feminist ranting!! hurray!!

On another note, I meant to post about this a while back but life got in the way. You know how it goes. This is what is known as the Gender Genie. It performs a nice bit of scientific magic and determines by syntax and pronoun usage whether an author is male or female.

Guess what? According to the Genie, I am overwhelmingly male. I put in four blog entries, three came up male and the fourth female. To be fair, I didn't really carefully select the entries I put into the program; three were rants (Average Joe, Drugs, and The Beauty Myth) and one was an old school Buddha Stew posting about Ryan. Guess which one came up female?

The Genie measures gender based on an algorhythm and scans texts for pronouns that can determine whether the author is writing about relationships (female) or objects (male). For example, I, you, them, and us are, according to the results, the territory of a female author. Quantifiers or identifiers (one, many, a, the) signify a male author. Because my three rants did not use personal pronouns and contained objective language, they are considered male, but the fourth is an emotional testament to my womanhood as I am most definitely talking about people.

The theories that this program brings to mind (men and women are different! see! now, how can we justify that women are inferior because they talk more about silly people-to-people issues?* [and you all go, whoa there crazy feminist, chill out]) seem to me to be utterly insignificant. Stupid. Can't we spend our research money on something better, like cures for serious diseases? So you've proven that men and women are socialized to talk about different things. You haven't said anything people didn't already know. I resent being told that my writing has to have a gender; it's my writing and it shouldn't matter whether I have a penis or a vagina, or even simply a pair of XX chromosomes. It's another example of how our society is so stoically stuck in this black-and-white division of gender as male and female. Men can write emotionally and women can discuss political matters. It's about time we dropped this debate of "masculine vs feminine" and got on with the business of living.

*this issue has come up in "chicklit," the recent trend of woman authors being categorized together by similar subject matter when oftentimes the novels can be very different and on varying levels of depth. The example given here (go into archives, and click on "Marketing Ms Right") is the difference between Bridget Jones' Diary and The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing. The trend is to market all new books about female singlehood and the antics associated with it as "the next BJD" or "if you like BJD..." even when the books are completely different. BJD and the Guide are definitely different books. Surely they share similarities, but it's harmful to lump all books by woman authors into one place. By doing so you diminish the better works and you assume that no one else would have an interest in reading them (like men, for example, oh dearie). Anyway, read the article, it says it much better than I can.