More Thinking On Gender

As I was reading Cixous and reflecting more about Woolf's ideas on the androgynous mind and the distinctions between male and female writing, I came upon this statement:

"I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man."

I am not sure exactly what this idea implies. Does Cixous mean that, as a writer, she must write out of her experience as a woman? That her writing is characterized chiefly by her femininity? Or that she must write for an audience of women? Or that she must write female characters? Or that only women have the authority to write about themselves? Operating upon the assumption that Cixous means that women should write about the female experience and men about the male experience, I began to think about male authors who write female protagonists and female authors who create male protagonists. Do writers do this for the challenge or does assuming the opposite gender's voice come naturally to some? Is writing a different gender more of a challenge than writing a different race? A different age? What kind of exercises might male writers undergo in order to channel a woman's voice? And what authors have been the most successful in this gender-switching experiment?

I decided to do a google search for authors who had written about characters of the opposite gender. I did not find much organized material on the subject besides a few chatroom discussions, but in the process I came across a very interesting link, and accompanying article in The New York Times Magazine:

The Gender Genie
"Sexed Texts"

The "Gender Genie" is supposed to be able to calculate with surprising accuracy whether the author of any text, 500 words or more, is a male or female. A simplified version of an algorithm developed out of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and Illinois Institute of Technology, the "Gender Genie" completes a word analysis of a text and based upon the frequency of the use of certain keywords, guesses the author's gender. I copied and pasted my last three blog entries into the "Gender Genie," and each time, it guessed incorrectly that I was male. Though I was not overly impressed by the test's accuracy, I was intrigued by the idea that even within the smallest words of our language (with, if, not, the, is, at, me, etc), a difference in usage according to gender might arise. I doubt that Woolf would encourage her readers to be aware of language use to this extent in order to achieve the elusive "androgynous mind." Yet, the question is still an interesting one: how does a woman avoid writing too much like a woman? And what does it mean to write too much like a woman? There is clearly a difference in the way that men and women write, but where does this difference start, if not in the use of the most functional words of our language? The impression that I got from reading "A Room of One's Own" was that Woolf believes that the difference in masculine and feminine writing style comes down to directness and perhaps even structure. Whereas men are more direct and explain in a point by point manner, women (and especially Woolf herself) are more indirect and have a more circumspect way of getting across their point.

In the article "Sexed Texts" which covers the findings of the "Gender Genie" more extensively, author Charles McGrath explains that language use reflects a broader gender difference in terms of what men and women speak about:

"Similarly, what the gender-identifying algorithm picks up on is that women are apparently far more likely than men to use personal pronouns -- ''I,'' ''you'' and ''she'' especially. Men, on the other hand, prefer so-called determiners -- ''a,'' ''the,'' ''that,'' ''these'' -- along with numbers and quantifiers like ''more'' and ''some.'' What this suggests, according to Moshe Koppel, an author of the Israeli project, is that women are more comfortable talking or thinking about people and relationships, while men prefer to contemplate things."

Perhaps these are the sort of things that authors have in mind as they set out to write from the perspective of the opposite gender. I would be very interested in knowing about some other studies that have been done regarding the difference in how men and women use language. I think it would be especially interesting to see if these supposed differences can be found in every language.