Women and men do not listen to music differently

Women's music? Men's music? Kerry King of Slayer and Joni Mitchell. Photograph: EPA/Corbis

Lesley Douglas - the co-ordinator of the BBC's popular music coverage across TV and radio - has been in the news this week expressing a rather controversial theory. According to Douglas, men and women listen to music differently. Women are more likely to interact with music emotionally, whereas men - walking calculators, all of us - hear it on an intellectual, analytical level, hearing not the soul in, say, Dusty Springfield's voice, but obsessing over the third note in the second verse and the rarity of the record's catalogue number or where an album was made. It's an interesting theory that certainly makes you think - and Laura Barton explores it in today's G2. It also, perhaps contains a couple of grains of truth. But by and large it is, in my opinion, complete bunkum.

Last time I looked, I was still a man. I have spent my whole life reacting absurdly emotionally to music. I don't know whether it's because my father died when I was very young, or because I am a genetically programmed indie weed, but as a child I would weep to Terry Jacks' Seasons In The Sun (about someone on his deathbed) or Elvis's Old Shep (the King's dog dies), a song I have been unable to listen to since 1974 in case it happens again. Even now, apparently a grown adult, I have been reduced to a quivering mess by Against All Odds by Phil Collins. But here is the news: I am not alone. Across the country, there are millions of men who react to music very emotionally just like me. I have seen men breathless with emotion at gigs by Doves or the Verve, overcome with something at the proximity to Morrissey; grown men in tears at gigs by Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson. I have seen Liverpool hardcases emerge with tearstained faces from a gig by Joe Strummer. I haven't been to many gigs where male voice choirs emit a unified cry of "But isn't the middle eight bonzer?"

Contrarily, I know quite a lot of women who react to music more intellectually than me. I have heard girls whisper in awe of a certain group's "sea-dredging bass". I once went out with someone who loved a description of the Stranglers (her favourite band) drum sound as "a cabbage landing on the roof of a garden shed". There are now scores of female rock journalists, many of whom are capable of stripping a song down to its nuts and bolts as well - and in some cases a lot better - than us blokes, as well as relating to the music's emotional impact.

The grain of truth in Douglas's theory is this: men and women do react emotionally to different things. There is undoubtedly some music which appeals more to women and vice versa, but even here the picture is hardly cut and dried. The glaring examples are bands like Westlife and Eternal - manufactured pop marketed to teens when their hormones are running wild. These audiences can remain loyal when they have grown up - witness the enormous female, screaming audiences that still greet Take That and Duran Duran. But are men really different? I know people who even now can be turned into a cauldron of repressed sexuality by a mere second's blast of Deborah Harry or Clare Grogan. The boy bands - and Kylie - also attract gay men. Some music has always been traditionally male-dominated, notably heavy metal, whose listeners react to physical raw power. The recent Led Zeppelin audience was apparently mostly male (curiously, since there are millions of women who adore Led Zeppelin but for some reason seem to have missed out on tickets). But among newer metal bands, it's different. The audience for Korn, for example, is notably split. There will always be macho extremes of music -hip-hop's more graphic gangsta rap, or Nitzer Ebb's European brutalism - which tend to appeal only to a certain type of male - but such audiences are not typical men and you wouldn't want them as your friends, especially if they wear cycling shorts to clubs or address each other "homie" in the middle of Doncaster Tesco.

A lot of Douglas's theory veers alarmingly close to patronising, almost "men are stronger than women" 1970s logic all over again. It's true that the bulk of the High Fidelity-type trainspotters who obsess over record sleeves and runout grooves are mainly men. At this point, I should ask for an offence to be taken into consideration: in a certain mood I can recite New Order setlists from 1982 (L'Ancienne Belgique, Brussels, 15/04/82 ... We All Stand, Dreams Never End ...) and know the names of the 40-odd people who played in the Fall, but these obsessions developed because I reacted emotionally to their music.

And there are girls in the indie scene who can recite the Sarah back catalogue, or the names of all the Riot Grrl fanzines, Madonna completists and female dance DJs as hung up on labels as the biggest male nerd. I am unconvinced that the lazy stereotype of a female pop fan who shrieks with joy whenever James Morrison comes on during the vacuuming bears any relation to most modern female listeners' experience. Gigs in Britain have gone from an almost exclusively male preserve in the 1960s and 1970s to an increasingly diverse environment where eclecticism rules and most audiences are a healthy mix of male and female - often together, as the singer-songwriter genre is peculiarly weighted towards couples.

Still, there is one group of blokes who do over-analyse everything, who are incapable of reacting emotionally to music and break everything down to demographics, chart positions, emerging trends, trendy labels or the fact that the remixer has an impressive grasp of Krautrock. They are employed in the still ridiculously male-dominated music industry. I suspect Ms Douglas has been hanging around with too many of them.