By now, most of the literary cosmos has either read for themselves or heard about Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul's comments in the Evening Standard that no woman writer is as good as he is. In his remarks, he claims that he can tell "within a paragraph or two" whether a piece of writing was composed by a woman, because females are sentimental, narrow, and "not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing."
Uh huh.
In the interest of not getting into a pissing contest with a skunk, I won't point out the obvious: that Naipaul is a notoriously misogynistic, racist, and abusive asshat, or that his comments give credence to the theory that one can be a Nobel Laureate and a complete wanker at the same time. Instead, let's have some fun.
In response to Naipaul, The Guardian has posted a quiz that asks readers to identify the gender of writers based on one-paragraph samples of their prose. I'm not going to tell you my score; it was abysmal. Which probably wouldn't surprise Mr. N. at all, since according to him, as a woman I have an imperceptive, overly emotional, and squishy intellect. You can't win for losing, can you?
Anyway, click on the link below to take the quiz. I hope you can do better than I did. Or maybe not.
V.S. Naipaul "Which Writer Has a Penis?" Quiz