Mr or Ms Vole?

One of the interesting exchanges at the Science into Fiction conference I attended yesterday came during the lunch break. Craig, a cheery man who writes what the Guardian calls 'harrowing' fiction, asked another chap if he knew who Plashing Vole was. I gingerly raised me hand, to which he replied that he'd always assumed PV was female.

I'm intrigued by this, and asked Twitter followers what their assumptions were. Most said male, a few said female. I realise I've never stated my sex online, but I assumed that if anyone gave it a moment's thought, they'd think I'm male. One respondent said my style is 'very male', which raises a number of fascinating questions about discourse and gender.

In terms of content, I think I fit largely into the male category, though it's a dubious claim to make. Sex and gender, we know from modern theory, is an unstable concept reinforced by performance. But I talk about football, the minutiae of indie music and politics a lot - not exclusively male, but certainly publicly more male than they should be. On the other hand, teaching is a subject and profession with many women in it (though less rarely in senior positions) and I talk about them a lot. I would reckon that I fit some stereotypical categories: the mildly autistic collector, for one.

Stylistically, I think my writing is masculine: I'm obsessive, forceful and often rude. Obviously there are plenty of women who fit these categories (hello mum) but you're more likely to find these qualities in writing by men. Certainly from my days as a literary theorist, feminist critics asserted that men write authoritarian, 'closed' 'phallic' texts, while women write 'open' or flowing, ambiguous work - informed by their respective genital and sexual characteristics. Lakoff claimed forty years ago that women's speech is marked by qualifiers, ambiguity, hesitations, redundancy and tentativeness - marking a desire for communal validation, whereas men supposedly assert things without concern for the speech community's opinions. Very baldly: some claim that men use speech as a carrier of meaning while women use it as a social glue. Interesting claim, but dependent on a lot of philosophical/ideological assumptions.

It's easy in some languages: Japanese has separate vocabularies for male and female language for some things. There's also some physiological evidence for differential communication skills between women (better) and men, from brain scans, and that women are more fluent on paper. Women apparently use language more formally or correctly, while men adopt slang more quickly - though I suspect new media and educational/social changes might erode this difference. It's also believed by some that men and women exist in differential cultures and linguistic groups, which makes sense to some extent: we often read different things, talk about different subjects and mix with different groups - though it leads too easily to the Men are from Mars bullshit. This isn't exclusive of course: most of us work and play in the same spaces, with each other. There's also an argument that linguistic difference represents the unequal distribution of power between men and women, which seems fairly convincing to me.

I quite like the idea that my sex isn't immediately obvious online. It lends a kind of freedom and lets me escape from gendered assumptions. To all the arguments noted above, I'd insist that linguistic and sexual identity is a continuum rather than a pair of opposed poles. We're all located somewhere on the scale. I hope that my interests are open and interesting to people all along the scale, but I'd have thought that my mode of expression was further to the male side. So: apart from those of you who know me, what sex did you think I am?

Update: some comments from Twitter:

@PlashingVole until I discovered your identity, I thought you were female, too! Pink background (gender construction) of the avatar [ a statue of a man reading]

I thought you were "he" because I read the profile bit where it says "he". 

 I know you and thought you were female. 

never for a second thought you were a woman - something very male about your writing style 

I did. I think it might have been discussions of child care. I know, says more about me...

I confess that I too thought you were female! Something in the (very eloquent, BTW) way you write, perhaps? 

Update: @infinitewarrior tells me about a site that claims to analyse your prose and give you a 'gender' reading. I'm a bit dubious: my writing is hugely derivative of the people I read, my academic context and the newspapers I follow, and when you look at the analysis, the decisions as to what constitutes a 'masculine' or 'feminine' word is heavily culturally dependent. But it's interesting.

