canyonwalker | (Reply)

From:

I genuinely don't know! I've been wracking my brain all day, because it intrigues me whenever I realize I'm making gendered assumptions of any sort. I do try what I can to break them.

Some ideas I've had so far:

*I might have been assuming Hawk to be a boy's name (or nym)? Not that everyone is straight, but a stranger with an (assumed) husband is more likely to be a woman than a man. (I also don't know that I have confirmation that she's your wife, although a quick search of your recent entries does give her a pronoun)

*Related to that, you do tend to write very much first-person, without giving pronouns to yourself or others as often. This isn't a feminine trait, but it is a "don't think about gender" one

*I don't think it's "writing about cooking/not about sports" but I do think it's partly because of the ways you write about media. Maybe I shouldn't assume that only women are discomfited by the overuse of sex (and rape etc) in Game of Thrones?

*More broadly, I think I currently assume all people writing at length on the internet to be women. This is patently absurd for many reasons, not the least of which is that there are absolutely other men on my DW feed whose entries I read, but maybe it's in part because 2/3 of my boyfriends almost never write anything longer than a few tweets, where my girlfriend writes plenty, so the people who are closest to me are only writers if they're female-aligned

*(the above is not aided by lots of time on Ask a Manager, since the author has a policy of referring to unknown people with she pronouns, specifically as pushback to the default/assumed he)

Yeah. Nothing particularly concrete that would give me this impression. Exactly the right combination of not-paying-attention and...something else? I wouldn't be surprised if there was some writing feature I interpret as feminine, although I'm vaguely annoyed at myself for making the assumption.

Anyways. Nice to meet you more! Thanks for keeping an interesting journal.

~Sor