High Femme Diary

This is now a friends-only journal. Partly because it's occasionally indiscreet and mostly because if I want the world to read something I publish it. This is where I try out ideas which I later realise are hideously embarrassing.

If you are interested in reading the opinions of a vain, ambitious, tough, feminine, lesbian professional historian and development economist then please leave me a message. If you are a publisher and would like to see that turned into the jacket blurb of a pornographic novel, then you should definitely leave me a message.

Generally I'm with the anti-quiz Nazis but I thought this was worth posting:

My journal says I'm 60% masculine.

What does your LJ writing style say about your gender? UsernameCommunity

LJ Gender Tool by hutta

Because that, of course, is pretty much my point. I may wear a lot of pink and look good in micro-skirts. But don't think that you know shit about my gender identity.

Update: Apologies if more community-minded LJers know this. However I ran that test on my small-but-very-select group of LJ friends, all of whom identify as female I believe, and all but one of them came out as male. The Koppel-Argamon test, which claims 80% accuracy, is less than 10% accurate in identifying the gender of my LJ peer group blogs. Whether this is a problem solely with the test, or particularly with its bookblog implementation I'm not sure. Either way it suggests that the algorithm can't cope with smart, often queer, women with attitude. What a surprise. Gender constructionism, anyone?

But my initial childish pleasure at subverting 'the rules' was diminished when I read the Koppel-Argamon paper properly. The algorithm was trained on some decent literature. There should be no gender bias in the type of material selected (though it is a little hard to tell from their description of their methodology, which doesn't properly examine this point). If we give Koppel and Argamon the benefit of the doubt on that, though, somewhere along the line we, with the honourable exception of tragicmulatta, all started writing in a way which has more in common with the style generally adopted by men. Is that really something to be proud of? I don't think shakinghell's Any François would think so. Judiths Butler and Halberstam might be proud of us; but Audre Lorde probably wouldn't be.

Update: Yes, there are some men on my friends list now. Fortunately. My LJ was showing a disturbing separatist tendency.

My baby just sent me a e-card. I won't show you what she wrote in it, but here is the design:
http://www.bust.com/cards/art/yesweare.jpg

A conversation I have too often for real.

I am very lucky and should stop moaning.