Says Uncle accused me of not being a girl. And he refers to an online gender calculator which supposedly can determine if you are man or woman by counting how many times you use words like "the."
This seems like a pretty unscientific way of determing someone's sex. I assure you that my girly fingers can type "the" just as easily as a man's, if not more easily. The the the the the -- oooh now I feel like wasting a whole Sunday watching football.
(1) Even if there's some validity to it, a program like the Gender Genie isn't going to work for testing the sex of political bloggers because we have a relatively closed community in which bloggers will tend to imitate the established writing style. With nearly all the top political bloggers being men, female bloggers will wind up modeling their blog writing after men.
Michelle Malkin, the only woman with a top political blog (I don't really consider Wonkette to be a politics blogger), writes in a manly style according to the Gender Genie.
(2) There is a sexist double standard here. When a man starts a blog, no one says "hey, maybe this person isn't a man" But I've only been blogging for two weeks and suddenly someone accuses me of not being a woman.
7 comments:
"The men are men, the women are men, and the teenage girls are FBI agents." - statement about the internet.
The internet in general tends to be more male dominated. Tech stuff is generally more male, and there's a lot of that on the internet. Men tend to be more "oooh, gadgets!" I'm not defending his statement or anything, just pointing out there's an assumption. It's changing over time.
"Sexist double standard in the blogosphere" - hmm, a bit dramatic don't you think? This is just one guy's opinion, not the blogosphere's. You're not famous yet. And, are you really sure there's a double standard? How can you be sure that no man who has started a blog has been accused of being a woman? Maybe the tree fell, but you weren't around to hear it.
Men read your blog, look at your picture and have nice dreams. It just happens that way. It's quite disenchanting to find out your fantasy is some balding middle aged guy with hair on his hands, who took the picture from some Russian Bride catalogue.
The New Democrat
I'll concede that point. Yes, it is becoming less male-dominated.
Urgh, I'm not sure I phrased that last comment right. Allow me to rephrase... Yes, in general, the 'net is less male-dominated, and there is no real reason for it to be male dominated. There are a lot of areas that are still mostly male, though.
Hell, I'm not even sure of that, because outside of the extremely geeky areas of the internet I can't think of any examples. I'll shut up now.
I never believed Malkin was a woman anyway.
Yeah. I'm a woman. I often use the internet for parenting sites. Pffft.
How odd that people care what gender they're reading. Does it matter? Aren't words sexless?
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