life.  Up until the 2010's, I felt like there was a little seed of something-or-other that I could glean off of most pop songs. A good part of that is age. I have heard the messages in these songs before. All of them. I think I've heard every four chord progression before and every contrite guitar lick before. It's just noise at this point. Funny how people who listen to pop say the same about metal. But then again, a fair portion of metal from the past few years has been just noise to me as well. It makes me feel old. I blame Taylor Swift for being old.


----------



## bostjan (Jun 30, 2017)

jephjacques said:


> Women are definitely always marginalized by society and it is 100% a significant contributing factor to why they are less present in music, particularly guitar-driven music.





TedEH said:


> [citation needed]





jephjacques said:


> here you go my dude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation


----------



## JSanta (Jun 30, 2017)

bostjan said:


> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation



It's the matrix of citations - making note that wikipedia doesn't count for s**t while using wikipedia to so. Well played.


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## jephjacques (Jun 30, 2017)

Lmao are you seriously arguing that feminism is not relevant to this discussion


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## bostjan (Jun 30, 2017)

jephjacques said:


> Lmao are you seriously arguing that feminism is not relevant to this discussion



Who me?

No. I never said anything even close to that.

But you seriously did just post a wikipedia article link on a broad topic to respond to a request for citation to a very absolute statement you made that wasn't supported by the article you posted. I guess I misinterpreted your posts as attempted humour rather than you trying to make an actual point.

You kind of have to snicker at the situation: an online forum that is >99% male arguing about how oppressed women are or are not.


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## TedEH (Jun 30, 2017)

jephjacques said:


> here you go my dude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism


Feminism existing is not any kind of proof that women are always marginalized by default. Feminism has, and has had, its place - I won't go into my opinions of it here because it's irrelevant to anything. The relevant part is that I think that the narative of women being victims by default is the result of recent iterations of feminism, as opposed to the other way around, but that's a whole other discussion and getting farther and farther off topic.


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## ArtDecade (Jun 30, 2017)

The current crop of popular female guitarists doesn't do a lot for me, but that is probably because I came up listening to Lita Ford. That said, the more the merrier. If someone - _anyone_ - grabs an instrument because they were inspired by a musician, that is all good by me.


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## JohnIce (Jun 30, 2017)

Oh boy  Well, I've certainly run out of arguments, at least any that aren't nitpicking. In short, my summed up stance is this: If we believe men and women to be different and good at different stuff (like people also tend to say about blacks and jews, but nevermind), that means we expect and assume different things from them, even when they're 3 years old. The 3-year old learns this and goes through life adapting as best they can to those expectations, slowly coddled neatly into their assigned gender role and gently told off when they go off trail, if not by their parents then _someone _will step in, always. The kid grows up to be 25, realizes they fit all over the spectrum of gender roles and wants to branch out, but is then faced with going against the stream of society and having a harder time for it by just like when they were 3, by the same kinds of people. To cope with this those people make up theories that discredit that person, like "she's only famous cause she has tits, she's only playing guitar to get attention, if she was a dude no one would care" or "he must be a fag, guys like him are not real men, he's only pretending to be a feminist to get laid" or any other number of things, all of which have been predictably said to me and my sister many times over. This is what I don't like. No one in this thread seems to think that people are that binary, yet you argue that it's for the best to generalize that they are because that's how it's always been. This is what I disagree with, when I pick up on it in your posts. This social construct of gender roles and raising kids to fit into them based on frenology, sorry I mean biology, is roughly what feminists call the patriarchy and I think that needs to go. But that's me. However, a world without this patriarchy has never existed, so its benefits or even possibility of happening, is entirely hypothetical. Thus, we reach a dead-end where none of us can prove that it would work or not, only speculate as we have done for long enough in this thread. So if all you have is arguments why I'm wrong, you can save them because you've made that point and I was quite familiar with it since long before this thread was started. Great 

Now, for some direct responses:



vilk said:


> people not having the expectation that a women know how to operate a lawnmower =/= people thinking women ought not to be operating lawnmowers



No, but it's a stupid and very popular assumtion. In my humble opinion.



bostjan said:


> nothing we do outside of the board really has any notable effect on how backwards society is at any rate, yet we come in here and argue about it anyway, because it makes us feel good on some weird level.



Wholeheartedly disagree. Virtually everything you've said in this thread are things that I used to agree with. And I used those arguments myself, and by listening to the counter-arguments (mostly from women) my mind slowly changed and now here I am arguing on behalf of the different viewpoint. This is why I argue, I learn things from those I disagree with and I want other people to learn things from me too.



TedEH said:


> As a blanket statement, I wouldn't say that's necessarily true. In certain contexts, yes, but overall I think the story of "women are always marginalized by society" is an exaggeration when you're talking about the western world. Maybe Canada is just better for women than other places and I lack the perspective to comment on any other place. You can pick out scenarios that "marginalize" any given person if you look for them, and I'll give you that women probably encounter these situations more often than most men do, but music is not an area that I see as marginalizing to women.
> 
> Until we've identified a concrete reason why there are less women playing guitar, outside of just some anecdotes on the internet, I don't jump immediately to "it's because we've marginalized them".



Canada is supposedly quite good, so is Sweden, I think we're both still behind Iceland, regardless I don't think you should base your idea on equality that locally. Anyway, picking out scenarios where people are marginalized by looking for them, as you put it, is what I advocate. Like you said, you find it if you look for it, that means it's there. Even in music, in my experience. I know female musicians who spend a great deal of their time, some even full-time, working for equality in the music industry and turning young girls on to playing in bands and learning music production. By that I mean I could name you 50 women off my personal facebook friend list who are involved in such organizations. I learned a lot from them, I'm happy to know them because I'd a lot less educated about this topic without them.


----------



## wankerness (Jun 30, 2017)

bostjan said:


> 1) How was McEnroe's statement outrageous, though?! Lulu saw an opportunity to call him out on his wording, but he defended himself pretty well.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



1) It came off as very aggressive and intentionally denigrating her abilities. I think she knows what he said was kinda true, but having HIM articulate it for her in such a dismissive way (saying she'd be 700 in the world!) is insulting and I don't blame her AT ALL for getting pissed and saying what she did. It's not that the idea of his quote was outrageous or wrong, it's that he worded it in such a dickish way that sounded like a personal attack, true or not.

