“Why?”
“Because the only ones you ever see that aren’t misshapen are in photographs.” The speaker pauses. “And they stink. They’re cloying.”
“Hm… I always liked the way the petals felt.”
When most people read they hear the written words spoken in their minds. A disembodied vocal of authors, narrators, and characters fills their minds’ ear acting out plays and essays, novels and poems. Blogs are composed with words and so are no exception to the rule, so chances are that you’re hearing a voice right now.
Sometimes the voices that readers hear are the voices of actual people. Mothers speak with familiar tones in letters to their children, and stories traded between friends are still heard as though over the phone even if read alone in silence. Some actors, even, can take over a character so that no matter what voice readers may have heard before they cannot help but hear the actor’s now. How many Harry Potter fans will always hear Alan Rickman when they read Severus Snape? How long with Lawrence Olivier be Hamlet?
Usually, though, the voices people hear are new, unique, and private. Each reader hears his or her own version of a character’s voice that is created from the reader’s perception of the character’s gender, age, race, ethnicity, personality, history, and personal appearance and how these things interact to create a whole person. These perceptions on the part of the reader can be the difference between a sympathetic character and one the reader hopes gets side-swiped by a bus. Everyone bring prejudices to the table while reading; people will inflict their views of blacks and whites and hispanics or men and women or the rich and the poor on the characters.
“Why?” the woman asks.
“Because the only ones you ever see that aren’t misshapen are in photographs.” He pauses. “And they stink. They’re cloying.”
“Hm…” she says, “I always liked the way the petals felt.”
It’s not just characters that people’s views effect, though. The reader’s views of people and their various types will also have an effect on the way that the reader views the author and the author’s intentions. A book or article written by a white woman will be viewed differently than a book or article written by a black man even if the content of the book or article doesn’t change significantly, or even at all. A book about growing old that is written by a teenager will probably be viewed as more artificial, more constructed, than one written by a sixty-year-old even if the words themselves remain the same. (Alternatively, the teenager might be praised as some sort of genius of insight while the sixty-year-old might be criticized for wasting people’s time with the minutiae of life as a senior citizen.)
In a sense, readers construct voices to read with for authors in the same way that they do with characters. If the reader believes that all senior citizens are crotchety and sarcastic then a book with a picture of a wrinkle-bedecked person on the dust jacket will be read in a voice that drips sarcasm and shrilly screams between the lines for you to cut your hair and get off the lawn. The author’s tone is constructed from the reader’s perception of what the author might or must be like.
Works published by anonymous authors are not immune to these forces of imagination and projection. Even though a reader may not have a byline or an authorial picture to attach the work to, the reader will still make certain assumptions about the author’s personality and history and will respond accordingly. In effect, though the author has no tone of voice but the one that the words themselves suggest, the reader will construct a tone and pitch based on what they think the author is like even without much evidence to back that claim up.
These factors can be observed with a good degree of regularity here in the blogosphere. An off-handed remark by Glenn Reynolds about liberals needing to be rounded up and shot is more likely to be viewed as a joke by his conservative readers, because of their perception of him as a fair-minded and well-balanced individual, and is more likely to be taken at face-value by liberals, because of their perception of him as some sort of fire-breathing extremist. A comment by Atrios along similar lines but concerning conservatives would have similar reactions but with reversed party lines. (And, yes, I’m horribly stereotyping, but you get the point.)
…truth, whose mother is history, rivals of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor.
This catalogue of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
…truth, whose mother is history, rivals of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor.
History, the mother of truth!–the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history as not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened. The final phrase–exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor–are brazenly pragmatic.
The contrast in styles is equally striking. The archaic style of Menard–who is, in addition, not a native speaker of the language in which he writes–is somewhat affected. Not so the style of his precursor, who employs the Spanish of the time with complete naturalness.
From “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges
In her post in response to my first post about the Crucifixion, Jeanne d’Arc at Body and Soul wrote:
The only problem with this sentence is that I’m not a “she.” I didn’t correct it at the time because it’s my personal opinion that gender is mutable and ultimately irrelevant, but her comment made me think and remember. One of the first comments in response to my first-ever post at Alas (kinda), A Comment on Rape and “She Asked For It,” was from Cleis of Sappho’s Breathing who said:
Oh, and Poppies is a guy? Who knew?
[Emphasis hers.]
