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Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

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Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#61

Post by dubrocks »

tomp wrote: post #39

> I think this paints a somewhat dark picture of gender roles within typical story plots. Women are more likely to be in the role of victims- “she screams”, “she cries”, or “she pleads.” Men tend to be the aggressor: “he kidnaps” or “he beats”. Not all male-oriented terms are negative- many, like “he saves”/”he rescues” are distinctly positive- but almost all are active rather than receptive. Got mathematical analysi…

He doesn't mean "dark" in the sense that the words are negative, he means they don't conform to modern progressive social views.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#62

Post by bbctol »

adsfqwop wrote: post #43
bbctol wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, of course. Since we live in a universe devoid of power relationships, it stands to reason that two groups described differently are in fact different, since no one has an interest in describing people other than accurately. Like how the Jews used to be all scheming and evil, but really cleaned up their act in the past few decades.

Right, of course, since we live in an universe devoid of genetic differences, it stands to reason that two groups described differently are in fact different. Genetic differences are FACTS. If you do not account for facts, you're operating in the twilight zone.

Hey, the Twilight Zone was always my favorite show. It's a place between mystery and imagination, a place where the laws of reality are bent, a place where people arbitrarily start thinking you said genes don't exist.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#63

Post by Bartweiss »

SerLava wrote: post #14
swf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author mentions in the second paragraph that the data comes from scraping Wikipedia articles' plot descriptions. So the plots might be old, but the descriptions (and language) were all written recently.

Hm. Wouldn't that have little bearing on the result? Can't really say "he poisons" when that wasn't the plot of the story.

It might have a large impact on the language, though. 'Empoison' used to be a verb, 'burgle' has largely been replaced with 'rob', and so on. I think this would tend to improve the data, though - 'empoison' and 'poison' ought to be grouped.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#64

Post by orpheansodality »

adsfqwop wrote: post #43
bbctol wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, of course. Since we live in a universe devoid of power relationships, it stands to reason that two groups described differently are in fact different, since no one has an interest in describing people other than accurately. Like how the Jews used to be all scheming and evil, but really cleaned up their act in the past few decades.

Right, of course, since we live in an universe devoid of genetic differences, it stands to reason that two groups described differently are in fact different. Genetic differences are FACTS. If you do not account for facts, you're operating in the twilight zone.

It would indeed be hard to argue that there are not genetic differences between people of different sexes.

It does not, however, follow that all perceived differences in behavior between gender groups are genetic at root. It would be rather dishonest of me to say "men in the US like trucks, therefore liking trucks is embedded in the male geneome" without considering that there could be a societal aspect to that behavior.

Genetic differences may be facts, but blindly assigning genetic causation to perceived behavior without completely ruling out other possible influencing factors is just bad science.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#65

Post by Bartweiss »

dahart wrote: post #56
tomp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you took 100,000 historical books describing the periods of US slavery, you'd have a strong correlation between "black" and "slave", but concluding that the books are therefore racist would be extremely illogical.

You have a valid point of logic. The only problem is that in reality, many many of those books actually were racist. Slavery and racism were in fact culturally acceptable in the United States for a period of time, it is not at all a stretch to hypothesize that the writing of the time reflected that fact. One might even argue that to assume otherwise would be extremely illogical.

Ok, but the conflation is still wrong. A tract by John Brown about the evils of slavery would conflate the two without racism, while a racist screed by a Southern manner owner might use "servitude" or some other euphemism. The question isn't whether racism was common (yes, obviously) it's whether a specific language correlation reflects a racist author or work about a racist society.

More broadly, this is a case of "right for the wrong reason". Many books mentioning slavery will be racist because many books of all sorts were racist, but we're asking whether this is informative or just a base rate fallacy.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#66

Post by appetizer »

tomp wrote: post #40
zebrafish wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably still sexist. I think you would probably agree that literature spoke the same way about black people a couple hundred years ago. Cultures can be sexist or racist even if everyone subscribes to the same discriminatory standards. However, I think the interesting point is that this is the culmination of 100,000 plot descriptions. At that point, it's not a reflection of bias in an author, it's a culturally…

If you took 100,000 historical books describing the periods of US slavery, you'd have a strong correlation between "black" and "slave", but concluding that the books are therefore racist would be extremely illogical.

