Photo by Flicker user andycarvin, used under a Creative Commons license.It's just like the anti-feminists always said: Flirt too much with this crazy idea of equality between the sexes, and you'll end up with a world full of people with gender-identity issues.
Which have now, tragically, struck me and my blog. I put the Kittywampus archive for August through the Gender Genie, an algorithm that purports to predict the gender of an author.
I came out of the Gender Genie ... a boy.
So I tried July's posts. Then June's. Boy oh boy!
There's no shortage of irony here - me, who teaches and researches and writes on gender issues! who's been an academic feminist for nearly half my life! who's been a gal for all my life! (Or so I thought!?)
So much for l'écriture feminine; I've apparently gone over to the phallogocentric dark side.
I'm curious how my reader stack up. (If you're not a blogger, you can also put any non-fiction text through their wacky algorithm - oddly, it looks mostly at tiny, super-common words.) Please let me know in comments, or leave a link there.
(Hat tip to my husband for the Gender Genie link.)
5 comments:
I'm all male too. Ah well!
I'm a mix, depending on the blog topic. My post about my hockey team was "male", but my post about divorce poison was "female". Kind of predictable if the basis of the Genie is stereotypes.
The funny thing is, the Genie uses a bunch of really short, common words to predict the author's gender. So it wouldn't look for words like "hockey" but instead it picks out "the" and "she." I'm guessing it somehow tries to parse style rather than content.
I'm a boy too. Sigh. NEVER wanted to be a boy. Whatever that means.
And yes sungold, the genie looks for a "manner" of writing rather than for content. Style. Hmm. My style is male. Of course, it's looking for stereotyped gender. Can we hope that in 200 years, if there's anyone here, the Genie just won't work?
In 200 years? I think we're already messing with it. :-)
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