I suppose that that’s what I get for naming myself PinkDreamPoppies. It makes me wonder, though: what voice do people hear when they read my posts? How much of a difference does it make to rAnDoMp0sTeR if he or she views me as a female instead of as a male? Have there been readers who agreed with me or disagreed with me or misread something I said based entirely on their perception of my sex?
One of them, the obnoxious one who has bad teeth, wanders over to me. He asks me a question, and when I reply I blush because I’m not used to speaking to people. Whenever I read things out loud in class the butterflies in my stomach makes the tears in my eyes quiver. The boy with the bad teeth asks me another question. This time when I answer, I’m not nervous because I’m speaking but because he’s put his arm around me. I don’t like the way he’s cupping my shoulder. I’m afraid he’s going to hurt me.
He’s trying hard to be charming, I can tell. He keeps smiling his yellow smile and making his voice be charming. I think he’s trying to win my trust in the way that the mob bosses always do before they shoot the wiseguy who crossed them. Maybe he’ll ask me if I want to smoke. His hand would get more insistent then, his arm a little more pressing, guiding me over to the shed behind the track where the teachers can’t see what the kids are doing. That’s when he’ll hurt me. I’m afraid to show him that I don’t trust him, though, so my mouth answers his questions while my mind hopes he goes away.
As the bus arrives one of the boy’s friends, one that knows who I am, mentions to him that my name is Adam. The hand goes away.
Unfortunately, there are certain perceptions of what it’s okay for men and women to say, think, and do and for some people it is so unacceptable for people of the “wrong” gender to do the “wrong” thing that their view of a specific action can be altered depending on what gender they think is performing it. I wonder how many men liked George Elliot’s novels who would have hated them had they know she wasn’t a man?
This doesn’t apply solely to the written word. Colors of lipstick that are sexy when on a woman’s lips can be decidedly unsexy when on a man’s. A man or woman who was attractive enough to make out with can suddenly become disgusting when it’s discovered that the man or woman is not what they appear to be. Football can be a national pastime until women want to play, then it’s comedy. Men can’t dress or decorate unless they’re gay and thus “half woman, anyway.” Need I even mention the wage gap?
When I started the experiment I had a core group of ten or so friends who I chatted with on a regular basis and a core group of maybe ten or so people who were most certainly not my friends. There was another group of people who didn’t really feel one way or the other about me.
As I said, I did everything I could to not change my behavior. I would show up as my male self about half the time and as my female self about half the time. At the end of one month of doing this, some members of my original core group of friends hated female-me while still being friends with male-me, some members of the original core group of not-friends were close to female-me without having changed toward male-me, and a substantial number of people who hadn’t given a wit about me before were friends of mine, now.
I never was able to figure out if changing genders had inspired people’s altered behavior or if it was just the fact that I was starting over with a “blank slate.”
People needn’t wonder about any internet person’s gender, though, if they know where to look.
The program’s success seems to confirm the stereotypical perception of differences in male and female language use. Crudely put, men talk more about objects, and women more about relationships.
Female writers use more pronouns (I, you, she, their, myself), say the program’s developers, Moshe Koppel of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and colleagues. Males prefer words that identify or determine nouns (a, the, that) and words that quantify them (one, two, more).
From Nature. The study itself can be found here (PDF). A program that uses a rough version of Koppel et al’s algorithm can be found here.
This raises other questions, though, about what whether or not those differences in the way that men and women write are created by social forces or are biological forces. However, that’s the subject of another post.
So how much changes for you?
“Why?” the man asks.
“Because the only ones you ever see that aren’t misshapen are in photographs.” She pauses. “And they stink. They’re cloying.”
“Hm…” he says, “I always liked the way the petals felt.”
Very interesting post, PDP. I like centering it around that dialog. It changed significantly all three times I read it. The gender non-specific one featured a person very similar to Eric Idle in my brain. Go figure.
A friend of mine who’s FtM told me about an experiment he tried when he was first discovering himself. He went online with a gender-neutral handle and no identifiers, and people read him as male. He also noticed that whereas his female self was read as pushy, bitchy, etc, his male self was read as a great bloke. Context, even implied context, can be all.
one quick comment on the ‘computer program’: it’s based on assumptions, not facts. I’m female, but I write academic literary criticism: when I plugged a bit of one of my articles into the program link, I was told I was male. When I plugged a copy of one of my comments from a blog into it, I was told I was male.
In order to get it to recognise me as female, I had to give it a bit of a letter, in which I was talking over a relationship with an old friend.
