So, this is weird and I don't know where it's going, but here it goes. I was floating around the NaNo forums (I've been a lot more active than I have been in past years. It's exciting :D) and I came across a "tips for female writers writing with a male voice" thread somewhere (I've forgotten exactly where). For the most part, it was people just saying to treat your characters as characters first and as males or females second-- which makes a lot of sense. Everyone should treat real people like this too-- but there were some legitimately helpful tips. What really distracted me from homework was The Gender Genie, an algorithm that can apparently predict gender based on preposition and pronoun usage. Just for shits and giggles, I put in some of my past NaNo manuscripts to see how I did portraying the gender of my main characters/narrators.
NaNo 2009: A Soul For Sale or Rent
Female Score: 63553
Male Score: 65529The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
Woo! The Gender Genie was successfully "fooled" into believing my very testosterone-fueled punk narrator was a boy.
Author: 1 Algorithm: 0
NaNo 2010: This Is Not My Story: A Summer of New History
Female Score: 72125
Male Score: 66328
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!
This made me giggle because the narrator of this NaNo is a bit on the soft and squishy side, even though he's a boy. But when I separated it out between Nicho (the main narrator ) and his grandfather, Lev (from whom he's recording an oral history), it turns out the Gender Genie correctly identified Nicho as a boy, and thought Lev was a girl (which is even funnier because Lev's a stoic former Soviet Union emigrant).
Author: 1 Algorithm: 1
After messing around with fiction, I thought it'd be funny to see what it thought of my non-fiction classwork, so I plugged in a test I had just written for 18th c. Brit. Lit. These were the results:
Brit. Lit. Take-home Essay
Female Score: 2465
Male Score: 2599
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
Okay. Academia and such is kind of a male-dominated field. Maybe it's just in the nature of academic writing to sound a little more male-ish. Let's try an actual blog post.
Halfway to Somewhere: Lazy Days
Female Score: 2682
Male Score: 2982
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
Hmm..
So, it's not that I have anything against boys, but it still bothers me just a little that it labeled me as a boy. I mean, I am kinda assertive, my name means "man from the sea," and I have a deeper voice for a girl, but Mother Nature's pretty adamant that I'm a female. And I like being a girl. Particularly, I like being a strong female. Ever since I was little, I've always asserted that I could do anything a boy could do (which is more or less true if I could put in the effort to stay in shape), but it's something completely different to actually be-- or want to be-- a boy. I'll admit, there were times growing up that I was pretty damn sure my life would be easier if I had been born a boy or if I were a boy, but that's a far cry from actually going through with anything.
And I know I'm putting stock into a math algorithm to determine something socio-behavioral, but still.. It's the same kind of weird that you get when your horoscope or astrology signs are scary accurate, and I'm having a hard time just blowing it off.
I guess The Gender Genie is trying to tell me I'm not too old to question my identity. As if I didn't have enough to worry about right now.
I'm mildly tempted to put this to a real human and see what they think. We'll see what happens!
