Gender Bending

www.GenderAnalyser.com says that it “uses artificial intelligence” to determine whether a blog is written by a man or a woman. Intrigued, I immediately submitted the blog you see before you. Gender Analyser correctly guessed the gender of the blog as male, by a healthy margin of 60%. Next, I submitted my other blog, These Are Songs to the procedure. Result: Gender Analyser thinks I’m a woman! Actually, the assessment was 50-50 male to female, but leaning female. So actually I’m more of a prose androgyne, bending genders like a blogging glam-rocker, the Marc Bolan of WordPress.

Barely had I had time to absorb this information than my confidence in my masculinity was further undermined by the following thought: I only write half of this blog. If my writing is 50% woman, as shown by the These Are Songs analysis, then that means that only a small proportion of the manliness of Tuppenceworth is provided by me, the slack all taken up by Simon “He-man” McGarr. Sure enough, an analysis of his collected Tuppenceworth musings comes to a beer-swilling, toolbelt-wearing, not-asking-for-directions 70%. My own collected Tuppenceworthing is…wait a minute, it’s 60%, the same as the average. This is reassuring. Though less masculine than Simon, I am at least comfortably over the hermaphrodite line. But why am I more masculine here than when I write about songs? Do I pursue more typically male topics?

Actually, now that I think of it, I have written about football once or twice. But those posts tend to focus on the TV analysis, rather than the game itself. Once, I even wrote about football poetry, surely a less than blokish angle on the beautiful game. To get a grip on just how male I can be when I tap out a blog post, I ran the test on my contributions to Super Euro Soccer Party, Fustar’s blog of the European Championships of earlier this year. My collected works came in at a grizzled and frankly disturbing 99%. I’m not sure I want to be that masculine. Even Twenty Major is only an effeminate 55%. The only blog I could find with a similar profile was Feministe, which is 99% female. I took a look around, and suddenly I didn’t feel too bad about my 50% rating. If being 99% anything leads to comment threads like this, maybe I’m better off neither one nor t’other.