In other words: authoritative, impersonal voices are read as male voices, while personal voices that discuss relationships are read as female. I’m assuming that the program would have a hard time telling a male-authored report, paper or research article from a female-authored one.
This isn’t ‘science’ — it’s the formalizing of very old catagories. Men are serious, women touchy-feely.
jo,
That’s not quite how the program works. I’d recommend reading Koppel’s paper as it explains how they arrived at their gender-sorting algorithm.
Great post.
(I’ve swapped genders and been explicitly non-gendered online now and then. It’s always interesting but rarely surprising to me anymore–there was one time, though, when I was having an email conversation with someone who I had thought knew my ‘real-life’ gender; in the course of the conversation (a meta-blog and technical discussion), he found out I was female and it really threw him for a loop. He actually stopped talking to me. I was amused.)
Fascinating stuff. I’ve been thinking about it in the context of a post on Pandagon (?) about why there are so few female, young, liberal bloggers who do well, which boiled down in the comments thread to why there are so few women bloggers who do well. First, we don’t even know what gender the bloggers are; it’s all based on assumptions and trust. Second, once you’re in the in-group, you get blogrolled; if you’re not in it, you won’t get blogrolled. Female handles might leave you out of the in-group. Third, I gave myself a female goddess handle, yet that doesn’t actually mean that I am a woman (though I happen to be that). Yet it somehow seems to matter so much.
BTW, that program codes me a man whatever I give it to read. Maybe because I didn’t grow up in this culture?
This was a very interesting post, PDP! For what it’s worth, I realized while reading it that I’ve always heard what you write in the voice of Robby Benson (Cornelius in the original Planet of the Apes). I do not know why, and am not sure if anyone else gets cast as Robby Benson by me or not. : )
I realized only recently that when I am trying to choose from a shelf full of books by authors I’ve never heard of, I am way more likely to pick up books by women. When I was younger, the reverse was true. The Greats I’d learned about were, to a man…well, men. Ditto the best humorists – the most compelling contemporary authors – the most stirring poets. Men were just Authors. Women were women authors. Ugh…
Part of my current partiality is, I know, an outraged reaction to what I was taught to believe – and to the fact that *still* so many of the men I know don’t name a single female when they are listing The Greats or their favorite authors – but the older I get, the more I’ve realized I’m consistently more interested in what most women have to say. Unless you pick up a bodice ripper or one of those haute litterature books that receives admiring bellows from various critics, you are less likely to encounter that comfortable, pervasive misogyny in books by women.
Because of this, I approached Wally Lamb’s “She’s Come Undone,” which has a female protagonist whose authenticity critics were gushing about at the time, with trepidation, expecting it to be all wrong. Well *I* was wrong, and Dolores turned out to be one of the best-drawn, most realistic female characters I’d ever read. Wally Lamb is now one of my favorite authors of all time (I wish he’d get cracking and write something more).
If Wally Lamb had been a woman, I doubt “She’s Come Undone” would have been so universally lauded. It might have still hit, but it wouldn’t have hit as big, given that no one would have considered a woman writer’s insight into surviving and recovering from rape all that extraordinary.
At the risk of sounding like a bad cliche, some of my favorite authors are men, and I don’t think all male authors are inferior to all female authors or any such thing. I’m just lazy, and I know I’m more likely to find a good read that doesn’t piss me off if I get a book by a woman. And I think that’s very sad.
Also, does anyone remember James Tiptree, Jr.? I love that story.
My vote for worst quote of all time about women’s writing:
“The sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy, Gaysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin’s whimsey, or else bright and stillborn.” – Norman Mailer
Oops…I did mean Robby Benson, but it was Roddy Macdowell who played Cornelius in Planet of the Apes. My apologies to any outraged Cornelius fans.
This is a really great post.
When I read the dialogue at the beginning, I figured out what the point of the exercise was going to be too soon to be completely sure of what my default casting choices were, but I think I was hearing female voices for both parts. (When I read writing in which I don’t know the gender of the narrator, the voice I tend to imagine is female; it may, in fact, be Emma Thompson. This includes writing by men, as long as there’s no particular reason to identify the narrator with the author.)
From what I’ve seen of the algorithm, it seems to produce a lot more false masculine results than false feminine results, but that could just be due to the sample I’ve chosen to test it on.
