Writes like a...

wikipedia

Years ago on some long-forgotten online message board, someone posted a link to this thing called "The Gender Genie ." You paste in a block of text and it tells you if the author is a man or a woman.

Guess what? I wrote like a dude. Every stinking time. For every blog post, journal entry, piece of half-assed fiction I submitted, the genie in its infinite wisdom predicted that "the author of piece is male." I pasted in yesterday's blog post and... I'm still a dude-writer. Critic Ellen Willis also reads as "male," at least with this quote from a thirty-year-old article about Bob Dylan. Short pieces from Dorothy Allison, Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldua were also guess as having been written by men.

Granted my methodology is laughably far from scientific -- I pulled a handful of quotes I'd jotted down over the past few months, and the genie claims to work best on texts with more than 500 words. My own pithy blog post clocked in at just over three-hundred words, and, yes, I know it' supposed to be just for fun.  But it's kind of odd, right? Without the tools to break down the algorithm, these were the "masculine keywords" that led the genie to think my post was penned by man:

what
more
are
who
is
the
a
at
it
to

The "feminine keywords" were, if, not, be and and me, and a handful of others that didn't show up in the samples I submitted. The only logical conclusion is men's writing (according to the gender genie) is more active and less self-directed than women's. Most nonfiction save for memoir is less self-directed in the first place, so isn't this more about the words than the person writing them? Ignoring the inherent danger in assigning gender roles to something as personal as writing (and oversimplifying with keywords), isn't this just a rather obvious timeworn trope of men = active, women = passive?