No Matter Your Gender, You Will Want St. Vincent's Female-Friendly New Guitar

St. Vincent has designed a new guitar, keeping female anatomy in mind.

Unlike other products “for women”- like these earplugs- their defining feature isn’t that they’re pink. (It’s beyond me why earplugs need to be gendered anyway.)

This guitar is designed to be the practical option for those with smaller frames and smaller fingers. It’s also designed to fit “a breast or two”.

It is with pride that I present the St. Vincent Signature @ernieball MusicMan Guitar. I wanted to design a tool that would be ergonomic*, lightweight, and sleek. So excited to be working with Ernie Ball. *There is room for a breast^ ^Or two

A photo posted by St. Vincent (@st_vincent) on Aug 27, 2015 at 11:28am PDT

Announced in 2015, the guitar will finally go on sale next month.

Spending months on tour, carrying a guitar for hours at a time out of necessity, it became clear to Annie Clark that classic guitars weren’t feasible options.

“I’m not a very big person,” she told Guitar World.

“I can’t even play a Sixties Strat or Seventies Les Paul. I would need to travel with a chiropractor on tour in order to play those guitars.”

So she teamed up with Ernie Ball to design a guitar that met the neglected needs of a large market. They came up with a guitar that is “ergonomic, lightweight, and sleek”. It is a functional and practical solution to an arguably gendered problem.

Does that make it a women’s guitar per se? Not really.

One fan commented that he “may be the wrong gender but the light weight sounds like it would do wonders for easing the bad back”.

St Vincent has consistently questioned what it means to be “a real boy” or “a real girl” (telling Rolling Stone that she “believes in gender fluidity”).

"We get handed down these ideas of gender and sexuality: you're supposed to be this or that,” she said.

“What happens if you float around the cracks and don't fit into these narrowly prescribed things?"

And with that note on the irrelevance of gender constructs, perhaps it doesn’t matter if this guitar is for women or not.

But as a practical solution to a problem, it’s definitely welcome.

Now, some shredding.

Photo: Ernie Ball.

Susan Alfayadh is one of Student Edge’s student contributors. Learn more about the contributors program.