2) What she said earlier in that quote I posted goes with what HE said, not her response to him. So, yeah, I wasn't trying to say that it was! I thought I was responding to something you said earlier. Maybe I misread something. I'm too tired to go back and trace our posts right now. 

3) I grew up with a dad that was constantly playing jazz/classical, so I didn't start branching out into my own music AT ALL until i hit the middle school rebellion-against-the-parents phase. Someone at school in 6th grade or so asked me what I listened to, and I knew I couldn't say jazz, so I said the most evul sounding band name I'd ever heard - MEGADETH. He then immediately volunteered to go buy me one of their albums, and I couldn't back out then! Unfortunately, he got me Hidden Treasures as my first album. Fortunately I ended up liking it, even though it was probably the worst intro to them available at the time (this was when Cryptic Writings was brand new). I think my ears were primed since I'd been hearing stuff like Pat Metheny all my life and thus three chord pop-rock junk sounded boring even when I'd never listened to rock before.

There was an electric bass in my basement, and since Megadeth was what I listened to at the time I found it, the first two things I wanted to learn were the intro to Peace Sells, and then the first guitar riff of Tornado of Souls! I was one badass middle schooler.

4) Taylor Swift doesn't really make me feel old, she just makes me roll my eyes. I can get into Lady Gaga and even Katy Perry since they actually have distinctive vocal abilities, but Taylor Swift? *puke* I guess she's better than Katy Perry in that she knows how to play instruments while singing, though.

I think all three of these women are probably considered way over the hill at this point, though. When did they become popular? 2006? Uhh...Lorde is cool! Iggy Izalea sure isn't! (I think I'm still a couple years behind the curve)


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## bostjan (Jun 30, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> Oh boy  Well, I've certainly run out of arguments, at least any that aren't nitpicking. In short, my summed up stance is this: If we believe men and women to be different and good at different stuff (like people also tend to say about blacks and jews, but nevermind), that means we expect and assume different things from them, even when they're 3 years old. The 3-year old learns this and goes through life adapting as best they can to those expectations, slowly coddled neatly into their assigned gender role and gently told off when they go off trail, if not by their parents then _someone _will step in, always. The kid grows up to be 25, realizes they fit all over the spectrum of gender roles and wants to branch out, but is then faced with going against the stream of society and having a harder time for it by just like when they were 3, by the same kinds of people. To cope with this those people make up theories that discredit that person, like "she's only famous cause she has tits, she's only playing guitar to get attention, if she was a dude no one would care" or "he must be a fag, guys like him are not real men, he's only pretending to be a feminist to get laid" or any other number of things, all of which have been predictably said to me and my sister many times over. This is what I don't like. No one in this thread seems to think that people are that binary, yet you argue that it's for the best to generalize that they are because that's how it's always been. This is what I disagree with, when I pick up on it in your posts. This social construct of gender roles and raising kids to fit into them based on frenology, sorry I mean biology, is roughly what feminists call the patriarchy and I think that needs to go. But that's me. However, a world without this patriarchy has never existed, so its benefits or even possibility of happening, is entirely hypothetical. Thus, we reach a dead-end where none of us can prove that it would work or not, only speculate as we have done for long enough in this thread. So if all you have is arguments why I'm wrong, you can save them because you've made that point and I was quite familiar with it since long before this thread was started. Great
> 
> Now, for some direct responses:
> 
> ...



Wow, you are projecting tons of stuff onto me that I never said and that I never even vaguely suggested, and from the sound of it, you are shutting your argument down at what seems to be "I'm right, you're wrong, end of discussion," then I think you have some issues you might want to work on when you have some spare time.

If you truly think that you have the power to change minds, then you wouldn't react like that, really. It's through open discussion and the use of logic and facts that people change their minds.

I have some issues with nearly every kind of -ism and -ology that isn't based on hard fact, personally. I see feminism as a movement that has some great points, but also has some misguided ones. The idea that the Western World continues to be run by a bunch of men in places of money and power is not wrong. 

But, let's cut to the chase. Name one thing, just one thing, that I would have worse off right now, if I were a woman instead of a man, all else being equal?


----------



## tedtan (Jun 30, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> Oh boy  Well, I've certainly run out of arguments, at least any that aren't nitpicking. In short, my summed up stance is this: If we believe men and women to be different and good at different stuff (like people also tend to say about blacks and jews, but nevermind), that means we expect and assume different things from them, even when they're 3 years old. The 3-year old learns this and goes through life adapting as best they can to those expectations, slowly coddled neatly into their assigned gender role and gently told off when they go off trail, if not by their parents then _someone _will step in, always. The kid grows up to be 25, realizes they fit all over the spectrum of gender roles and wants to branch out, but is then faced with going against the stream of society and having a harder time for it by just like when they were 3, by the same kinds of people. To cope with this those people make up theories that discredit that person, like "she's only famous cause she has tits, she's only playing guitar to get attention, if she was a dude no one would care" or "he must be a fag, guys like him are not real men, he's only pretending to be a feminist to get laid" or any other number of things, all of which have been predictably said to me and my sister many times over. This is what I don't like.



While your example is gender based, most people are conformists, so they try to fit in with, and make others fit in with, the norm of their group. This is a part of the human condition and is much more difficult to change than you seem to realize.




JohnIce said:


> No one in this thread seems to think that people are that binary, yet you argue that it's for the best to generalize that they are because that's how it's always been. This is what I disagree with, when I pick up on it in your posts.



No one is arguing that. What they are saying is that there are some differences between men and women that may contribute to their preferences. Further, everyone should be encouraged to do what they want rather than fit into a mold, women included, but this is something that has to be addressed at the individual level, not from a "normalize the numbers" perspective.


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## bostjan (Jun 30, 2017)

wankerness said:


> 1) It came off as very aggressive and intentionally denigrating her abilities. I think she knows what he said was kinda true, but having HIM articulate it for her in such a dismissive way (saying she'd be 700 in the world!) is insulting and I don't blame her AT ALL for getting pissed and saying what she did. It's not that the idea of his quote was outrageous or wrong, it's that he worded it in such a dickish way that sounded like a personal attack, true or not.



