Gender: It's Not What You Think

There is a fair amount of linguistic research about sex, gender and writing, and how culturally encoded linguistic norms affect writing. There are, for instance, tendencies mf symbolsfor female native English speakers to be more exacting about color names (women might use mauve instead of purple), curse differently (or not at all), and use verbs and adverbs differently than native male speakers use them. There are also tendencies towards differences in syntax and intonation in speech when male and female native speakers are compared. But these are tendencies, not rigid rules, and the research is not exactly as rigorous as we might prefer. Professor and linguist Robin Lakoff is the best known of these researchers, and the most approachable discussion is her book Language and Woman's Place: Text and Commentaries (2nd edition. Oxford University Press, 2004). Deborah Tannen is another researcher who has looked principally at the language used by women. But in general researchers writing about these gender and sex-linked differences look at very selective text corpora and speech acts, and they aren't looking at fiction.

Nonetheless, people do have preconceived notions about how men and women write; hence the recent odd dilemma faced by short story writer Bev Vincent. Bev, despite his name, is a guy. He had a story accepted by one editor at a publication, only to have another reject it, because as Bev notes, the editor (sex unknown) notes that:

It's quite a challenge for a writer of one sex to explore writing from the perspective of the opposite sex. Bev Vincent has not done a convincing job.

As Bev the man notes "The protagonist in my story is a man." You need to go read the entire post here.

There are a number of interesting things going on here; including assumptions about gender and language, and how they relate to larger issues about writing; to wit, the idea of writing the other. I'm not at all interested in current hot-beds-of-coals discussions about writing and identity politics; I note that thousands of writers, including Anonymous, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Elliot, Woolf, Joyce and Cherryh have written characters they were emphatically not, for several thousand of years. It's one of the reasons that writing is hard and, when it works, it's  magical. But I am very interested that this unnamed editor clearly has some pretty fixed ideas about gender. As Bev notes:

The editor says: "The story seems far too personal, introspective and emotional for a man . . . It is hard to imagine a fellow from a place like [the setting] uttering the following line." The editor then provides three sentences from my story as examples. He or she continues, "And I can't think of many guys from [setting] who call home every Sunday afternoon to talk to their family" [Emphasis his or hers]. Another brilliant insight: "Most men don't think deeply about the dewy greenness of nature." The ultimate conclusion: "She [sic] needs to write more convincing [sic] from a man's perspective."

Bev notes that this is the most autobiographic piece he has ever written. I believe him. I'm fascinated though that the editor has such interesting and clear-cut assumptions about gender and writing. I'm interested in part because so very many women writers were at first assumed to be male (Alice Sheldon, George Elliot, the Brontes)—I'm still not sure what this tells us about ourselves and our culture.

For those of you who are curious, I leave you with two separate "gender analysis" text engines. Gender Gusseer and Gender Genie. Both are using sets of assumptions about syntax and, especially, word choice, to "guess" gender. Both of them get it wrong, too, repeatedly, but it's fun to play around with tools like this; they reveal our own cultural assumptions and textual habits.