PDP, I always thought you were a guy. Then, I saw a few posts that identified you as “she,” and wondered if I missed something. I missed nothing. I can’t remember exactly what it was that made me know you were male. It wasn’t an assumption based on your writing. It was something specific.
I saw that Gender Genie a few months ago. Every text I plugged into it identified me as male. When I first came to the WWW a decade ago, I was constantly referred to as a guy either in X-Files chats or on message boards. Most people didn’t recognize my screen name as that of a Biblical goddess (I still use that screen name, but not on my blog), so they went by what I wrote. Even people who ran into me regularly in that X Files chat thought for several months that I was male. I and others had to keep reminding them I was female. It was rather funny. Sometimes people IM’d me saying we should take bets to see how long it would be before someone called me “he.”
Excellent post, PDP!
You go, girl!
*ducks*
*runs*
—JRC
When I read the genderless dialogue I heard Calvin and Hobbes. Hobbes was the one that liked the flowers. The man who disliked flowers reminded me of detective novels. I dunno what the last one made me think of
Fantastic post. What was intriguing to me, though, is that I absolutely do not hear voices when I read. I suspect that it’s due to a speedreading class I took as a kid. I read very, very quickly, grabbing content and context but often having to re-read for more subtle nuances. I even tried re-reading your post with a focus on personality and voice… but heard absolutely nothing.
I’ve always had a tremendously difficult time reading screenplays. I bet that’s why.
The Gender Genie was about 50/50 on whether my journal entries were male or female. Interestingly enough, when I entered Vera Katz’ statement on gay marriage, it responded that it was written by a male. (Of course, we don’t know the gender of the author of her public statements, but I found that to be interesting nonetheless.) The text can be found at http://www.portlandonline.com/index.cfm?&a=41693&c=30196 .
Fantastic post!
When reading the first dialogue, and subsequent dialogues, I immediately tuned into tone, but not at all gender. I’m trying to figure out if that might come from having a psychology background, where I need the environment to remain neutral or if it’s something that has always been with me. That will be something nice to obsess about for a while.
As for the Gender Genie, I entered a bunch of posts from my blog, even one that centered around a telephone conversation with a female friend, and all were radically male on the scale. I was expecting that to be the case since I am a very strong personality with many male qualities. Still, it was interesting to see HOW MUCH I fall on that end of the spectrum when it comes to writing.
I think when I read the genderless dialogue, I assumed it was the way you had it the second time around – after all, it seems much more remarkable for a woman to dislike flowers than for a man.
I don’t hear voices when I read. If I do sometimes, I think it’s my own voice.
I do picture the writer.
I imagined that both speakers were women, probably because I can’t imagine any man I know being on either end of that conversation, whether it be talking about how they feel about flowers, or pretending to give a shit that someone else is talking about flowers.
Um I think I can take this a bit further. Firstly, the obvious problems that people are pointing out about the Gender Genie program suggest that this sort of distinction is a little superficial and that there are a few confounding factors at work here. The net has created a new kind of dialogue where old rules such as those that Gender Genie seems to be based on, don’t necessarily apply. As PDP and others point out – it is quite easy to disguise your gender and IMHO this has much to do with the newness of the medium as it does with gender issues.
On the other hand it is quite easy to detect gender differences in the way in which men and women talk in group settings. I once attended a conference on eco-feminism back in the early 80’s when separatism was still a live issue and mixed conferences about feminism were relatively unusual and as a result most men were on their best behaviour. Nevertheless during a large plenary session with about 100 participants, I started keeping stats on how many times men versus women spoke and as the discussion got more heated the number of women’s voices dropped off radically. It was almost inevitable.
Sexual preferences and the allowable roles of men and women are an interesting area and PDP’s(?) little reminiscince about sexual misidentification as a young boy struck a chord. What was striking was the role of fear and intimidation in the behaviour of the ‘obnoxious one’. When I was reading this I had to re-read it to get the point about sexual misidentification since I thought the author was talking about allowable roles and appearances for young boys. You can see how this sort of behaviour affects men and women differently in their response to homosexuality. Many women change their sexual preferences mid- stream in a way that men rarely do, usually in response to frustration and anger at a series of bad heterosexual relationships. The problem is not women’s ability to change but men’s inability to change which is rooted in the fear and intimidation inherent in male socialization in societies dominated by homophobia and aggression.