My result:

Female Score: 1160Male Score: 1288The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
 

Laudanum Habit Doth Detract From Lady Caroline Lamb's Complexion (pages 3-12)

Mrs Brightside posts this image, an imagined 18th-century edition of Cosmopolitan:

They're not so far removed from reality: the period saw an explosion in journals and almanacs for women. The Ladies' Mercury appeared in 1693 and promised (in a phrase you may recognise from a more modern medium), to deal with 'Love Etc.' (or indeed this). The Lady's Magazine (link includes images and text) turned up a century later and doesn't look much different to the gentler mags available now: grovelling royalty rubbish and style tips, some romantic fiction to divert a gentlewoman's attention from the Servant Problem and of course the Agony Aunt, in this case Mrs. Grey, 'The Matron'. Of particular interest to those readers contemplating, ahem, 'enhancement', there's an article on 'Wax Bosoms' 

In many cases, the problem pages seemed to become thinly disguised erotica for the readers - The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine (link is to images) seemed so interested in the subject of whipping one's daughters and servants that contemporary pornography started to satirise it, according to Marcus's Between Women: "Those stories in the Ladies' Magazines/ Are scarcely credible, that is to say/ They may be true, but brought behind the scenes/ The sense of being there they don't convey… It's pleasant while you're whipping!/ "I'll go and give it to the Girls!"'

Also available: The Lady’s Monthly Museum or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction, whose 'Old Woman' counselled lots of housework as the answer to pretty much all emotional difficulties. By 1859, advice had hardly changed: the Weekly Magazine informed newly-wed wives that:

Your duty now is to your husband.  No wife should have a soul above buttons nor should she ignore the fact that man’s heart lies very near his stomach, and that cold mutton dampens the flame of wedded love.  

Urbanism, fear of feminism, increased literacy and the consumer society provided the motor for the explosion in women's magazines in the nineteenth-century - the problem page was born in this era, alongside some very explicit discussions -  but the earlier ones are still remarkably similar to the modern templates (check out the Hindustan Times' magazine, Brunch!: 'Women Love Shoes!'). Titillation overlaid with moralising, moral panics and compulsory heterosexuality, all served up with a hefty dose of consumerism. And if you worry about your daughters' magazines, remember this: every generation back to the Ladies' Mercury thought that reading matter was ruining the youth!

If you're searching for good solid advice from Agony Aunts of the past, you need to read Never Kiss a Man in a Canoe - a compendium of hilarious advice. Here's a taster:

By Grabthar's Hammer!

Last year, one of my excellent students did a very dissertation on representations of women and ethnic minorities in online gaming, and on what happened to people who chose such avatars in MMORPGs.

Sad to say, someone's just summarised her thesis one one sheet of paper (educational illustrations here). It's sad but true.

Meanwhile, if you have a female toddler, how about buying her a bikini-line shaving kit? You can't start them too young…

(Thanks to Sociological Images for these).

So you've started fancying boys…

No, I haven't. But I'm teaching a Shakespeare comedy tomorrow, and as you know, classics of English literature aren't complete without a bit of cross-dressing (the same applies to stag nights).

And so this episode of Blackadder springs to mind:

S/he/it

This is a fascinating one:

A Swedish couple have decided to avoid gender stereotyping by hiding their baby's sex from everybody: an asexual name, male and female clothing, no sexually-identifying pronouns. It's not clear how much the child will be told about its sex and gender.

Here in the world of gender studies, we've long ago accepted that sex and gender aren't the same thing: sex is biology and gender is culture, so it doesn't seem that big an issue in philosophical terms.

However, a lot of people are quite upset because sex is one of the major ways in which we divide the world, for good or ill. We treat people differently according to how we perceive their genders, from clothing to conversational gambits to sexual advances.

Would you do this to/for your child? I'm quite impressed. The gender lines we draw are so arbitrary. Perhaps effacing the cultural signs of gender will make for a balanced, open child and adult. On the other hand, if the rest of the world continues to divide along gender lines, it's going to suffer: choosing which toilet to use, for example. Things will get really interesting (or awful) when the child develops sexually, and has to confront the difference between sex and gender.

Is this experiment child abuse? I'm really torn. On the one hand, I am postmodern enough to admire the attempt, but I can only see unhappiness for this individual because of the fact that the rest of humanity, even in enlightened Sweden, won't be in the same position.