Did you listen to the interview in question? I didn't get that at all. If you haven't, check out the audio here. Lulu was clearly trying to get him to say something controversial, and I thought he handled it well. If you think otherwise, what exactly did he say, or what tone did he construe that led you to believe he was being disrespectful? I mean, it is John McEnroe, and he tends to speak rather frankly at times, but I really didn't get that from him in this case. I think people are just being stupid about the whole thing and trying to make up drama.

Incidentally, in the same interview, earlier on, he mentioned wanting to play in his wife's band, and that she wouldn't go for it. He is a musician as well, you know. I don't know how much that pertains to the topic at hand, but I thought it was interesting since he keeps coming up in this discussion.



wankerness said:


> 2) What she said earlier in that quote I posted goes with what HE said, not her response to him. So, yeah, I wasn't trying to say that it was! I thought I was responding to something you said earlier. Maybe I misread something. I'm too tired to go back and trace our posts right now.
> 
> 3) I grew up with a dad that was constantly playing jazz/classical, so I didn't start branching out into my own music AT ALL until i hit the middle school rebellion-against-the-parents phase. Someone at school in 6th grade or so asked me what I listened to, and I knew I couldn't say jazz, so I said the most evul sounding band name I'd ever heard - MEGADETH. He then immediately volunteered to go buy me one of their albums, and I couldn't back out then! Unfortunately, he got me Hidden Treasures as my first album. Fortunately I ended up liking it, even though it was probably the worst intro to them available at the time (this was when Cryptic Writings was brand new). I think my ears were primed since I'd been hearing stuff like Pat Metheny all my life and thus three chord pop-rock junk sounded boring even when I'd never listened to rock before.
> 
> ...



I really don't particularly pay attention to any of those singers. I think Adele is pretty great, but she's not even along the lines of what the others are going for, stylistically. I've heard more than a few Lady Gaga songs, and some of them were different enough for me to notice them. Every few years, I venture out of my musical shell and explore "normal" music, but I always end up turning back to weird music, because the mainstream stuff is just so bland to me. I guess there is nothing wrong with liking whatever you like, but some music, to me, just lacks originality so hard that it actually makes me a little angry.  That's pretty stupid, I know, but music does a lot of stupid things to me.


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## JohnIce (Jun 30, 2017)

bostjan said:


> Wow, you are projecting tons of stuff onto me that I never said and that I never even vaguely suggested, and from the sound of it, you are shutting your argument down at what seems to be "I'm right, you're wrong, end of discussion," then I think you have some issues you might want to work on when you have some spare time.



I don't mean to project anything onto you, just saying I read your posts thoroughly and several times over before commenting, and I've made my arguments why I disagree. The reason I shut it down is not because I think I'm "right" but because, like I explicitly pointed out, *"a world without this patriarchy has never existed, so its benefits or even possibility of happening, is entirely hypothetical. Thus, we reach a dead-end where none of us can prove that it would work or not, only speculate as we have done for long enough in this thread."* Do you see where I'm going with this? Neither of us could ever prove to be right, but our arguments aren't developing any further.



bostjan said:


> If you truly think that you have the power to change minds, then you wouldn't react like that, really. It's through open discussion and the use of logic and facts that people change their minds.



Agreed, it's also through logic that you can acknowledge a dead-end when you reach one. I don't assume I have the power to change your personal mind, but I gave it a go, and you did likewise.



bostjan said:


> I have some issues with nearly every kind of -ism and -ology that isn't based on hard fact, personally. I see feminism as a movement that has some great points, but also has some misguided ones. The idea that the Western World continues to be run by a bunch of men in places of money and power is not wrong.



I don't doubt that, which is why I'm picking at your arguments the way I do cause I think we're on the same trajectory. I do believe you to be able to comprehend my line of thinking more than many others, or else I wouldn't have gone on this long. I find it totally plausible that you get exactly what I'm saying and that you simply disagree, in which case I don't understand your logic, but who's to say I'm not missing something. All I know is I didn't find anything in your arguments that shed any new light on things I've already thought about, I have no idea if you feel the same way about what I've said.



bostjan said:


> But, let's cut to the chase. Name one thing, just one thing, that I would have worse off right now, if I were a woman instead of a man, all else being equal?



I'd rather not, see point #2.


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## JohnIce (Jun 30, 2017)

tedtan said:


> While your example is gender based, most people are conformists, so they try to fit in with, and make others fit in with, the norm of their group. This is a part of the human condition and is much more difficult to change than you seem to realize.



I didn't realize I was making the impression that it was, given how much time I've spent arguing in this thread  I agree with you, but I don't think improving equality of any kind is in any way easy.



tedtan said:


> No one is arguing that. What they are saying is that there are some differences between men and women that may contribute to their preferences. Further, everyone should be encouraged to do what they want rather than fit into a mold, women included, but this is something that has to be addressed at the individual level, not from a "normalize the numbers" perspective.



I don't disagree with you that it should be addressed at an individual level, what I'm arguing is that it's generally not. People are projecting gender stereotypes left and right like you pointed out when you brought up conformism. Then it's no longer about how biological differences between men and women *may* contribute to their preferences as you eloquently put it, but rather telling people who they can and can't be if they want to fit in, citing a rudimentary consensus on biology as their only reason. That is something I don't like. The whole tangent about affirmative action wasn't started by me and is unrelated to music (from me anyway), but I responded with the arguments for why it can be useful in a society where women for example are expected to be caretakers, family oriented, good listeners etc. All neat things but they're things that would discourage people from hiring a woman for a time-consuming managerial job where strong results are needed no matter how late the hours and who gets their feathers ruffled. These are qualities you need in a boss or a president, but they are also quite opposite of what society attributes to women. What are your thoughts on that?


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## Pablo (Jun 30, 2017)

Taylor Swift isn't the next van Halen - she doesn't have to be, she's WAY to busy being herself! But who cares? If Taylor Swift is inspiring kids to express themselves through music, that is an absolutely amazing thing! Furthermore, turning something as intrinsically human as music into a gender debate is, at best, counter productive to the essence of all art: the expression of the human experience.