As a contrast to all this consider traditional Aboriginal society where men and women often have separate languages entirely (to enable them to keep secrets from one and another). At the same time while masculine aggression is often expressed in fighting, it is the role of a man’s friends and family to stand up for him and to restrain him at the same time. But what is really striking is that women fight just as physically and just as violently and these fights are often completely missed especially by 19th century observers unless of course they were women!
Also, male sexuality is the basis of men’s ceremonies and secret business in Oz indigenous societies and they have a 40,000 year history of not going to war. Funny that!
As a minor piece of cultural dissonance I was a bit taken aback with your comment about women playing football. Teenage women are increasingly taking up aussie rules which is at least as physically rough as most other codes but without the requirement of brute force which is emphasised in gridiron. It is well known that size difference between male and female of the same species determines species behaviour and it’s worth asking what cultural evolutionary factors leads the U.S to develop a form of football that selects so preferentially for large male species. The only sport that selects in this fashion AFAIK is sumo wrestling and that’s a one on one sport.
Great post! Thanks PDP. (I always assumed you were a female because of your “This Day in Women’s History” posts.)
Actually, bean posts the “This Day in Women’s History” stuff.
bean != PDP != Ampersand
I don’t hear voices that strongly when I read — perhaps because I spend so much more time reading than talking (It sometimes throws me a bit when I finally talk to my girlfriend on the phone instead of on IM — whoa, she has a voice instead of a font!). But sometimes I’ll hear academic papers in my advisor’s voice, which is distracting because he has a strong Texas accent.
For non-blog internet activities I go by a female screen name (though I didn’t choose it because of its gender). But I’ve rarely confused anyone as to my gender — I guess the maleness of my writing must overwhelm the “mama” in my name, or something.
very insightful post!
what’s interesting is now I’m acutely aware of what I’m hearing in my head just from reading the comments. I’ve noticed that a poster with a “feminine” name gets a low pitch woman’s voice–perhaps because I associate intelligent comments by a woman with a calm voiced, serious demeanor? (read: more like a professorly man’s voice maybe..not a bad thing, but suggests that I have trouble seeing higher pitched women’s voices as intelligent sounding) The mannish names and ungenderless names (p, dch, etc) get a sort of monotone-at a pitch somewhat with how i hear my own voice. go figure.
thanks for getting me thinking first thing this morning!
When I first read the dialog, I imagined the speakers to be children about 8 to 10 years old- I’m not sure if I imagined a gender. I think it was because of the subject matter. Passing judgement on a whole category of objects such as “flowers” based on simplistic reasons seems to be appropriate for that stage of development.
“A new computer program can tell whether a book was written by a man or a woman. The simple scan of key words and syntax is around 80% accurate on both fiction and non-fiction.”
80%? Is that the best they can do? Flipping a coin will get you 50%. Isn’t statisitical significance in the social sciences 95%?
80%? Is that the best they can do? Flipping a coin will get you 50%. Isn’t statisitical significance in the social sciences 95%?
95% believability of the result, not 95% accuracy of the algorithm. if the difference between 80% and 50% here is significant to beyond 95% (or, in other words, if the apparent success of the program has less than a 5% chance of having just happened by chance), then it’s trustable. that usually depends on the sample size: the difference between 2/4 and 3/4 is not really reliable, while when the latter number is something like 3150/4000, then it appears that the difference from chance (2000/4000) is pretty significant.
[end lecture]
Once I saw an early Baroque concert featuring a male soprano. It throws people off, hearing and seeing a male soprano. The cognitive dissonance was so strong I had to close my eyes for a few songs! It wasn’t repulsion or fear, just surrealism, that made me look away. Once my mind could wrap around a lovely, high voice coming out of a man’s mouth, though, the whole thing was great. I sensed that the most of the audience took awhile to get used to our soprano.
Interesting post. The thing is, though, I hear the same voice for all the dialog. For some reaosn, the voive I hear in my head when i read is essentially mine. Which, I think, lead me to have pretty much the same reaction to all three pieces of the dialog.
I do admit, however, that I did think you were a women once, based on the Pink part of your name. I wasn’t even aware of it until I found myself surprised when soemone refered to you as “he”
To expand on the stats: if the difference between 80% and 50% is significant (probability of less than .05 that it occurred by chance), all that means is that the *difference* between the program and coin-flipping is probably real. Significance wouldn’t in this case say anything about whether you should trust the program or not. All p
Crap. I put a less-than sign, forgetting about that html stuff. :)
I was saying: all that p less than .05 means in that case is that 80% isn’t the same as 50%, statistically speaking.
brill post. i’d also assumed you were female.
i think i’m noticing that if someone turns out to be a different gender than i thought, my level of interest in that person goes way up.
i probably hear the voices in a sort of dull monotone, but i’ll want to try to observe that more closely.
