My Children Are Bullets: Associating Gender With Inanimate Objects

It's a simple question; if the sword can be seen as a substitute for the phallus, why can't a gun be seen as a substitute for a womb?

And how would you do something like that?

I am totally aware that guns already are seen as penises (what with their ability to explode and discharge matter with great speed), but I want to change that.

Well I suppose assigning gender to an inanimate object all depends on the person really.

I've heard of swords and guns being referred to a "she" and so on.

Though I do remember reading somewhere a article on how different languages assign genders to objects based on words. Like fork is a masculine word in Spanish but in French it's a feminine word and their gender association matched accordingly. Not sure about that specific example though, might have gotten it mixed up.

edited 3rd Dec '13 12:32:16 AM by LeGarcon

Psychology. Stabbing-as-substitute-penetration is an unfortunately well-documented paraphilia among the criminally less than sane.

Guns haven't to my knowledge got any parallel behavior on the books. If anything shooting is seen as an impersonal act, very different from stabbing because of its possible ease and distance. They're not a substitute anything most of the time, just an enabler of power fantasy.

edited 3rd Dec '13 2:47:54 AM by Night

I would think that most references to non-intelligent weapons as female comes from the same source as the convention of naming/referring to ships as female, which in turn comes from...somewhere.

As for the OP's question on how to do it, I guess just referencing it in the dialog. "Do you have your gun?" "Yes, I've got her." or something like that, though better written.

Of course, if I were writing it, being the lover of science fiction and fantasy that I am, I'd just make the gun magically intelligent or equipped with a sentient AI, depending on genre.

edited 9th Dec '13 12:23:34 PM by Sharur

Precisely.

Incidentally, the few female serial killers that I can think of nearly all shot or poisoned their victims and rarely had an overt sexual motive or element to their actions. The exceptions were women who either had a male accomplice or worked in tandem with a male murderer, and those... yeah, that's something else entirely.