Roger Collier

I drive my children to school every weekday morning, and during the trip they each get to pick a song from my iPod to play over the car stereo. My four-year-old son, Jack, always chooses an up-tempo, guitar-heavy rock song. My six-year-old daughter, Ella, generally chooses a fluffy, boppy pop tune -- that, for the record, I downloaded from iTunes specifically for her or my wife. (No Gaga for me, thanks.)

This comes as no surprise to me. The female gender tends to have fantastic taste in clothing and home decor, among other things. My wife, for instance, has impeccable taste in husbands. But when it comes to music, girls tend to like, um -- how shall I put this? -- absolute crap.

OK, I know that sounds sexist. There are, of course, women who are into edgy, alternative rock. There are, I'm guessing, guys who prefer Taylor Swift to Neil Young. And I realize that the quality of any musical artist's oeuvre is subjective. Arguments about music generally boil down to: You listen to songs that I hate, therefore you have bad taste in music.

But I only have 750 words to get my point across, so I have to generalize. For a more nuanced take on musical preferences according to gender, see my 20,000-word treatise "Abhorrent Melodic Predilection of Non-Male Home Sapiens," which is available on my website: www.you-have-too-much-time-on-your-hands.com.

Still, there is no denying that it is because of teenage girls that the world has been subjected to numerous auditory atrocities. There was a time when girls went crazy for real bands, such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. No more. Now it's Justin Bieber and The Jonas Brothers and Insert-Boy-Band-Name-Here.

Boys, on the other hand, tend to listen to rock rather than disposable pop -- at least, the boys with whom I grew up. For us, it was AC/DC all the way. I knew one kid who repeatedly dubbed the band's song Thunderstruck on a single cassette so he could listen to it over and over. Unlike girls, boys don't want to dance. They want to rock.

Jack is no different. His most recent song requests include Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N' Roses, Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes and Blur's Song 2, which he calls the woo-hoo song. (You've probably heard it at a hockey game.) The other day, I put on a rock song that I thought he would like, but he quickly judged it as too mellow. He wanted something louder, something faster, with more guitar. It's enough to make a father weep with joy.

You could argue that I'm a bad parent for introducing my impressionable children to aggressive rock music at such a young age. That is an argument you would no doubt win, so I'd prefer not to have it. (Thank you for your understanding.)

Ella most often asks for a song from the playlist I put on my iPod for my wife -- something by Katy Perry or a former American Idol contestant. This is the music that dominates pop charts today but will soon be forgotten. Twenty years from now, music lovers will not be reminiscing over that classic song about Daisy Dukes and bikini tops.

Psychologists have studied why men and women like different types of music, and one theory is that women listen to music for how it makes them feel, whereas men tend to approach music more analytically. Raymond MacDonald, a professor of music psychology and improvisation at Glasgow Caledonian University, says that musical tastes differ according to gender because men are more likely to have "systematizing brains" and women are more likely to have "empathizing brains."

It makes sense, then, that men tend to prefer music that is more intricate than the formulaic offerings of pop radio stations, whose audiences are mostly female. Men are just geekier than women, and that geekiness extends to music. If you ever read a blog post about the top 10 guitar solos of all time, you can rest assured that the author has a Y chromosome.

My daughter's musical tastes, however, seem to be changing. On a recent morning, when it was her turn to choose a song, Ella opted for Paradise City by Guns N' Roses. I was pleasantly surprised. As it played, we joined in on the chorus, singing about the place where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. I can only presume that this city, being paradise, is also the place where the radio doesn't play Ke$ha.