thread: 2005-03-15 : Cross-gender Play
On 2005-03-20, Ninja Hunter J wrote:
I haven't read this thread yet; I want to answer before being influenced by others, but I'm very happy Meg brought this up here.
1) I'm a male player with two characters in very different groups right now. One is an androgyne, but I'm playing him like an 8-year-old boy because the character's primarily comic and I think 8-year-old boys are hilarious. I was never an 8-year-old girl and haven't paid enough attention to their senses of humor to pull it off, but I know it was different than mine.
In the other group, my character is female because:
I get to talk about the Rosie the Riveter feminism of the 1940s (the period in which the game takes place); I get to be sexy in a different way than I, the player am (not that I'm not sexy; I'm just not sexy like a woman. The degree to which you agree with this is, of course, a matter of opinion and taste.); I get to play a character that never gets properly developed in other period pieces; I get to break stereotype by doing what it occurs to me naturally to do, which makes me look like a better RPer than I really am.
In a lot of ways, she's just stuff I'm not, and in some cases, wish I was: she smokes (heavily), drinks (heavily), is tidy, courageous, beautiful, revolutionary, violent, cool. And she can run in heels. In that way, it's like the nerdy, skinny kid playing the Fighter/Barbarian with St20/Dx20. Playing a woman in this context gives me the opportunity to overcome in a heroic fashion the grief the other players deal and I get to define that arena as this interesting social one. If the character was male, it would take a lot of wind out of the character's sails. I'd have to find other, probably less interesting stuff to confront. And there wouldn't be any female characters.
1a) I'm sure this has come up, but in case it hasn't, I'd like to talk a bit about gender orientation in characters vis-???is the player's, and would like to know what makes a player choose that. I've played all over the gender map, though I don't recall ever playing a Lesbian, probably because it seems tawdry for me to play it as a fairly straight man. My straight male characters don't tend to play out their sexuality, probably because it's too close to home, and I'd have to have six bushels of trust to get into that with a krewe. (I'm close with my second group, comically distant with the first, listed below.) I'll typically play whatever will be the most textured. A homosexual man in Mountain Witch gave me this beautifully melancholy love/death warrior/lover thing; A 'female' monosex genetically engineered posthuman who birthed and consumed her own society at will in a sci fi game a while back; a bisexual femme fatale elfin spy in a fantasy game many moons ago. I almost got to play the gunslinger wife of a PC US marshall in a Western game a few months back, but I ended up having to Produce the game instead (the Marshall's player may have been a little uncomfortable with the setup, not sure).
2) My games are: 4 male and a female, playing D&D (don't look at me), PTA, and DitV soon. We used to have one more female and one fewer male; The other group is suspiciously like Vincent's second: three female and two male in which we're all playing cross-gender. We've discussed why that might be and haven't come up with anything. It might be random coincidence. We'll look again a few generations down the line.
And now, to read everyone else' posts that obviate the need for this one.
