"The": for men only?

Bob at Unfogged, in addition to echoing my views of President Bush perfectly, has helped me to discover that I write like a girl.

While the Gender Genie is pretty silly, I do feel that, especially in fiction, there are recognizable differences between writing by men and writing by women. I can’t quantify it—certainly not by counting uses of ‘the’ versus ‘with’ as Gender Genie does—but it’s more than a feeling that it would be unlikely for a woman to have written John Norman’s execrable ‘Gor’ novels, and less than a feeling there are plots, characters, settings or styles that are unavailable to either gender. I suppose it’s a reflection of my own unwitting education in gender roles: sometimes authors surprise me by confounding expectations that I don’t know I have. And those expectations and surprises are differently arrayed when I know I’m reading a man’s writing rather than a woman’s. Which I think means that it’s all in my head. But since we’re talking about experiences of made-up worlds, does “it’s all in my head” actually mean anything?

Filed under: culture/books