Examine your assumptions
I read an interesting article on the assumptions people make about gender when they don't have the more standard (e.g. physical) cues to fall back on. Most of what I was going to say about it has now gotten lost in my incoherent outrage over Random House getting into vanity publishing while pretending they're not. Emphasis on incoherent, so I'm not going to even try to say anything else about that. Besides, Scalzi said it much better than I could. But this is why I should write the blog post, then cruise the internet. My attention span isn't long enough for two things at once.
Back to the first article. It's an interesting question: why is it so important to us to be able to assign gender to a speaker/writer? And why do we re-interpret things we've read/heard if we find out that our original gender assumption was wrong? Part of me thinks this isn't always a bad thing: if a woman makes a crack about PMS...well, she's been there. She's earned the right to make jokes about it. And yet, has she earned the right to demean someone else? There are plenty of women who hate other women, and are only too happy to perpetuate such idiocies as, "Oh she's just emotional, it's her time of the month, you know."
I was also reminded of this blog post, which I read a couple months ago. The blogger did a survey, using ten writing samples, to see if people could actually guess whether a piece was written by a man or a woman. The short answer is no. The longer answer is at the link, and very interesting. From a scientific standpoint, there are some sampling issues (self-selection is the first that comes to mind), but I don't think it invalidates what she says. I also suspect that a more scientifically controlled experiment would yield the same results, though of course we can't know that without doing it.
In trying to find the link to the survey, I also stumbled on this. I didn't try to take the test. Instead, my attention was caught by the intro paragraph. Again, here we are back at gender as affecting everything we are and do. I don't deny the impact of gender, only the insistence that it must, of course, be the thing that makes the biggest impact: on my life, on my writing, on my interactions with others. Especially in the case of the Naipaul quote (and having read the article linked to in the intro paragraph), I feel as if "influence" isn't the word he would use. Perhaps, "taint"?
Plenty of people have said it, and said it more eloquently than I can: why is feminine bad? I can't help but think that part of our desire to know a writer's gender is so that we can properly categorize his/her remarks. Does that include subtly or not so subtly dismissing something if it's a woman who said it?
Back to the first article. It's an interesting question: why is it so important to us to be able to assign gender to a speaker/writer? And why do we re-interpret things we've read/heard if we find out that our original gender assumption was wrong? Part of me thinks this isn't always a bad thing: if a woman makes a crack about PMS...well, she's been there. She's earned the right to make jokes about it. And yet, has she earned the right to demean someone else? There are plenty of women who hate other women, and are only too happy to perpetuate such idiocies as, "Oh she's just emotional, it's her time of the month, you know."
I was also reminded of this blog post, which I read a couple months ago. The blogger did a survey, using ten writing samples, to see if people could actually guess whether a piece was written by a man or a woman. The short answer is no. The longer answer is at the link, and very interesting. From a scientific standpoint, there are some sampling issues (self-selection is the first that comes to mind), but I don't think it invalidates what she says. I also suspect that a more scientifically controlled experiment would yield the same results, though of course we can't know that without doing it.
In trying to find the link to the survey, I also stumbled on this. I didn't try to take the test. Instead, my attention was caught by the intro paragraph. Again, here we are back at gender as affecting everything we are and do. I don't deny the impact of gender, only the insistence that it must, of course, be the thing that makes the biggest impact: on my life, on my writing, on my interactions with others. Especially in the case of the Naipaul quote (and having read the article linked to in the intro paragraph), I feel as if "influence" isn't the word he would use. Perhaps, "taint"?
Plenty of people have said it, and said it more eloquently than I can: why is feminine bad? I can't help but think that part of our desire to know a writer's gender is so that we can properly categorize his/her remarks. Does that include subtly or not so subtly dismissing something if it's a woman who said it?