Years ago, I wrote about this thing called "the gender genie" that determines whether the author of a piece of writing is male or female based on some mysterious algorithm. The original has been retired to the internet graveyard, but luckily, I found another gender analyzer which yielded some interesting -- but not that surprising -- results.
My posts that mention feminism are thought to be written by a woman. Makes sense. The word "feminism" by yields a result of 100% female (because no men ever wright about feminism, huh?), Conversely, my eulogy for Christopher Hitchens and my post about Johnny Weir coming out were labeled "male." It works best with a large block of text, but it's fun to plug in individual words: baseball and war are obviously male (obviously), while somewhat surprisingly, car and politics are female. According to the analyzer, this sentence is 57% female:
"I think all politicians are wrong."
70% female:
"I feel all politicians are wrong."
75% male:
"All politicians are wrong."
(Note: I don't really think all politicians are wrong, just the ones I don't agree with.)
Bold, declarative statements are male. Or, at least, are determined to be masculine by the reader. I used to make bold declarative statements on the internet, then someone told me I was too aggressive and too opinionated. (I wish I were. In reality I'm fairly wishy-washy.) But I noticed that I started to preface my comments with "I think," or even "I feel." It's a tick, a kind of shorthand for "see, I'm not so threatening," that a lot of women perform, especially online. (How does one "feel" a thought, anyway?) This should come as no surprise, but it's still disappointing.
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