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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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I agree with Folamh3 that that seems to be a different phenomenon. Along those lines, though, author George Eliot (real name: Mary Ann Evans Cross) is an older but more blatant example.

Edit: Of course, going the other direction, there’s Evelyn Waugh, who once made it onto a list of top female authors, even though he never pretended to be a woman. Joyce Kilmer is similarly often thought to be a woman.

Yeah, historically, a pretty sizable number of authors write under gender-ambiguous or male-sounding names, especially in history or scifi. Andre Norton's my favorite example, as she changed her name legally, but afaik was not trans or trans-adjacent.

It's fallen out of popularity in recent eras, at least outside of romance (where mainstream het and f/f works are almost always published under female names, and m/m under male names). There's a few cases where that's turned into someone coming out trans or nonbinary, but they're pretty rare.

And George Sand.

Not an author, but I’m always tickled that Kim Crawford is a bloke.

It’s a very popular brand of New Zealand white wine, and all the marketing heavily implies the owner / winemaker is a woman because the wines prime demographic is middle aged women. You see big billboards with a blonde kiwi woman, or cutouts in WineStore with that same woman in a green dress.

But Kim Crawford is like a bald, middle aged white kiwi guy.

Kim Crawford also doesn't have anything to do with Kim Crawford wines and hasn't since 2003 when he sold the company and his name. (Still, their Sauvignon Blanc is pretty good).

Evelyn Waugh, who once made it onto a list of top female authors, even though he never pretended to be a woman

DUDES🤘ROCK🤘

Yeah I thought of George Eliot too. It seems like something that was easier in the past, and becomes more and more difficult as you get more modern technology. Hard to hide your gender when everyone expects you to be doing live video interviews constantly.

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