The importance of the narrator's gender

BTW - and off topic for this thread, but related to the same story.....the singer who inspired me on this is PiNK

I find her music and videos to be in a class of their own; she is just fabulous.

If I may throw my own five eggs in here.

I noted the lack of identification of the narrator's sex, but, like jefesse I saw the other clues and was reading with female eyes.

As KJM says, trying to hide the characters sex is a fair trick. I tried it once in a story (The Appointment) where this was the whole underlying point - the characters had androgynous names just to play with the readers' preconceptions. The strange thing is, when it was first posted no-one noticed, or at least, no-one thought it was worth commenting that it was possible that the characters sexes might be unknown and unstated, so I added an explanatory note.

Trying to be clever eh?

For a first person narrative which totally throws (and shocks) the reader, try 'The Wasp Factory' by Iain Banks.

+1 for The Wasp Factory, a superb book.

I deliberately made the gender of the narrator in my story Glimpse ambiguous, after all, in limbo does gender really matter any more?

I can agree that there are sometimes a little 'trick' played on the reader that really makes for a surprise ending to the story. The spanking part usually gives it away.

I can see arguments both ways. The reader starts to imagine the narrator, even if the narrator is a discreet figure in the background, more so if (s)he is a major actor in the drama. So finding you've made a wrong assumption about such a fundamental characteristic can be confusing.

However, it may usefully make you question the grounds for your assumptions and it can represent a big twist in the story. If sexual feelings by the narrator about other people are involved, of course the reader may find what (s)he thought was heterosexual attraction was homosexual, which will disturb some people.

A little aside, but how about the importance of the author's gender ...! I couldn't deny to myself that I find a certain extra fascination knowing that I'm reading the imaginings of a female mind. Is this shameful?

No, it isn't, and if you don't know an author's gender, you can be in for some surprises. This isn't just in spanking or even in sex-related work. Some people who post writing on-line don't make their gender clear and I was reading poems in English by a very talented Indian writer, then unpublished, for a long time before I realised she was a woman. The abbreviation of her name she used made it easy to think she was a man. Interestingly, some of her work I'd have guessed to be by a man. A woman, for example, may well write an anti-war poem, but there is a kind of wry black humour about war I'd have expected to be masculine. I was wrong.

There's also people like George Eliot and James Tiptree Jr, both pseudonyms used by women who didn't think that they could get their work out there or be taken seriously if it were known that they weren't male. Even Jo Rowling was advised to use her initials when she published the Harry Potter books as the publishers thought male readers may shy away from the books if they knew that they were written by a woman.