Does online gender matter ?
July 24th, 2006Who is my blogging persona ?
Lorelle on Wordpress, in her compelling blogging challenge, encourages us to give more details on who we are when blogging:
Who and what is your online blogging persona? Is it different from who you really are in life? How? I’ve been asking who the hell are you for a while now. Here’s your chance to tell us. Who are you, the blogger, when you blog?
At first, I thought: ‘I am no different from what I really am in life’, but then I started thinking (for real).
For one thing, I am french, and I do use French as my main language. But it so happens that my blogging persona (and also my professional avatar) writes everything in English. How is this for a split personality? Maybe I simply use English like I would have used Latin a while back: when I want to write for everybody, I use the conventional Lingua Franca.
But maybe it goes deeper than this: contrary to French and many other languages, English is primarily gender-neutral. In French, you say ‘LE Soleil’, in German ‘DIE Sonne’, whereas in English, ‘the Sun’ has no gender, not even a hint. In French, when you hang out with a friend, you have to specify ‘UN ami’ or ‘UNE amie’. It is the same for a colleague, a cousin, a neighbor, and so forth. In fact, all french words have a gender. And so it is that all references to things, and above all to people are sexually biased, because of this indelible gender tag. It may seem trivial, as it is deeply rooted in our culture, but imagine for an instant a language that would tag words with racial or religious references. Would you find it normal to use a different word for a white or a black neighbor, a christian or a muslim driver ?
Does online gender matter ?
I very strongly believe in gender equity, and although I am no activist, I take many opportunities to advocate what I believe is one of the fundamental human rights. The internet is revolutionary in this respect. You can be involved in relationships without seeing faces or hearing voices. Having no physical contact gives no grip to the ordinary prejudices: your favorite blogger might have psoriasis all over the scalp, have a limp, and a glass-eye, and yet there would be none of the unconscious disgust to skew the exchange.
But above all, one’s gender does not show outright. For me, it is the holy graal of gender equity: when no love-making and other niceties are involved, I like to shed my gender, be a pure-spirit, not tainted by hormonal or cultural thoughts, gestures, attitudes. Maybe I blog in English so I can take gender neutrality much further than with French. I can say that I am a married aerospace engineer, born near Paris in 1974, without telling whether I am a man or a woman. Why would one need to know anyway ? I believe one does not need to know more than one would need to know about the color of my skin, my religious beliefs or my cholesterol ratio.
Is it neutrality or ambiguity ?
From the blogger’s point of view, I believe not telling about gender is neutral. It feels ambiguous when readers unconsciously take it for granted that they should know, because everyone is so used to knowing. Well, the internet is perhaps the best place for people to learn that they do not need to know after all, at least not all the time.
Unfortunately, as most first names are gender-specific, not telling means blogging with a pseudonym. I had left a comment on Lorelle’s debate against anonymous bloggers, which I have since turned into a post. I use my cat’s name Mandarine as a pseudonym (this is quite illegal, for I do not have her written assent not her parents’). Although you could tell from the name that she is a she-cat, I gather that you will find it hard to relate to me. Well, I do not say that I will not (involuntarily) leak a clue here and there in my blog - I did not say that nobody must know either. At least it will only be the faithful and thorough readers who will get it. The funny thing is that my first name is neutral itself, so I could have avoided the pseudonym in the first place, but I guess I prefer a little privacy.
Read on
What’s in a name ?
About Mandarine
Achieving gender equality statistically
Read away
Who the hell are you ?
Online Identity on Wikipedia
John Suler’s The Psychology of Cyberspace
Again, your eloquence is amazing, especially on this topic. The issue of gender has been a funky one for me, and I had some surprising responses when people found out. Not that I was hiding, it just wasn’t relevant.
Yet, the interesting point that jumped out is that while we have a “relationship” through the shared communication between our blogs, as soon as I read “aerospace engineer” my heart jumped. A commonality, a connection, a reason to expand our non-existent but existing relationship.
Which is part of the point of bring the issue of privacy vs. sharing a bit of who you are with your audience. Creating a connection with your audience is very important to attracting and maintaining an audience. You don’t have to reveal all, but reveal enough to help us recognize you as a fellow soul sharing a spot on the planet and give us enough to create a relationship with you in our heads. I spoke about this kind of connection in an article called Global Awareness May Change The Way You Communicate on the Web, which I believe makes a very important point about geographic sensitivity that is changing how we communicate via the Internet.
Thank you, to you and your cat, for taking my little points and expanding them so beautifully and giving me greater insights into the points. You challenge me and inspire me. Thank you so much!
I was thinking about this recently. If your online gender doesn’t matter, why do you go out of your way to tell us that you’re French? What am I supposed to get from that. Should I think, “Oh, Mandarine probably wears a beret, eats baguettes, lives in Paris, likes Jerry Lewis, cooks snails, discusses philosophy over wine, and snacks on frogs legs”? That would be absurd.
Yes, the French as whole do like to do some of those things more than other nations as a whole, but for individual French people, whether they like those things or not is a completely personal matter. I’m an American, but I don’t have a car, let alone a gun. What’s the point of knowing our national identities…
But! But you do tell us your nationality, and I think it does tell us something about you, even if it can’t really tell us about you. Don’t you agree? Why should gender then be different, other than the enjoyable novelty of genderlessness?
Idle thoughts.
Very true. Food for further thought.
I can understand withholding personal information, but it is interesting to see which things different people hold sacred. As was mentioned here, you had no qualms about being labeled French or Aeronautic Engineer, but use a pseudonym. I have seen others that avoid using any place names, even when talking about something they did in the distant past. I think it usually just comes down to what each person is thinking about the most.
I had published my former addresses in my blog, but once my daily hits jumped from one a day to thirty, I decided it wasn’t just my trusted family and friends reading. I also avoid putting other people’s names in my blog unless they have previously consented. One recurring character is The Good Doctor.
Good luck protecting your secrets, while sharing your public info.
I guess you are right about the fact that each person sees privacy (and therefore anonymity) from a different angle.
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