People hear voices? This is quite new to me. But like Kevin, I had no reaction to the dialogs, probably because of the no-voices rule. (Or my own voice, which in my mind is suspiciously free of accent!)
I heard two female voices the first time I read the dialogue. As there was no preceeding dialogue, it seemed to have come out of the blue, and I imagined women would have more of a reason to actually say “I hate flowers” than men, who are already assumed to hate flowers and would therefore have no reason to verify their preference.
But I think “I love flowers” would sound female to me, too, for some reason, so I’m not defending my logic…
Really interesting post.
One thing keeps bugging me, though–I don’t understand the selection from Borges. I read it over about a dozen times, but if the bits he quotes are exactly the same, I don’t get the point of what he’s saying.
Thanks!
I still have a schoolgirl crush on you PDP. But then, I have ongoing crushes on maybe half of the internet at any one time. The one I have on you is more special than the others, but I only say that so it sounds more important than the others, because in this moment it is, but tomorrow when I write about my crush on another author, I will make my crush on them sound more important. Crushes are about me, but they’re also about you, because of who you are.
Or you could be head-tripping us and you’re really female and this is all part of that experiment.
One of these days, it won’t matter. That may or may not be a good thing. It might be both.
(As I said above, it is okay for me to post here, because I said I wouldn’t post on the *other* blog, but since you refuse to move back to the old place, I can now post here, even though I am annoying, but I will try to be less annoying.)
I wonder if it is also true that other aspects about people are hidden or overblown in our writing. Like, for instance, I am crazy as a loon, verifiably, clinically; I got papers signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours. How much of that is hidden. Can you tell? Can you tell how bad it is to live inside my head? Sometimes it comes out as cute and funny and sometimes dark and depressing and sometimes it just makes no sense, like I am talking about things that people have never said. Like I read things into what people write that aren’t there *all* the time, and in this case, I just happened to have fallen for the Pink and the Poppies (though Poppie was what we called my late paternal grandfather, or it is the flower that is the incarnation of Morpheus on earth, given freely, taken away by the forces of puritanism and authoritarianism) and Dreams which belong to all of us) which are all cute and fuzzies which even most females keep away from on the internet, when we want to be taken seriously, like on a political blog, unless we are very strong and have a burning desire to overcome the stereotype that we only dream of ponies and becoming princess and our own knight in shining armor coming to marry us and we will live in our Malibu Barbie Dream House forever and ever, living happily the whole time, of course.
Your own reasons are just as valid, though, and maybe even more so, because feminism has given us so much, and given you so little. The men who aren’t “manly” are the ones I worry about, because I’ve known so many and they don’t have any big non-profit organizations there to help them. And it’s their own fault what they get for acting the way they do — if only they’d act *normal*, like *normal* people. Can you read the sarcasm in that last bit? I hope so, because I don’t believe that at all, because you deserve to be held and loved in the way and the when and the place with the who that you want to be held and loved.
Just my opinion, of course, which is valueless. (The gender genie would tell me that is a male statement, because it is forceful and not passive-voice, yet what the genie doesn’t know is that I am destroying myself even more when I say it — the genie can’t read the content of the phrase, just the context of the words in the sentence diagram. The genie is no genie. It grants no wishes.)
Oh, and I have a Goddesses name, too, but she is so old that nobody remembers her.
Inanna / Ananna / Ishtar
All the same Goddess.
Too bad they made a crumby movie about her; Ishtar is a pretty name.
Oh, and I’m thinking about going with “Bast” sometime, too, like if I ever have to go into the federal witness protection program or something, so I call dibs.
She’s Sumerian, by the way. Not Bast, I mean.
Gender Genie is just plain idiotic. I went to Lars Eighner’s website, copied a chapter of Wank into my word processor, and removed all indications that it was supposed to be an interview rather than a straightforward narrative. I pasted the resulting piece into Gender Genie three times, once each for the fiction, nonfiction, and blog entry options. Each time Gender Genie told me that this long, detailed first-person description of gay male sex was written by a woman.
congrats mate! Fine job and fine site!
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Ohh… I put my blog on procreation up at the gender genie: http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.php
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