As far as sports go, the creation of seperate leagues for women, is just about the single most obvious case of gender discrimination and affirmative action available. In short: If even Serena Williams admits she would loose 6-0 6-0 to the top male tennis players, then how on earth can any equal rights activist support the massively inflated focus on female athletes, bearing their, objectively speaking, mediocre performances in mind.

However, music simply isn't a competitive sport - it is art! By my definition, the only valid measure of artistic expression is the emotional impression it leaves... which obviously is subjective and thus void of any meaningful objectivity. Again: neither masculine nor feminine - just human.

In my mind, an ideal world is a humane meritocracy. In essence, I really don't care about gender, race, colour or spiritual beliefs, I care about performance and how you treat the people around you... even if you're Taylor Swift... or Eddie van Halen, for that matter


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## couverdure (Jun 30, 2017)

This thread certainly went  all because of the fact that Taylor Swift is a female artist in the pop music realm and she happens to strum a few chords on a guitar compared to every other guitarist regardless of their sex.

Like Pablo said above me, music isn't a competition of what kind of person does better. T-Swiz could shred if she wanted to but it's obviously not her style and if anything a comparison to Noel Gallagher, who's also listed as an influential guitarist despite playing just basic chords, would make a lot more sense than Eddie. Different strokes for different folks. I'm pretty sure there are lots of guitarists who started playing guitar because of them but chose the path of breaking the four-chord strumming barrier instead of their pop superstardom.


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## marcwormjim (Jul 1, 2017)

I'm just impressed over how everyone got their 
girlfriends to agree to post for them.


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## dr_game0ver (Jul 1, 2017)

This is a hell of a click bait!


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## marcwormjim (Jul 1, 2017)

You see how many guys clickbaited all over their keyboards - Who the hell ever said reserved judgement is extinct?


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## Alternative-Perspective (Jul 1, 2017)

dr_game0ver said:


> This is a hell of a click bait!



Pretty much everything MusicIsWin does is clickbait.


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## mikernaut (Jul 2, 2017)

Taylor who? I'd rather watch and listen to Stephanie Jones play.


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## tedtan (Jul 3, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> I didn't realize I was making the impression that it was, given how much time I've spent arguing in this thread  I agree with you, but I don't think improving equality of any kind is in any way easy.



Perhaps I misread your post.




JohnIce said:


> I don't disagree with you that it should be addressed at an individual level, what I'm arguing is that it's generally not.



Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. But who should be responsible for addressing it and how far should they go? (I'm thinking out loud here, as I would need a specific example in order to answer those questions).




JohnIce said:


> People are projecting gender stereotypes left and right like you pointed out when you brought up conformism. Then it's no longer about how biological differences between men and women *may* contribute to their preferences as you eloquently put it, but rather telling people who they can and can't be if they want to fit in, citing a rudimentary consensus on biology as their only reason. That is something I don't like.



I do think there are a lot of people who jump to stereotypes, but I can't leave out the role that biology plays, either, as I do think it is one of the (many) contributing factors leading to the current situation. Discrimination is another, though I can't go so far as to agree with jephjacques's statement that women are always marginalized.

In my own anecdotal experience, I see both sides of this every day as I am in Texas which is far more conservative than Sweden. On the one hand, I regularly see the religious fundamentalists who raise their daughters to be nothing more than breeders and caregivers, more or less.

But on the other hand, when I look at my colleagues in the company that I work for, our top engineer is a woman, our top attorney is a woman, our top finance person is a woman, one of our top IT people is a woman, and we have a lot of other ladies working with us in all levels of the company as well. My sister has a PhD. My fiance worked on the team that cracked the human DNA sequence, was one of the first people to work with stem cells and when she got bored with that, returned to school to get a third degree and has been quite successful in her new career as well. So we've made a lot of progress, but we're not there yet.

But that brings up another point. Successful people tend to be driven to succeed and keep pushing until they accomplish their goals. People who aren't successful sometimes have a tendency to blame the environment or others rather than looking in the mirror and accepting their own failure. Obviously that tendency will vary from one person to the next, but I think it is probably another contributing factor: some women giving up too easily and blame men/the world for discrimination rather than realizing and accepting that they gave up too easily. And I'm not talking about legitimate discrimination here (which is a real problem) before anyone misreads that, just the tendency to inaccurately blame others' for one's own failure.




JohnIce said:


> The whole tangent about affirmative action wasn't started by me and is unrelated to music (from me anyway), but I responded with the arguments for why it can be useful in a society where women for example are expected to be caretakers, family oriented, good listeners etc. All neat things but they're things that would discourage people from hiring a woman for a time-consuming managerial job where strong results are needed no matter how late the hours and who gets their feathers ruffled. These are qualities you need in a boss or a president, but they are also quite opposite of what society attributes to women. What are your thoughts on that?



I think the issue with the time consuming managerial role is just that - it is time consuming. If you look at statistics, women take more time off work than men do. They take time off to have children, to care for their sick children, to get their children enrolled in school, to care for elderly family members, etc. (not that men don't ever do these things, too, but they don't do them as often). This does cost the company money in terms of project delays, hiring a temporary replacement, etc. plus some of these days off are paid days off, too. So while I can say that someone shouldn't be passed over because she is a woman, I can also see that it is a legitimate concern for the business that, all else being equal*, a woman candidate will cost the company more money for the same (or lesser**) performance than a man.


* All else is rarely equal, but it gets difficult discussing more than one variable at a time.


** Lesser performance in this case assumes the woman would take more time off work, not deliver less while working.


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## bhakan (Jul 3, 2017)

This thread is real off topic and I didn't wanna join in... but here I am .


tedtan said:


> I think the issue with the time consuming managerial role is just that - it is time consuming. If you look at statistics, women take more time off work than men do. They take time off to have children, to care for their sick children, to get their children enrolled in school, to care for elderly family members, etc. (not that men don't ever do these things, too, but they don't do them as often). This does cost the company money in terms of project delays, hiring a temporary replacement, etc. plus some of these days off are paid days off, too. So while I can say that someone shouldn't be passed over because she is a woman, I can also see that it is a legitimate concern for the business that, all else being equal*, a woman candidate will cost the company more money for the same (or lesser**) performance than a man.
> 
> 
> * All else is rarely equal, but it gets difficult discussing more than one variable at a time.
> ...


