…and does it matter? How about online such as the SD message boards, if someone doesn’t use prounouns to refer to themselves or say something obvious how sure are you of their gender? Is it important to you when talking to someone to know what sex they are?
Inspired by this test I came across, I thought it was pretty interesting, if not exactly rigorous:
I scored 5 out of 10 (apparently I need to read more books written by men), but then I personally don’t put much emphasis on a persons sex when talking to them online unless its relevant to the discussion.
I can do better than that. I can tell a person’s gender thousands of miles away, by listening to someone talk to them on the telephone. Especially easy, listening to a man talk on the phone, you always know immediately if he’s saying Hello to a man or a woman.
And yes, handwriting is a piece of cake. When I was collecting stamps, I could tell what European country a writer had learned to write in. Penmanship used to be taught very rigidly over there.
I think you can make a good guess for informal writing, as there’s websites which will analyze writings online (such as internet forums) and guess right the majority of the time. But for more stylized writing such as the examples in this test, I agree with you.
After writing the above (based on thread title), I went ahead and did the test. 5/10 “You really have to read more books by men”. No shit! But there aren’t any. An overwhelming majority of the new fiction in my library is by women writers. A male writer can’t get in the door of a publishing house nowadays, there such a heavy push for female writers, and even worse, minority writers. To be sure, there are a lot of very very good women writers nowadays, whom I avidly read. (Hazzard, Kushner, Erdrich, Zadie, Waters, Tyler ccme to mind) But also a wide swath of mediocre ones, who are getting published and pushed only because they are women, and even worse, because of sensitive subject matter (that goes more for men than women). When I browse at the library for a new book, 8 or 9 out of ten that I pick up are by women. That’s what my library buys, that’s what the critics have been taught to praise, that’s what the borrowers ask for. Quality of writing no longer relevant.
The examples in this Naipaul test are, I’m sure, intentionally selected to be as gotcha as possible. Furthermore, by the time a novelist goes to press, any tipoffs as to gender have all been thoroughly ironed out by an editor.
I got 9 of 10 right which shocks the crap out of me. My track record for getting the gender right here or anywhere else on the web without direct references is pretty poor.
8/10 for me. I looked for things that mentioned emotions and feelings for women and things that focused more on concrete details for men. I dunno if that’s not how it’s done or what but it seemed to do fairly well in this test lol
I got 9/10, but I have read most of those books. Not that I specifically remembered every passage word for word, but there was enough of a ring of familiarity for me to guess. I have read a lot of Toni Morrison, and a lot of V.S. Naipaul, and nearly all of Margaret Atwood. In fact, the only books on the list I hadn’t read were the Naipaul book-- but I have read a number of his other books-- and the one I missed, which was On Beauty by Zadie Smith. I have not read anything by her. So, apparently I have no real sense of whether a writer is male or female, just a good memory.
Honestly, I majored in English, and have been up and down the canon, and read a lot of new fiction in the 80s and 90s (I was the person who liked Slaves of New York; I fully intended to hate it, because I want to hate all the right things, but I couldn’t help myself), but since I turned about 35, I have read very, very little new fiction. I occasionally reread a favorite old book, or something I missed, like a Henry James I didn’t read when I was younger, but not I mostly read history, theology, popular science, and political science. And paperback mysteries. And the occasional true crime book.
Your bullshit cite, I grant, has merit. But I think that includes a great deal of non-fiction (it doesn’t specify), which is more heavily male-dominated. For the fiction, it does not address the fact that publishers may be buying more work from men (because they’re better writers?), libraries are shelving more works by women, because women make up a preponderance of their borrowers. The library I use is a college library, and nearly all colleges now have more female then male students, and they are more militant, and librarians are under heavy pressure to feature books by women writers. Or at least be able to demonstrate that their selection is “balanced”, using criteria other than pure merit…
Your nonsense cite is a single person’s essay of her anecdotal experience, and contains little empirical data, and is therefore an opinion that is no better than mine, based on my observations.
That requires the person to have been able to master whatever version of penmanship they were taught. If it had been an actual requirement, I wouldn’t have been allowed to move past 3rd grade.
One time, a guy selling long distance courses came to my parents’ house, as he had a requirement for a course “from me”. I had requested no such thing. He showed us the form they’d received, and we exclaimed “no way, that’s from a girl! Uh… one who actually writes like a girl.” A look at my classnotes proved that no way that was from me.
5/10. I’ve only read two of those books (well, I started and abandoned a third), and I’m not inclined to read any of the other eight from the samples. yech.