I also have been thinking aboutnthe Bechdel test for a long time.  This is the test: are there two (named) female characters?  Do they talk to each other? About something other than a man?

But I don't pass it all the time. Or hardly ever, because of the tight-third single male protagonist and few other characters issue.  And why do I write that way ( Read more... )

So a hundred years ago little boys wore pink ("light red" -- the word "pink" usually meant a particular range of light red colors at the time) and little girls wore baby blue.  Though colors in general were less gendered, and you just did not see the monochromatic pallettes for small children you see now ( Read more... )

Two of the annoying things that keep popping up about writing are (1) an irrational hatred of the passive vocie coupled with a complete ignorance as to what the passive voice actually is: and (2) blather about gender and writing style.  They've come together in a recent idiotic essay by Kathleen Parker about President Obama, and you can read the ( Read more... )

Every so often somebody comes trolling around with a link to the Gender Genie.

(It's hereHere's my results. I got bored after six pieces of fiction I wrote ( Read more... )

Scalzi went and did the gender genie, and was smug about the answers he got -- he put in something he wrote from a female perspective and got a female answer -- so naturally, since I ought to be doing a dozen other things, I did too, and got the result that my fiction -- four samples -- came out male, and my blog entry, female ( Read more... )