I think the problem with these sort of statistics is that while they are correct, it's not fair to judge someone based on them. You can't assume that a woman will take more time off, even if it is statistically likely, because it's unfair to a woman who doesn't want kids and has no intention of taking more time off. She didn't choose to be born female and has zero control over the fact that other women take more time off, so "punishing" her by using those statistics is discrimination.


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## ArtDecade (Jul 3, 2017)

couverdure said:


> Noel Gallagher, who's also listed as an influential guitarist despite playing just basic chords



Noel Gallagher is not a shredder, but he is a solid rock and roll guitarist that knows how to take an extended solo.


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## tedtan (Jul 3, 2017)

bhakan said:


> This thread is real off topic and I didn't wanna join in... but here I am .



Well, this is SSO. What are we good for if not for going off topic. 




bhakan said:


> I think the problem with these sort of statistics is that while they are correct, it's not fair to judge someone based on them. You can't assume that a woman will take more time off, even if it is statistically likely, because it's unfair to a woman who doesn't want kids and has no intention of taking more time off. She didn't choose to be born female and has zero control over the fact that other women take more time off, so "punishing" her by using those statistics is discrimination.



I don't disagree with you, and I certainly don't want to see anyone discriminated against. But at the same time, I can see it from the business's perspective, too - there is no way to know who will and who won't take that extra time off before they actually take it off, so it's a bit riskier for the business to hire a woman, even if it is not politically correct to admit that.


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## bhakan (Jul 3, 2017)

tedtan said:


> Well, this is SSO. What are we good for if not for going off topic.
> 
> I don't disagree with you, and I certainly don't want to see anyone discriminated against. But at the same time, I can see it from the business's perspective, too - there is no way to know who will and who won't take that extra time off before they actually take it off, so it's a bit riskier for the business to hire a woman, even if it is not politically correct to admit that.


Very true 

I personally don't think it matters if it is statistically more likely that women take off, if you factor that statistic into your hiring it's discrimination. This kind of situation is exactly why laws ensuring equal opportunities need to exist. It makes business sense, but like a monopoly or sweat shops, while it makes business sense it's bad for society. If a business can't afford its employees taking time off, it needs to just offer less vacation or something instead of favoring men.


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## JohnIce (Jul 3, 2017)

@tedtan: Thanks for a very well-put post, I agree with what you're saying and my response would be pretty much what bhakan said. If women are expected to take more time off it potentially harms women who are more independent, especially when they reach past 30 years old where kids become sort of a given almost. My aunt for example is past 50 and never wanted kids. For such women, affirmative action is a way to get them into positions they rightfully deserve and would excel at. Maybe not a perfect solution, but still a legitimate one I think.

By the way, yhere's a new documentary that just came out called "Play your gender" that I really want to see, it talks mainly about women's relatively small numbers in music production and behind the scenes work in music. Like I said I haven't seen it so I can't vouch for it, but on this topic I think it would be a good watch. Most of my favourite artists lately are self-producing women and I do think it's a very exciting development.


Going back more to women and guitar playing, I also think Nita's closing words here at 26:40 are a good added perspective on this subject:

(Also, I'd recommend having a look at the comment section of that video.... it's pretty disgusting, but it speaks quite loudly about the topic too)


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## Addie5150 (Jul 5, 2017)

People just haven't heard enough Van Halen. 
Forget the tapping , the various mods to the guitar, the hits , song writing etc. There s a X factor to the way he approaches music.
Fire in the hole off the Van Halen 3 album for example. Their worst album but still had some stellar playing and 3-4 good songs on it.
The rhythm section over his solo is a riff that plays for the first time in the song in the key of E, the second time he plays the same riff is as an outro on the song. But this time its played in B ,where he's down tuned his entire guitar. It just fucking roars out of your speakers.
I think he used one of those steinberger like locking floyds where you could drop and lock.
To hear that in 1998 as a kid just blew my mind away.
Sure if the artist in question can do something like that with her guitar or voice in a song context and make it work i d agree with the click bait title.


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## bostjan (Jul 5, 2017)

bhakan said:


> Very true
> 
> I personally don't think it matters if it is statistically more likely that women take off, if you factor that statistic into your hiring it's discrimination. This kind of situation is exactly why laws ensuring equal opportunities need to exist. It makes business sense, but like a monopoly or sweat shops, while it makes business sense it's bad for society. If a business can't afford its employees taking time off, it needs to just offer less vacation or something instead of favoring men.





JohnIce said:


> @tedtan: Thanks for a very well-put post, I agree with what you're saying and my response would be pretty much what bhakan said. If women are expected to take more time off it potentially harms women who are more independent, especially when they reach past 30 years old where kids become sort of a given almost. My aunt for example is past 50 and never wanted kids. For such women, affirmative action is a way to get them into positions they rightfully deserve and would excel at. Maybe not a perfect solution, but still a legitimate one I think.



You can't have it both ways. Either take the statistics or leave them. If you try to cherry pick statistics to say that women are not paid as much as men, in general, then it is fair to respond with a related statistic, which is that women take more time away from work than men, in general. Trying to use one statistic, but then to dismiss a counter-argument based on another valid statistic is, quite frankly, hypocritical.

I've seen specific cases of discrimination many times before, and I have gone to my HR department before to stick up for someone who was marginalized by our boss. I probably should have done more than that, but, at the time, I thought I was doing the right thing.

In general, we know lots of people are discriminated. This happens sometimes because people are female, and sometimes because people are male. But, honestly, gender discrimination works both ways, whereas ethnic discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination are much more one-sided.

Back toward the topic, though, EVH was not only a hell of an inspiration, but he was a huge innovator in technique and in gear. I don't think any other person in history could compare.


