Guess the Author's Gender: A Game

Are you convinced that you can tell a male author from a female one solely based on their writing style? Do you think you write true-to-life characters of both genders? Time to put your money where your mouth is.

Authors, PM me a short (<500 words) passage and your gender (if you post a lot about said story, you may want to change the names to anonymize it). I'll post them anonymously and then everyone can speculate wildly about whether you're a chick or a dude.

Paragraph 1:

It hurt to think.

Her mind bubbled and seethed, half-formed memories rising to the surface. As each vanished into murk, it scalded her very soul.

She walked in a straight line. The rebels had not advanced far after the day's battle—only ten minutes' time brought her to the burned-out barn. She did not look behind her till she'd reached it, did not confirm that her Commander had followed her.

He was there, of course, panting to keep up. "Is this about that girl?" he asked.

"I need to know who she was."

"I don't know. I never saw her before."

"I need to know why it hurts."

"What are you—"

She was never to know whether that question would have ended with "talking about" or "doing," since it abruptly ended as she stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the lips.

Paragraph 2:

“Oh, you’re so awfully paranoid.” Christina Bryard waved her fork around, which still had a piece of roost beef on it, “It’s not like anyone would kill your husband.”

Several people were gathered around the dining table, with plenty of food laid out. The hostess, Mrs. Diana Winston, was sitting at the head of the table. She had an anxious expression on her face, her nose wrinkled. She picked at the food on her plate. The cuisine was of goment quality, heavily seasoned and giving off a strong but mouth-watering smell. Her appetite wasn’t brought out by all of this, “I have the right to be worried,” Diana said to Christina in a resigned tone, “In the last six months, three jewelers had been murdered in their homes, and their personal gemstones stolen. I should be worrying.”

Sergeant Bernard Huntington sat near the opposite end of the table, vigorously carving his steak. He looked down at his plate, with a stiff but bent posture, “You are paranoid. I doubt the murderer would be here. His crimes were committed in Britain. I doubt he would travel here, in risk of being discovered with a bag full of precious jewels.”

Grace Millers was across from him, stabbing her peas with a folk. She lifted to her mouth, holding it in a flirty way. Her lips touched the metal tips, “Oh, you’re a sergeant. You should know how many ways a man can hide his jewels.”

“Please, Ms. Grace,” Mrs. Bryard said, “Restrain from such dirty jokes during dinner.”

Professor Brian Lehrer sat by the middle of the table, meekly scooping up his meal, “Well, he could’ve taken a boat. But this is presuming he even left Europe. From what the authorities know, the stolen items cost enough to set someone for life.”

“Now, now.” Mister Horace Preston sat opposite of Pr. Brain, swaying slightly as he carved his meat, “Let’s not worry about such things and let’s focus on our meal.” He looked behind, at the direction where the kitchen was at, “Hmm…Mrs. Minston, where would be your husband be?”

edited 13th Jul '11 10:57:01 PM by jewelleddragon

Paragraph 3:

Just at the bottom of the narrow stair was a steel door with a wheel you had to turn to unlatch it. The door was a little smaller than the corridor it led into because it sealed all the way around. Distance from the bottom rim to the top rim: six feet even. Average height of an Orbin male: six foot two. Apparently they were slow learners, too. If you were on the stairs or in the engine room, you could pretty much tell when someone entered the ballast by the cry of pain that came echoing up. "Ow!" meant it was his father or the captain. "Dammit!" meant it was Mr. van der Durn, Tobias, or the precaptain. When Joshua felt skull meet steel, his reaction turned out to be something roughly like "Waagh!"

Paragraph 4:

The water here is so blue and the trees that overhang it so green that one hesitates to use the words, knowing how far short they fall of what they describe. You look at everything like a schoolgirl on her first outing; Max, who arranged everything, sits in the back of the boat and enjoys your reactions.

“It’s like Eden,” you say breathlessly.

“But without the stringent moral code,” he replies. “And the best part? Marie-Berthe is 700 kilometers away.”

“Don’t talk about her,” you tell him reproachfully. “She’s spent months trying to ruin my life and I won’t give her the satisfaction of thinking about her ever again if I can help it.”

You lean forward to look at a natural stone arch that passes overhead, then remember your good sense and move back to the middle of the boat, even though if anyone is going to tip the boat, it’ll be Max, on purpose.

edited 13th Jul '11 11:44:40 PM by jewelleddragon

Can we guess now?

Sure, go ahead.

Gonna go with female, mostly because of the romance in the 1st and The fact that the 1st 2 characters were female

edited 14th Jul '11 1:40:39 AM by DefectiveHeadMeat

male. just cause.

With limited information, guessing male.

Girl, girl, boy, girl.

Wait, are these separate entries, or are they from the same work?

If they are separate: girl, girl, boy, boy.

edited 14th Jul '11 7:00:31 AM by chihuahua0

Separate. Notice how they don't flow. At all.

Paragraph one is a meng.. (3) and (4) looks to me like girls, while (2) I'm ambivalent about is also meng — look at how spatial descriptions are used there, and the emotions, although you tend to associate them with women, they're described 'selfishly' instead of relationship-wise.

edited 14th Jul '11 7:33:14 AM by QQQQQ

They're separate. Should have mentioned that.

