If you are following along, I recently covered the Nagging Wife Guitar Meme. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, this brought up another prominent guitar culture issue: Naming and gendering your guitar!
This is something that folks do with a lot of objects: boats, cars, motorcycles, bikes. But it comes up a LOT with guitars and other musical instruments, as well.
It shows up as someone naming their guitar, which is almost always given a “woman’s” name. Or sometimes folks just refer to their guitar as “she”.
I’m certain that many folks will think that I am making a big deal out of nothing here. So, let me explain why this is an issue.
First, it is applied unevenly. Any time that something happens more for one gender than another, there is usually a reason, and that reason usually isn’t good.
In this case, on appearance, the person is trying to show affection or connection toward the guitar. Or perhaps demonstrating a relationship with it? But unfortunately, the fact that a large number of intimate objects are given women’s names is not just about connection.
The major problem here is objectification.
Objectification is the act of making a person an object, and in the process, dehumanizing them. We’ve talked about this a few times here before. But making a person NOT a person is the first step towards making it okay to harm them. Because, obviously, they aren’t people. And pretty much the most direct way you can objectify someone, (in this case, women), is by naming an object after them.
I know people are not intending this to be harmful, but because it exists in a context where women are already being dehumanized, this simply adds fuel to the fire.
So, I hope the next time you get ready to play Betsy, you address it by its real name— “Stratocaster”.