Richard's Online Journal
Writing Irritations: Gender Assignment
Yes, it’s the continuation of our epic series “Things In Writing That Are Really Annoying Richard Right Now”, parts 1–52 of which are now available in the epic guide Who’s Whom: Your Guide To Pedantry.
In today’s exciting instalment, writers who assume their reader’s gender, and why it’s a bad idea. Worse, why it’s one of the most irritating habits in writing, especially on the internet. Almost invariably, the assumption is that the reader is male, and that’s usually a bad idea regardless of how true it’s likely to be. Much like assuming race or nationality, it rarely adds anything to the piece, and only serves to make the reader feel less welcome if you’ve guessed incorrectly.
But let’s stick with gender. What do I mean? It’s not big, sweeping issues or outright sexism. Those are other issues. It’s the little details; the accidental slips. Articles talking about their reader’s wife/girlfriend, reviews that recommend movies because the lead actress is hot, feminine/non-violent elements in video games being decried as ‘gay’, technology being compared to a beautiful woman, captions about not drooling over the page, phrases like ‘a kick in the balls’ used to add emphasis…
The list is pretty long, and the problem self-explanatory. Everybody takes their creative cues from culture as a whole, and historically speaking, most entertainment has assumed a male gaze. Just look at how many romance movies/chick flicks are about a guy getting the girl, instead of the other way around. However, the wider social issue isn’t relevant here; politically correct or not, it’s a simple matter of good writing. Hell, not actively excluding half the world’s population isn’t even feminism; it’s just common sense. You never know who ‘you’ is going to be, but you can guarantee that whoever they are, they’ll want whatever they’re reading to speak to them.
Sadly, too many writers produce work that does exactly the opposite; pushing the reader away instead of drawing them in. And yes, women are just as guilty of it as men. It’s sometimes more subtle, but often not — for instance, while you’ll rarely get exact mirrors like ‘with your boyfriend’ in the tech press, you’ll frequently see lines like ‘as a woman, I…’ that do much the same job. A lot of the press releases I get in are agonising — over the years, I remember three female PRs sending general invites to paintball or other gun-related events* with tag-lines like ‘shoot your load’ or ‘burst your balls’, even knowing full well that there were several women on their invite list.
(* I didn’t go to any of these events. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my balls to remain in one piece. Sorry about that mental image there.)
Obviously, there are always exceptions to the rules. If a particular piece relies on speaking to one type of reader, fine. If you’re writing in the first person, or otherwise telling an anecdote or story from your point of view, it’s silly not to use terms and situations that square with that. It’s simply a question of remembering that there’s a difference between “This game was like taking my girlfriend to Disneyland” and “This game is like taking your girlfriend to Disneyland”.
Individual slips may not count for much, but they build up. Writing for a demographic is a matter of style more than anything else — the words you use, the level of complexity, the ebb and flow of your sentences, the amount of humour you include. You can never be sure of the specifics, and even if the reader doesn’t notice, or simply does identify with the group you’re highlighting, it’s a slippery slope to those race, nationality, and other differentiating factors mentioned back at the start.
In short: stop doing it. If indeed you do.
The good news is that fixing the problem is something that any writer can do, and not only does it greatly improve many articles, it couldn’t be easier. Just a little thought, and a couple of mouse-clicks. And if you really, really can’t think of a metaphor that doesn’t involve breasts, you’ve likely got bigger problems than the couple of minutes it takes to edit the odd sentence here and there. Bromide may help.