Brave New World describes an inferior negroid class whose female zygotes furiously accept sperm zygotes with great vigor.

Its not just about slavery, and I'm not sure how this analysis would even begin to comprehensively find these currently unfavorable descriptions of people.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#67

Post by appetizer »

artursapek wrote: post #18
empath75 wrote: post #6

It's interesting how thoroughly ingrained sexist concepts are in the language. Even a verb that's fairly active like 'resist' assumes a power relation in which they are in a worse position. I'd like to see this done by country or year or language or genre.

Is it sexist if it's reflective of reality? Men commit more aggressive crimes than women by far.

But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that isn't an absolute. Men's efficacy at aggression is greater, when it happens, and that is what gets reported.

I would say most of the research in this area is in abusive relationships. Where only heterosexual abuse from man to woman is noticed and acted on, which greatly distorts reality and cultural expectations.

Many men are physically abused by women, and this is underreported.

Gay and lesbian relationships also produce a power dynamic, which has also gone underreported, as they were already either marginalized, or collectively too busy trying to make all LGBT relationships seem completely benign so that their neighbors wouldn't marginalize them.

Do I have enough quantitative evidence to disprove your "by far" statement? No, but thats not the point. There is something about HUMANS that we should enlighten ourselves about.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#68

Post by hasenj »

People who have poor understanding of human nature will consider this an evidence of sexism.

Think for a minute about why "Fifty shades of grey" is popular among female readers.

If there are many stories are filled with males competing over resources and women (in the form of violent criminals kidnapping women and brave heroes rescuing them) then might it be that these kinds of stories are what people are looking for?

Try to imagine a story about a weak man who cannot defend himself against a gang of three women who kidnap him, only to get saved by his brave girlfriend, who upon rescuing him promises him to stay by his side for ever.

Just try it. Does it sound like an interesting story?

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#69

Post by LunaSea »

shouldbworking wrote: post #28
artursapek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it sexist if it's reflective of reality? Men commit more aggressive crimes than women by far.

Shhhhhh! Theres no room for reality in here, were pretending that gender is a made up sociological concept

We're waiting for your constructive rebuttal instead of snide remarks.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#70

Post by coroxout »

dahart wrote: post #48
wyldfire wrote: post #30

> what verbs are used after “he” and “she”, and therefore what roles male and female characters tend to have within stories. It might've been better had the author (and the Jane Austen article's author) used some NLP processing to see whether the pronoun was actually the subject of those verbs. But I'll grant that it's usually the case. Also interesting: gender and the object of those verbs. EDIT: after some research…

Do you need NLP for that? The forms he, she and they are used when a pronoun is the subject of a sentence. The forms him, her and them are used when a pronoun is the object of a sentence. https://www.englishgrammar.org/words-heshe-himher-hishers/ I would think looking at the verb that comes after he/she also doubles as a subject/object filter.

I agree that the nominative case endings and usual SVO order of English should prevent (nearly all) false positives.

(The only one I can think of is that comparatives are meant to take the nominative case, e.g. pedantically it's supposed to be "he" rather than "him" in "A man smarter than he would decline". However, this rather convoluted sentence structure is rare, even more unlikely in a plot summary rather than the full novel text, and almost always followed by the subjunctive rather than an indicative verb.)

My bigger concern was what doesn't get caught because it appears after a noun rather than a pronoun, or has an adverb in the way. I thought major dramatic plot points might be more likely to use the character's name rather than a pronoun, and so we might see fewer words like "murders", "defeats", etc. From the results it seems like those words are still present in large quantities, so perhaps I'm wrong.

I'd like to see it done with "they" too, partly as a control case and partly to see if any verbs are more common for individuals rather than groups (although the rise of impersonal "they" may hinder that aspect of the analysis).

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