Friday, May 29, 2009

The Woman in Me

I tried out the GenderAnalyzer  tool which uses artificial intelligence software to guess if a blog is written by a man or a woman. They claim that the tool is quite accurate but it guessed that my blog is written by a woman with a 62% certainty score. I imagine that the algorithms used look at word counts and map them to domains associated with the respective genders. Though of course I take the result with a pinch of salt I can't say that I am surprised as I am clearly not particularly masculine.
It is an interesting question though. Is gender a relative thing? Is our physical body merely a repository that can be labelled male or female while our emotional and mental selves can be all things in between? There was a phase when I was younger when I seemed to have a particular attraction for bisexual women. I found it quite hard to deal with their sexual orientation because of my inherent conservatism. If I had have been more open in my thinking at the time it might have made more sense. At that time I was too busy trying to fit in with my male peers though so I wasn't willing to deal with anything outside of the box.

2 comments:

Colm said...

Wow, gender...I could write a book and still never get anywhere.

In short, my personal feeling is that I am my own gender. The only time what I have between the legs should matter is when it comes to my part in the reproductive cycle. Outside that, people are people and labels are for jam jars.

I try not to pay too much attention to gender roles or sterotypes and I am annoyed when people judge others based on them.

But hey, that's the world we live in. The vast majority of society doesn't fit neatly in any box but only a small minority is willing to proactively and vocally discard them. The rest just prentend they work.

Aidan said...

I think that the labels male and female are quite valid but there are other dimensions to gender that are not so Boolean as you say.