Monday, March 26, 2007

The Gender Genie


The Gender Genie is a computerized algorithm that supposedly predicts the sex of the author of a given text. I am shocked to report that it almost always thinks that I'm a lady, not that there's anything wrong with that. After being deemed a chick six or seven times, I entered several paragraphs of Hemingway and sure enough it spotted him as a man. I tried again with several passages of Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House" and the Genie thought she was a man. A large excerpt of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood was deemed, overwhelmingly, to be written by a man. P.J. O'Rourke's writing was deemed masculine, hell even a large Ann Rice sample came back as masculine. I begin to wonder if The Gender Genie just calls my shitty writing feminine?
Note: Please forgive the overly macho Djinn image. It's just that I'm feeling a little confused right now. Thanks to Greg Staples Art for the image.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lighten up, Francis.

Anonymous said...

Two entries from me, both say I am a male. My husband will be surprised!