Chicks and Prog

Now if you are a female and enjoy prog, more power to ya, but i have noticed that at least NONE of the girls ive ever met have the remotest interest in prog ( jazz and classical too for that matter). What do you think it is that makes it so women tend to not like prog? And again dont get offended if you are a female prog-head but im just saying in GENERAL.

Well, it's because the genre is co-identified with hard rock, a very masculine thing, but in fact considered even nerdier. Prog rock's an anachronistic adrenaline-soaked bombast attack, isn't it? ;) 

Edited by laplace - February 15 2008 at 20:39

I'm the only girl I know who likes prog (except internet girls who I know through prog forums).
All the guys I know who like prog are, well, kind of nerds.
At the rock society at uni I'm the prog rep but nobody ever comes out of the woodwork to discuss prog... I suggest that progheads are just nerds and therefore keep to themselves. =/ Then add to that the fact that nerdy things (Warhammer, calculus, trainspotting, prog) just tend to be more interesting to males, and there you have it.

The last Marillion concert I went to (december 2007), the audience was about 50/50 between man/woman (my personal estimation, no verifiable facts). What I find is that the more extreme the prog is (experimental, metal), the more the audience tends to be men. So, my conclusion is that women prefer non-extreme music.

Women's brains are on average smaller than men's.

But to answer your question, I have no idea.

When I was in college, my roommate and I (both heavily into ELP/Yes -- this was 1972), arranged to meet a couple of lovely coeds at their apartment and listen to music, with expectations of a GREAT evening nudge nudge.  So what did we choose as the album to drive them into sexual frenzy?  Um, for some reason that listening to a recording of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was in order. 

Result:  Elvis Costello has a nice song call 'No Action'.  The title of that song perfectly describes the rest of our evening.

SFranke wrote: Women's brains are on average smaller than men's. But to answer your question, I have no idea.

That's because brain size is proportional to overall bodyweight! 

But women also attach more emotional retrival tags to their memories....maybe that's why they'll always associate prog with nerds, because they'll always remember the nerd who tried to explain the plot behind Tarkus in high school.

Oh wait, that nerd was me...

I'm still waiting for Rick Wakeman to come out with a DVD of The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, ON ICE.  Perfect for a Friday evening with the woman of your choice.  By the time you're done saying the title, she'll be long gone.

Bellringer wrote: We tried to figure this out in another thread (which I think I started), but IMHO, in general, women tend to admire emotion in the art they like before they admire any intellectualism.  In other words, women tend to like the songs that are simpler, that you can sing, that are more traditionally structured, etc. etc.  Prog is almost completely intellectual-- there ARE melodies and structured tunes in prog, but you usually have to wade through an album's worth of concept to find them.  This isn't to say we women aren't intellectual, but we do, as a gender, tend to find anything that's almost solely intellectual boring.  The complex musical ideas of prog are very left-brained and most of us gals are predominantly right-brained.   Since I ended my working day today with Soft Machine's Fourth, what does that make me, I wonder?

Emotion and intellectualism aren't in opposition though.  Many intellectuals have very strong feelings and because they like to think and ask questions, they can be very "in tune" with emotions...their own feelings.  I don't see how women could inherently prefer short simple songs, I think there's a social explanation.  Possibly controversial, but in many cases, women (especially one's perceived as "attractive") control the social groups and institutions they are involved in (they don't necessarily have to most power, but they carry a certain influence because of their...social weight with men).  I think that men who feel they don't belong or "fit in" in these social groups, turn to outlets or escapes to get away from the  groups they dislike or feel ostracized from.  Maybe they turn to communities that accept them for it's own sake or maybe they have a lot of time to themselves and explore their mind's creativity...thus leading them to the worlds of music, literature, science...and end up concentrated in places with likeminded people and of course enjoy the art in itself as well.

I am one of the resident "chicks who love prog". My first prog album was bought at the age of 11. Though I am very well aware of the biological differences between men and women, I tend to resent any kind of generalisation relating to those differences - especially as regards brain size and such.

As to the matter of emotion vs intellectualism, I have never felt that prog was devoid of emotion, or that mainstream love songs were full of it. On the contrary, I find the latter's sentimentalism quite fake, while something like "Epitaph" or "Starless" really touches a chord within me. I may be an exception, but I am not so sure... It's just that I have always tended to think with my own brain (smaller or otherwise), instead of letting myself be brainwashed by what society thinks a woman should be like.