The importance of the narrator's gender

I have recently written a few stories in the first person. On my latest (thanks to all commenters...I will be responding son), 'The pÜnk', I got an unexpected reaction.

Almost everyone note that they were caught by surprise when half way through the story they discovered the narrator was female.

I had never made any point of identifying the gender previously because I thought it was irrelevant to the storyline until 'the action' started ie relationships started forming, interactions taking place. How wrong I was...it seems to have 'disturbed' readers. I suppose it is important to help with the scene setting, visualisation etc.

Lesson learned!!

Telling a story in the third person, one is unlikely to run into this problem because the protagonists are usually described pretty early on.

POV is one of the most important decisions one makes in writing a story. It defines how the observations, emotional content, physical action, and impact on the characters are going to be conveyed to the reader. 1st person is necessarily limiting because the narrator will never know what the other characters are thinking. 3rd person omni is just the opposite, but one has to be careful so as not to indulge in too much head-hopping. I was recently called to task by an editor for doing this. 3rd person limited is probably the most common POV and works well for this genre.
I can see why a failure to identify gender for a 1st person narrator might be upsetting in a spanking story, unless, of course, a big twist was the point all along. Then that could be very effective. It all depends on what you were trying to accomplish. So it's not necessarily a bad thing.

That's quite interesting. I read 200 pages of a novel by the Norwegian novelist Jan Kjærstad before realizing with a jolt that the narrator was a woman, but I think the shock was intentional and that he was playing with the readers' gender stereotypes - the narrator was described as tall, wearing a long, black overcoat, and driving a truck!

I am sorry if you thought it was disturbing to me. It was not at all. It didn't matter the gender, but I was thinking it one gender and it turned out another. Either way, it was a great, very sensual and well told story. You are a great writer, Gail. I am not always an attentive reader!

I am surprised about peoples reaction to your story, gail. You did not explicitly state the gender or sexual orientation of the narrator until panties came down. But you did leave some clues: the narrator's name is "Val", which these days is most often a short form of "Valerie"; she describes her lust-object as "butch, yet femme", and there happens to be another couple of females hanging out in the lesbian erotica aisle for some reason, all of which tends to lead the mind in a certain direction. So I was completely unsurprised to discover the truth. (And if I'd been familiar with your other work, I'd be even more unsurprised!)

In other words, I don't think you should worry about it.

I was not concerned with the narrator being female, it just surprised me. Actually I thought you had intended the story that way and that was the only reason I commented on it.

CS

That goes for me too. I saw it as an interesting surprise, not some sort of plot error. It made me look at myself (not at the author) and question my own assumptions and why I made them the way I did.

Barb (and others)....I wasn't trying to imply anyone was 'disturbed' by it simply that it was an unintended consequence of my not using enough cues in the first part of the story. While the results might have been ok, it is not an impression that I had set out to do.

It's a writing thing. It's a bit like how do you do exposition without infodumping and just let the details come out as you write. There are ways of giving subtle cues as to what gender someone is. Speech is a good one when you're writing first person. Sometimes being wrong footed can actually be a good experience rather than a negative one.

I understand that it was unintended, but even if it was, I think that omitting character gender and leaving misleading clues and playing with readers' stereotypes biases is a perfectly valid author's gimmick.