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## oc616 (Jul 5, 2017)

So first off, that guy in the bottom video in OP's post is one of the types of people that are quite common nowadays over various hobbies (typically male). "You said a thing I like is dying and I feel under attack because of it!" All you have to do is see that YES, the sales of electric guitars are down and have been down for a while now. YES, the sale increase in acoustic guitars, along with guitar lesson uptake still shows a passion for music amongst younger generations. Are Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran (feel free to insert other relevant moderners) to blame here? Absolutely. The entire blame? Not even close. The guitar is and has been since arguably the late 90s, on its way out as the "rock-star" instrument. When I say rock star, I mean cool factor. How widespread is the saxaphone now in mainstream music? How many current, young saxophonists are inspirational to millions of kids and young adults right now? Because before the 50s that was THE cool instrument to play.

To use an anecdotal example, for our music GCSE and A Level courses, we currently have 1, maybe 2 guitarists per year. We have a ridiculously high number of aspiring vocalists and beat-boxers, although drummers are on the uptake as well. Ed Sheeran (from memory) used beat boxing during his busking days and on a few official tracks. Grime, another rising genre in the UK has a focus on a singular artist who sings. Starting to notice a pattern here? The big genres atm aren't based on bands, they're based on individuals. Sometimes they're a singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar, but the "mainstream" solo players like Slash and Van Halen just don't have a modern equivalent. Before any of you parrot that YouTuber's sentiment "but muh Tosin, muh Misha", they're not musicians for the mainstream, they're for the musician. Your current technical incarnations of Malmsteen and Wylde. There is no reasonable situation in which I could see them reaching anywhere near the status of Swift or Sheeran, nor do they have to, and that's why I find all of this posturing quite ludicrous. Those of us who complain about the doomsayers, you have your hobby, you enjoy your hobby, you have a different belief to the conclusion that individual has drawn, now sit the **** down! All of this grandstanding and patronising dismissal of a idea that isn't founded in fiction, and matches current trends in the younger generations, just makes no sense to me outside of needlessly defensive mindsets.

As for women guitar players, genuinely not virtue signalling here, gender has never factored for me. I've known some terrible ones hired for their looks, and taught some rising stars who look plain to below average appearance wise, but go on to write fantastic music and perform session. Replace the women with men in that statement and it still stands.


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## ArtDecade (Jul 5, 2017)

bostjan said:


> Back toward the topic, though, EVH was not only a hell of an inspiration, but he was a huge innovator in technique and in gear. I don't think any other person in history could compare.



Segovia.


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## bostjan (Jul 5, 2017)

On second thought, Jan Akkerman was basically an earlier version of EVH. Akkerman used a lot of the techniques EVH was incorrectly noted as innovating, before EVH was even playing (tapping, artificial harmonics, volume knob swells, sweep picking, etc.). 

Where EVH really kind of rounded out was his endless tinkering with gear and the results that sugared off from that: The original Floyd Rose bridge (EVH is believed to have been FR's first customer), the superstrat (in the form of the frankenstrat, which was not at all a widespread approach in guitar construction at the time), the 5150 amp, the use of a variac to tweak amplifier wattage (even if his understanding of what he was doing was backwards, he was still perhaps the first to do it), the d-tuna (which predates other drop-d tuners), and numerous other little things. EVH owns patents on guitar flip-out stands, the d-tuna, and the Wolfgang guitar. A lot of his signature pedals, guitars, amps, and techniques were cutting edge innovative at the time they were released, and were hugely influential on other designs that followed. I mean, hell, the 5150/6505 amp lines might well be the most commonly owned on this board, and that all exists because of EVH's advocacy of them.


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## bhakan (Jul 5, 2017)

bostjan said:


> You can't have it both ways. Either take the statistics or leave them. If you try to cherry pick statistics to say that women are not paid as much as men, in general, then it is fair to respond with a related statistic, which is that women take more time away from work than men, in general. Trying to use one statistic, but then to dismiss a counter-argument based on another valid statistic is, quite frankly, hypocritical.
> 
> I've seen specific cases of discrimination many times before, and I have gone to my HR department before to stick up for someone who was marginalized by our boss. I probably should have done more than that, but, at the time, I thought I was doing the right thing.
> 
> In general, we know lots of people are discriminated. This happens sometimes because people are female, and sometimes because people are male. But, honestly, gender discrimination works both ways, whereas ethnic discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination are much more one-sided.


Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like you glossed over the key point I was trying to make. All of those statistics are absolutely valid. My issue lies with the conclusions drawn from them. I do hear "women taking more time off" as a response to the pay gap. However I don't think that response is fair, because it is absolutely not right that a woman's pay is automatically "docked" for more time off just because other women take more time off. I'm not saying that it isn't fair to be paid less money for less work, my issue is it isn't fair to assume you'll do less work because you're a women. If a women doesn't want children and just wants to focus on her career, she should be afforded the same opportunity to do so as a man.

On the other hand, I think one of the ways to help fix this problem is to give men more paternity leave, because I think men should be afforded equal time with their baby. So I think you're right in that gender inequality does go both ways more than most other discrimination. I would however say women get the short end of the stick by a significant margin.


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## JohnIce (Jul 5, 2017)

bostjan said:


> You can't have it both ways. Either take the statistics or leave them. If you try to cherry pick statistics to say that women are not paid as much as men, in general, then it is fair to respond with a related statistic, which is that women take more time away from work than men, in general. Trying to use one statistic, but then to dismiss a counter-argument based on another valid statistic is, quite frankly, hypocritical.



How is it cherry picking statistics? Just because you can point at reasons for why the wage gap (and other gender-related workplace issues) exist doesn't mean you can't take a stand against it. Bhakan's comparisons to sweat shops are a good analogy to me, what makes the most capitalistic sense (with statistics to back it up) isn't necessarily "right", if we're to use a loose term. Right being subjective, of course. Though now we're leaving the topic of feminism and venturing into capitalism vs. socialism which I'm sure we can all agree is too off-topic of a discussion to bloat this thread with.



bhakan said:


> On the other hand, I think one of the ways to help fix this problem is to give men more paternity leave, because I think men should be afforded equal time with their baby. So I think you're right in that gender inequality does go both ways more than most other discrimination. I would however say women get the short end of the stick by a significant margin.



