Sometimes I'm a Woman - Sometimes I'm Not

How's this for a series of links? Got give credit where credit it due, right?

Fairyhedgehog recently had a Post on her blog about a male Author who had work rejected because the editor believed he was a female writing with a male main character. Here's the Link to his blog. In the comments to his post someone provided a link to Gender Genie, a website which analyzes writing to determine if the creator is male or female.

Out of curiosity, I submitted two of my Hero episodes. The first was Twice the Fun, the first episode in a new Hero series. the second was On Trial For Treason, the fifth episode in an existing Hero series.

Now both of these works were written by me. But they didn't score the same.

In a close score of 693 to 725 Gender Genie correctly identified me as male for Twice the Fun.

However, by a score of 986 to 459 Gender Genie says I am female for On Trial For Treason.

What I find interesting about this is that I consciously put myself into different "frames of mind" while writing each of these pieces. There is a perspective I wish to have when I write stories, and so, like the method actor, I "become" someone in order to achieve greatest effect. In my Panthera series, the On Trial For Treason episodes, my goal is to be female. The result? Well, if Gender Genie is worth the bits and bytes used to make it up, I have succeeded. Pat on my back.

For Twice the Fun, I chose a different mode. My Main Character was actually twins. Both women, but one a bit more femine than the other. So my challenge was to "feel entirely femine" while writing the one, and more masculine for the other. It was the the other who got the greater exposure (no, not that kind of exposure). The result? A close score in which male out points female by just 32-points.

These kind of things are generally arbitrary and silly, and to be honest, I haven't a clue if it's realistic to ever claim the ability to determine an author's/writer's gender simply by the words they use. My belief is that most authors/writers are like me (at least a little). How they write is completely dependent on what they write. Any of us who have been around long enough to get a feel for both sexes (no, not that kind of feeling - although that has merit, too) begins to get a sense of how to write from either sex's perspective. It only makes sense. And editors, agents, readers, or whoever, who believe otherwise, just aren't using their brains.

I had a friend who used to like to travel to San Francisco, where he claimed there were a great number of female impersonators. He said many were indistinguishable from real women (while they were dressed anyway). In fact, he said some were more feminine and female than the real women. (This was proven on some daytime show where the audience was to guess which contestants were women and which were male. Some men were able to fool everybody.) If this can be done in a face-to-face scenario, how much more so can it be done with only the written word, for which the reader must fill in missing pieces?

So, if you happen to be a woman who doesn't believe men can write a woman's perspective, or a man who doesn't believe a woman can write a man's, my question to you is this:

What's your problem?

But go ahead and believe what you want. Just don't take it so far as to affect someone else's abilty to earn a living. That's stupid, cruel, and wrong.

I write like a woman. Sometimes. Gender Genie says so. That makes me very happy.

I'm going to have a great day now.

S M I L E S