I was making a mix CD for a certain special someone yesterday, specifically the ULTIMATE punk collection, and I started going through old mixes to see if there were any awesome punk songs that I had forgotten. While looking through a mix CD I made for Desirina once, I spotted a song by the Donnas, and I said, “Aha! That’s an awesome song that is missing from my ultimate punk collection!” I stuck it into the mix, and then I observed the song in its new context to see how it looked… suddenly, something jumped out at me.

This was the only band which had obvious female members on the entire CD! The first band, the Anniversary, has a female singer/keyboardist, but she’s only singing backup vocals on the song that I selected. I thought, “hm, that’s no good, if my mysterious special someone is going to punk out, she’s going to need some role models,” so I started digging in my dozens of gigabytes of music to see what I could come up with. I pulled out another song or two played by women which had been stuck in my head at some point or another, but the fact was that most of the punk rock that I listen to is written and played exclusively by guys, and that seems to be pretty much true for punk rock in general, not just my listening tastes (although I can’t stand some influential women in the genre, such as Bikini Kill, I think they’re kind of annoying). In fact, it might be true of rock in general.

What’s to be done? Why aren’t there more girls who like to sing/play loud music? Is it just a masculine aggressive thing to make noise? One website I visited said that guys have support networks where they can learn guitar licks, learn how to silkscreen, etc. and girls don’t, so it’s kind of a catch-22. I dunno if that’s true, but clearly girls need to rock out more.