Bingo. Paternity leave is in my opinion the biggest thing a man can do to help equality forward in a business world. In Sweden we have generous paid parental leave (480 days) and dads now have a legal right to 240 of those, yet very few couples step up to it because the dad usually makes more money. Dads claim 27% of parental leave money in Sweden as of 2017, which is more than ever but it shows that even when complete equality is a legal option it still doesn't mean people choose it. Sorry for the trivia, but you guys seem interested


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## bostjan (Jul 6, 2017)

bhakan said:


> However I don't think that response is fair, because it is absolutely not right that a woman's pay is automatically "docked" for more time off just because other women take more time off. I'm not saying that it isn't fair to be paid less money for less work, my issue is it isn't fair to assume you'll do less work because you're a women.



This speaks directly to my point.

You have a statistic that says that women get paid less than men, in general.
You have a statistic that says that women work less than men, in general.
Then you conclude that people assume that a woman will do less work than a man. And then you assume that that particular woman is paid less than that particular man.
It's a combination of two logic errors: you are stereotyping and you are employing a strawman, and doing so directly for the sake of rhetoric. 

Do you follow me?

In other words, your conclusion that something is unfair could be right or wrong, but the process by which you are arguing toward that conclusion has some bugs in the logic.

And all of this is spawning from the foundation of the claim that Taylor Swift's guitar playing is somehow comparable to Eddie van Halen's guitar playing. Does this only seem insane to me?


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## KnightBrolaire (Jul 6, 2017)

ArtDecade said:


> Segovia.


Lenny Breau, Pat Metheny, John Mclaughlin, Al Dimeola as well imo. Lenny Breau literally invented harp harmonics.


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## tedtan (Jul 6, 2017)

bostjan said:


> all of this is spawning from the foundation of the claim that Taylor Swift's guitar playing is somehow comparable to Eddie van Halen's guitar playing. Does this only seem insane to me?



1. The claim was merely click bait. It worked.

2. Can Taylor Swift play guitar as well as Eddie Van Halen? No, obviously not.

3. Is Taylor Swift as influential in terms of inspiring people to play guitar as Eddie Van Halen was? Probably not, but I haven't seen any actual statistics to make a definitive call here.

4. Can women play guitar as well as men? Yes. Jennifer Batten and others mentioned in this thread should be more than proof enough to silence the naysayers.

5. Is it insane that a thread involving a woman in the OP gets sidetracked into a discussion of women's rights, discrimination and equality? Not on SSO it isn't. In fact, we should expect it to happen. 




JohnIce said:


> In Sweden we have generous paid parental leave (480 days) and dads now have a legal right to 240 of those, yet very few couples step up to it because the dad usually makes more money.



In the US, men and women both get up to twelve weeks (70 work days) of unpaid maternity/paternity leave. Men generally don't take that option for obvious reasons.

Some states offer better benefits under state law than those required by federal law (e.g., California). But even in these cases, we are far behind other first world countries.


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## JohnIce (Jul 6, 2017)

bostjan said:


> Then you conclude that people assume that a woman will do less work than a man. And then you assume that that particular woman is paid less than that particular man.
> It's a combination of two logic errors: you are stereotyping and you are employing a strawman, and doing so directly for the sake of rhetoric.
> 
> Do you follow me?
> ...



Not to put words in bhakan's mouth, but did he/she really say that the assumption that women work less leads to a lower hourly wage? I must have missed that. I don't know why some women make less per hour than men (though I know it happens, among friends and family), what I do know is that it makes more economic sense for an employer to hire/promote the person they deem least likely to have to take time off. Fair enough, but I don't think women should get stereotyped that way, especially since part of the reason women statistically take more time off is because men don't. It's a vicious circle perpetuated by employers who think that way, which leads to women both with and without children missing out on promotions which, over a lifetime, results in a lower income. It doesn't have to be as simple as them making less an hour compared to the dude in the next cubicle. So I don't see these logical fallacies you are pointing at.



bostjan said:


> And all of this is spawning from the foundation of the claim that Taylor Swift's guitar playing is somehow comparable to Eddie van Halen's guitar playing. Does this only seem insane to me?



Maybe, your own word count is quite high in the derailment though. I have no problem with that so don't get me wrong, but yeah, the stretch from Taylor Swift to affirmative action was ridiculous from the start, I'll agree with that. Doesn't mean taking that debate once it was started was insane, I think. The debate got more sophisticated as it went along, but in the beginning there was a lot of crude statements that warranted some debate. That debate just got very bloated.



tedtan said:


> In the US, men and women both get up to twelve weeks (70 work days) of unpaid maternity/paternity leave. Men generally don't take that option for obvious reasons.
> 
> Some states offer better benefits under state law than those required by federal law (e.g., California). But even in these cases, we are far behind other first world countries.



Damn, that's tough. We have 480 days paid for through taxes. You can boost it with some very reasonable insurances as well.


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## bostjan (Jul 6, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> Not to put words in bhakan's mouth, but did he/she really say that the assumption that women work less leads to a lower hourly wage? I must have missed that. I don't know why some women make less per hour than men (though I know it happens, among friends and family), what I do know is that it makes more economic sense for an employer to hire/promote the person they deem least likely to have to take time off. Fair enough, but I don't think women should get stereotyped that way, especially since part of the reason women statistically take more time off is because men don't. It's a vicious circle perpetuated by employers who think that way, which leads to women both with and without children missing out on promotions which, over a lifetime, results in a lower income. It doesn't have to be as simple as them making less an hour compared to the dude in the next cubicle. So I don't see these logical fallacies you are pointing at.



You keep pounding that same nail, but you don't see what's wrong with the logic there. I don't think I left ambiguity in my explanation. Logic is just logic, it's not really open to a lot of different interpretations. When you say stuff like what you said above, you are complaining about stereotyping based off of statistical behaviour of a group based off of statistical behaviour of a different group.

Take women out and replace with "blue people." And then see how much sense the argument makes:

Blue people get paid less than green people, on average.
Blue people work fewer hours than green people, on average.
Obviously, employers are stereotyping blue people as less hard working, so therefore, they are unfairly paying them less.