Paragraph #5:

Similar situations. Either Kaya is either a bisexual female clone that went psychotic and tried to ruin the original's life only to revert back at the last second and now has to go to a different school than the original because it would be too messy to explain, or Nami was an experimentally bred assassin that never went to school and was never educated to do anything but fight but can still mysteriously read and write for some reason... Hard enough? How about impossible. No fucking ability to aquire trivia will save you from the fucking abomination that is math. Think about it. Highschool? What are they teaching? Algebra at the lowest, Calc and Stats at the highest. In the middle, you have trig, so lets say she is learning trig. Someone who has never learned their times tables is going to be learning about trig.

Then, she will have to take an exam at the end of a year based on half a year's worth of knowledge. Now, while I'm basing my exam knowledge on my state, I am fairly sure every other state ever has had end of the year exams in some shape or form. They might not be state tests like mine are, but there are still going to be tests.

OK, so no working knowledge of math. Since homeschooling is impossible to do, as is getting a tutor, they can just put her in the low-rank classes. No big.

Oh wait, they can't. She has the exact same schedule as Nami. So either Nami has decided that college doesn't matter, and she'll just take a bunch of classes she probably took in ninth grade if not lower, or Kaya is going to be taking high level classes. Considering how , by the time she gets to highschool, she doesn't know there have been any world wars and does not know how to fill out a bubble sheet thingy, I highly doubt she has been doing any catching up on her schoolwork.

Lets assume Kaya is gifted with math, and is somehow able to permanently memorize things that have been drilled into our heads since the age of five in the time of a couple of weeks. Lets assume she can comprehend algebra and geometry in the same amount of time as well. Lets assume Kaya is able to make a habit of showing her work, labeling her units and all that jazz in that amount of time as well. Lets assume that on top of that, she is able to understand how to graph things, and how the 360 degree system works (in degrees AND radians) and the accompanying memorizing that comes with that as well. Lets assume she is a gift from the math gods sent down to understand all things mathy.

We still have plenty of other subjects to get through.

History. Everything from naming the states to what the three ships were that CC sailed in. The ancient empires, the river valleys, all the revolutions, economics wise and war wise. Or hell, remember when history just used to cover 'society' and the needs and wants of it? She wouldn't even understand the importance of Godwins Law! Magna Carta. Religion. She. Knows. None of this. She has to start completely from scratch.

English. We are going to read Midsummer's Night Dream. Quote a line from it that is an allusion to Greek Mythology. Write an essay dealing with the symbolism of Animal Farm. Now tell me what a proper noun is.

Science. Scientific Method. Go.

Foreign Language. Not even gonna touch this one.

And what's worse? You need all of these to fucking graduate. You can't just waltz in mid year, mid highschool with no degree to your name. No. Fuck you gov't. Fuck you for handing this girl everything on a silver platter and letting her skip 10 years of school, so she may have a social life full of drama and Nami!

Fuck you!

Girl!(!!!!!)

edited 14th Jul '11 10:16:26 AM by QQQQQ

1: Male

2: Female

3: Female

4: Male

5: Male

Something kind of tells me that they're all females. But...

Female, male, male, female, male.

edited 14th Jul '11 1:10:17 PM by Cakman

I get the sense of all-female, too. So, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl. Then again, I've had people guess I'm a Guy In Real Life, which I'm distinctly not, because of how I write.

Paragraph #6:

The noblewoman surveyed her apartments with a critical eye.

"They're still not clean enough. Again," she ordered the young servant, pointing to an invisible spot on the floor.

With a resigned sigh, a bow, and a "Yes, mistress," the bone-weary maiden began scrubbing again. Her hands and knees were rubbed raw from it, and she couldn't help wincing when she moved.

A smile, a cruel one, lifted the lips of the lady of the house. "That's better. No, wait...Get that spot over there, girl." A flick of her wrist indicated where she wanted her - the motion reminded the girl, eerily, of someone using a switch.

With her thoughts slowly turning elsewhere - certainly nowhere near her constantly-absent, always demanding husband - she watched the girl work, considerably more concerned with how her clothes moved around her rough body than how clean her floor was.

She rested her chin in a well-kept hand, careful to keep her sumptuous kimono out of the way. She was enjoying this, as she always did - she understood very well, however, that their servants loathed her. Her own maidservants especially, for she was never satisfied, working them to the bone, sometimes ending it with punishment even if the job had been done to perfection. And she always watched.

"I need to go check on the accounts," she said when she had had enough, as though talking to air. She left the hall, indeed to go check on accounts, although they were not her husband's. They were hers, and she needed to make sure she could still easily cover and hide tonight's upcoming excursion. If she couldn't, the maidservants would feel it instead of the delightful new girl she was planning to hire for the third time.

The young woman excited her, and her honesty was refreshing. She was getting better, too, at what her customer wanted, and was quick to please, despite the fire in her eyes. She would bring her here, she thought, to avoid liability; she never hired the same girl more than twice, and switched pleasure houses constantly so that recognition would be dubious at best. This one, however, struck her differently. And despite her best efforts, she felt attachment blooming. Attachment stemming from the girl seeming to want her attention and her sexual taboos, no matter how sadistic she could be, and from her, secretly, wanting the girl's, seeing easily that she trusted very, very few.

She simply hoped that the nine-pronged whip she hid in her apartments wouldn't scare her off...

Six entries seems like a quorum to me, so I'll stop there. Guess away! It's a crapshoot so far.

Girl, girl, guy, girl, guy, and whatever that last one is, I think it likes females.

f, m, m, f, m, f.

Fine point on that last one, AHR.

edited 14th Jul '11 12:28:04 PM by Morgulion

My best guesses: female, female, male, female, male, male.