How to Attract Women Like a Guitar Player (Without Playing the Guitar)
I talked to evolutionary psychologists and sex experts to find the secrets to Dave Grohl's appeal. It went about as well as you'd imagine.
My wife and I have one of those sex freebie lists; the five celebrities you’re allowed to sleep with, without repercussions, should the opportunity arise.
Yes, I know, it’s stupid. But if you’re paying attention, it can offer a fascinating window into your partner’s tastes.
I have a preference for potty-mouth comedians. But for my wife, it’s guitarists. Her list is almost entirely rock guitarists. Dave Grohl is on there twice. Twice! I guess for emphasis.
Which presents a problem.
My wife has a spectacularly foul mouth, and she’s one of the funniest people I know. So I’m very satisfied.
However, I don’t play guitar. Like at all. I couldn’t strum a chord if my life depended on it. I don’t even air guitar particularly well. When I try, I look like I’m having a vaguely rhythmic gallbladder attack.
It’s hard not to feel like my lack of guitar chops might be an inadequacy. My wife insists it isn’t, but I’ve seen the way she stops blinking whenever Dave Grohl is on TV, or how she mentioned to me way too many times that there’s a video online of Lenny Kravitz’s penis popping out mid-guitar solo.
And she’s hardly the exception. If I can make a gender generalization, women love guitar players.
Science has proved as much. Well, kinda.
A 2012 study from Israel found that single women were 28 percent more likely to accept Facebook friend requests from strange men if they posed with guitars in their profile pics. That might’ve been true a decade ago, before Facebook became your racist aunt’s favorite place to share conspiracy theories. With or without a guitar, nobody is getting laid on Facebook anymore.
A year later, some pervy French researchers attempted to find out if 300 college females were into guitar players, which is like studying whether college students are into cheap weed and sleeping in on weekdays. Their research found that 31 percent would happily hand over their phone numbers if a guy was just carrying a guitar case, while only 14 percent would respond to gym bags or nothing at all. The study was retracted in 2020, which is academia speak for “flirting with 300 college girls does not count as science.”
Since then, there’s been zero research on why guitar players are so irresistible. Which is shocking. Our scientists have time to develop a vaccine for COVID but not investigate why all of our wives want to bone a guy who wrote 156 songs that all sound vaguely the same? How is that helping humanity?
I reached out to several experts on human psychology, hoping they’d have some insight. With few exceptions, they all reached the same conclusions: Women love guitar players because they want to have their babies.
“Females of many species select the best male musicians as mates,” says Geoffrey Miller, Ph.D., an evolutionary psychologist. The animal kingdom’s most sexually desirable partners are “best at vocal music, like frogs, birds, whales, or howler monkeys, or at instrumental music, like crickets that ‘stridulate’ (the sound they make by rubbing their wings together).”
Great music, Miller says, is only produced by the “healthiest, most energetic, most intelligent animals. This has been true in our species for a long time—at least 30,000 years, according to the prehistoric bone flutes discovered some years ago.”
If I can paraphrase what I think Miller is saying: On a basic level, Jack White isn’t all that different from a howler monkey. And 30,000 years ago, guys who knew how to play their “bone flutes” were super popular with women.
“Guitar skill, like many forms of skilled expression, provides a display of intelligence and creativity,” explains Jon Maner, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Florida State University.
“Mating with an intelligent and creative partner increases the likelihood that one will have children who are intelligent and creative, and this is good for one’s reproductive success.”
Reproductive success. It’s not the two words most of us would associate with rock guitarists.
Many years ago, I interviewed Sammy Hagar for a website called MTV Hive. He told me that Van Halen had sex tents under the stage during their concerts.
Yes, sex tents. Tents for the sole purpose of having sex with female fans.
During any live performance, the band would have between eight and ten women waiting for them in the tents, and during a particularly long guitar or drum solo, they’d go underneath the stage to have sex with them.
Now, I mean this with the utmost respect for Hagar, but if one of those eight to ten women found out that they were pregnant with Sammy Hagar’s offspring, I’m not fully convinced that their first thought would be [with what I assume is a Borat voice], ‘Reproductive success!’
Greg Bryant, a communication studies professor at UCLA, agrees that claiming guitarists are attractive because they’d make ideal baby daddies is intrinsically insane. (Or, in his words, “Waaaaay a stretch.”)
Except, on some biological level, it also makes complete sense.
He compares guitarists to peacocks. “The peacock tail is this ridiculous, elaborate trait that only the males have,” Bryant says. “It signals something about their quality. People have proposed that music could be, at least in part, a sexually selected trait.”
But that’s the deep-rooted animal part of our sexual instincts. What about our human capacity for reason and logic?
“I think when it comes down to it, a woman may look at a guy with a guitar and go, ‘Yeah, that’s attractive, but he’s probably a huge pain in the ass.’”
This isn’t to say that all guitarists would make terrible partners. Especially a guy like Grohl. The dude spent Super Bowl Sunday barbecuing pork for the homeless. He’s. inarguably a good guy. But in the general gene pool of guitar players, if you date or marry one of them, you do have to accept the possibility that he may one day give an interview in which he describes you as “sexual napalm.”
Bryant suspects it may not specifically be their musical ability that women find attractive, but what this ability suggests about their creative ability.
“If you are a writer or are an artist or you’re good at some task, that could be evidence that you’re smart, and women have preferences for that,” he says.
It also helps if you’re doing a public performance. “If you have a bunch of people’s attention for a sustained amount of time,” Bryant says, “that suggests that you’re worth listening to.”
It’s a great relief to those of us who don’t want to take the time to learn how to play a guitar. Because honestly, when you reach a certain age, it’s just not going to happen.
Even if I wasn’t married and in my 50s, there are few things in this world as douchey as a guy who knows a few Beatles songs because he thinks it’ll get him laid.
But how do you create, as Maner put it, a “public display of intelligence and creativity” without, you know… the public displaying part?
As a writer, my job involves being creative and at least attempting to be intelligent. But I usually write in private, in an office, without ever being watched by other people, certainly not a crowd.
If I want my wife to look at me the same way she looks at Dave Grohl, should I start typing in front of her?
I gave it a shot. I brought my laptop to bed and made sure she was watching. She looked at me like she’d look at a homeless person defecating on the subway.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked. “Why are you making that face?”
“What face?” I asked. But I knew what she meant. I tried grimacing as I wrote, the same way Carlos Santana does when he hits an especially pleasurable note.
Anka Radakovich, a longtime sex writer and old pal, gave me another explanation for the appeal of guitar players that proved more helpful. “While we watch him play his guitar, we are fantasizing that he is strumming our ‘clitar’.”
Clitar. I see what you did there, Anka.
“Guitar players are notorious for being good with their fingers,” she added.
So maybe it’s not about public displays of creativity, or musical ability that equates with making pretty babies. Maybe, when women are being transfixed by guitarists, they’re just looking at the “chord changes,” if you know what I mean.
Miller more or less said the same thing when he explained all the traits that make guitar players attractive to women. Among the top selling points, he told me, is “the manual dexterity to master the fingerings.”
Yes, of course. “Master the fingerings.” It’s all starting to make sense.
I’ll be bringing my laptop back to bed tonight. And this time, I’ll make sure I put plenty of emphasis on my “fingerings.”
I know it probably won’t work. But I refuse to let Dave Grohl get all the glory.