The problem is that employers don't necessarily even have the information that blue people work less than green people. Maybe blue people are paid hourly. That makes a very simple explanation of the situation. Without specific information, you are just stereotyping the behaviour of the employer, being outraged by your perception that they are making assumptions based on the statistics, but your assumption that their assumption is being made because of statistics is because of statistics, yet you fail to see the hypocrisy in the mere existence of that argument.




JohnIce said:


> Maybe, your own word count is quite high in the derailment though. I have no problem with that so don't get me wrong, but yeah, the stretch from Taylor Swift to affirmative action was ridiculous from the start, I'll agree with that. Doesn't mean taking that debate once it was started was insane, I think. The debate got more sophisticated as it went along, but in the beginning there was a lot of crude statements that warranted some debate. That debate just got very bloated.



Everyone has their own very heated opinion of affirmative action.

The problem is that switching from capitalism to socialism, all else equal, doesn't eliminate sexism, nor racism, nor pretty much any other -ism. It's just a distraction. I think either system done properly will work far better than any system done improperly.


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## JohnIce (Jul 6, 2017)

bostjan said:


> You keep pounding that same nail, but you don't see what's wrong with the logic there. I don't think I left ambiguity in my explanation. Logic is just logic, it's not really open to a lot of different interpretations. When you say stuff like what you said above, you are complaining about stereotyping based off of statistical behaviour of a group based off of statistical behaviour of a different group.
> 
> Take women out and replace with "blue people." And then see how much sense the argument makes:
> 
> ...



Paid less? The argument wasn't that at all. I'm talking about promotions and job opportunities lost because of a systematic gender bias. You on the other hand are talking about wages and hourly income, blue people and hypocrisy. I acknowledge the statistics and see connections between them, and I see a vicious circle where one statistic can't improve before the other does. In that crossroads I side with the employee rather than the employer, it's the employers' responsibility to make a positive change, not the employees. That's my _opinion_. No strawmen, no blue people, no Serena Williams, just an opinion. Lastly, on principle I'm not against stereotyping a group if it's entirely voluntary to be part of that group (employers). It's not voluntary to be a woman though. Or... blue, I guess. If that makes me a hypocrite in your eyes then fine, that's yet another opinion.





bostjan said:


> The problem is that switching from capitalism to socialism, all else equal, doesn't eliminate sexism, nor racism, nor pretty much any other -ism. It's just a distraction. I think either system done properly will work far better than any system done improperly.



No idea what this has to do with anything but sure, I agree.


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## USMarine75 (Jul 6, 2017)

bostjan said:


> Back toward the topic, though, EVH was not only a hell of an inspiration, but he was a huge innovator in technique and in gear. I don't think any other person in history could compare.



Les Paul. No one is even close.

Then there's the next level... EVH, Hendrix + Eddie Kramer, The Beatles + George Martin

Then there's the lower rung of everyone else... Tom Morello, The Edge, Chuck Berry, Clapton, YJM/Ritchie Blackmore, Sam Maghette, the Kings (Albert, Freddie, BB), Schuldiner, Satriani, Vai, etc...

And honestly I HATE to say it, but if we're talking influence - today's gear whore bands have influenced more people to buy and flip particular gear than ever, as well as the influence they've had on the use of solid state/modelers/IR cabs/home recording/etc: Mayones, Aristides, AxeFX, BKP all owe their success to these guys IMO.


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## bostjan (Jul 6, 2017)

JohnIce said:


> Paid less? The argument wasn't that at all. I'm talking about promotions and job opportunities lost because of a systematic gender bias. You on the other hand are talking about wages and hourly income, blue people and hypocrisy. I acknowledge the statistics and see connections between them, and I see a vicious circle where one statistic can't improve before the other does. In that crossroads I side with the employee rather than the employer, it's the employers' responsibility to make a positive change, not the employees. That's my _opinion_. No strawmen, no blue people, no Serena Williams, just an opinion. Lastly, on principle I'm not against stereotyping a group if it's entirely voluntary to be part of that group (employers). It's not voluntary to be a woman though. Or... blue, I guess. If that makes me a hypocrite in your eyes then fine, that's yet another opinion.



Read what you have been posting about! I know you might not have been the one to bring it up, but twenty posts about the wage gap later and you are acting like my last post came out of the blue.

You aren't against stereotyping a group if it's voluntary to be in that group?! WTF?

I guess it's voluntary to be an employer and earn a living by making stuff for people, as opposed to not making a living or earning money. 



USMarine75 said:


> Les Paul. No one is even close.
> 
> Then there's the next level... EVH, Hendrix + Eddie Kramer, The Beatles + George Martin
> 
> ...



You have a great point there. Les Paul basically invented the solidbody guitar. There's nothing really to top that.

Hendrix probably would have surpassed EVH's level of innovation had he lived just a little longer.

Then there's Taylor Swift. Which guitar innovation did she introduce to the public?


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## bhakan (Jul 6, 2017)

bostjan said:


> This speaks directly to my point.
> 
> You have a statistic that says that women get paid less than men, in general.
> You have a statistic that says that women work less than men, in general.
> ...


I see what you're saying now and I think I misinterpreted what you were saying in your post. I see it almost as a "chicken or the egg" type situation. Are employers subconsciously thinking "she's a woman, so she'll work less hours, so I'll pay her less/won't offer her a promotion/etc" or are women taking more time off, resulting in employers giving them less raises/promotions/etc? I'd be willing to bet it's the latter in the majority of situations, but the former in enough situations to make it an issue we should at least talk about.

Also I honestly I haven't read this thread and I have absolutely no clue how it turned into a debate on feminism.


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## TedEH (Jul 7, 2017)

bhakan said:


> I have absolutely no clue how it turned into a debate on feminism.


I think it was naturally going to go there, given how the significance of the idea of Taylor Swift as a guitar role model is tied pretty closely to the idea of trying to encourage women to play more guitar just because it's something more men do than women currently.

The video is clearly clickbait, but it only works as such because of the current social environment that tries to push women into male-dominated activities. Otherwise nobody would care. The idea of girls citing pop stars as their inspiration for picking up a guitar is nothing new.


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