anyway.

I love this post.

I especially love the fact that it is problematic, sympathetic, empathetic, and vulnerable all at once.

Yes!

Instead of trying so hard to please my peers that they despised me, I actually tended to go out of my way to preemptively annoy my peers so they'd despise me for that instead of all the other stuff, but, basically, yeah, that was me, too. And to this day I still boggle when something/someone—say, my wife & child—confronts me with the fact that, hey, I'm a man now! ("Really?" goes the 14-year-old entrenched in the back of my head. "What does that even mean?")

Now, here is the strange, glorious, possibly fucked-up thing:

When I roleplay male characters, they tend to be cold, controlling, and repressed; at best they have mild martyr complexes, at worst they want everybody else to be a martyr, too. They are not people you'd want to meet and, often, not people I really enjoy pretending to be.

But when I roleplay female characters, they are passionate, intense, and expressive; at worst they self-destruct spectacularly, at best they ride through hell towards the possibility of redemption—and, just in the my last two years of play, towards the possibility of forgiving themselves.

So: I "roleplay like a man" by roleplaying a woman. Go figure.

Vincent.

Yes.  But you knew that already.

Sydney.

Are you going to be at GenCon, ever?  I have a game I want to play with you.

yrs—
—Ben

Vincent, I think maybe the word you don't know but would be happy if you did is mensch.

This may or may not be news to anyone, and hell, it may be off-topic, but I feel it worth pointing out.

Meaning rests more in the interpretation than it does in authorial intent. Meaning doesn't exist without an interpreter. You can intend your words in a certain way until you're blue in the teeth; it will have little bearing on how people interpret you. In a written medium, the words are everything.

So when you say something, you want to be as cognizant as possible of how that something is going to be interpreted. And then you try to craft the words such that the likely interpretation will match your intent.

So, when you say, Vincent, "I roleplay like a man," you need to be aware (and I'm not suggesting that you're not) that people are most likely going to latch onto the man/woman angle.

Once you've assessed something and determined that a likely interpretation may not match your intent, you have to decide whether or not you want to rephrase a thing. It's rarely an easy call. Sometimes, like in the case of this here post you've made, it just takes a whole slew of extra words to explain yourself.

Ethan.

When we write, we make context.

This essay does a great job about what "I role-play like a man" means to Vincent, and what it contrasts with.

If you still have a problem with his use of "man," now that you have been given the context, you have only yourself to play.

"Adult" is what I would naturally say too.

Well, okay, "grownup" is.

Which may be revealing too.

Vincent, I would love ottell you how almost tear-jerkingly beautiful this post is. But Brand already did, in much better words. So there ya go.

No, I totally don't have a problem with Vincent's use of the phrase "I roleplay like a man." And I never did. Because I know Vincent isn't sexist. Not everyone knows that, was my point.

And yes, if this essay doesn't assuage the concerns of the previously ignorant, it's no longer Vincent's problem.

Of course I'm sexist. But I don't admire it in myself, and maybe that counts for something.

Just because you distinguish between the genders in your mind, and you take a person's gender into consideration when making judgements about that person, doesn't mean you're sexist.

I'm using the following definition for sexism: prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women

Boy, it hit me the other day: by Jewish law, I've been a man for just short of 20 years. By US law, I could have fought and died as a man 15 years ago, and I elected a President instead (though I haven't had much luck since).

I went to look at pellet guns the other day (I love machines, I love target shooting, and I consider the NRA to be an organization worthy of deep suspicion, so it's a logical choice) and the guy told me I had to be 18 to buy one. I thought, "Boy, that was a long time ago."

When I was, oh, probably 19 or so, something clicked with the characters I was playing. They very suddenly stopped being machines of vengeance and became avenues of moral exploration. That's not to say that "vengeance" is necessarily off the table, but it very, very suddenly became one color in a subtle spectrum. Coercion (the cause of the vengeance) remains a hotbutton issue with me, but other things are usually more interesting: religious orthodoxy, pragmatism, violent solutions causing their own, larger problems, placing family above all else...

I could see, the moment my character was a Taoist monk instead of a vengeance-soaked cowboy, that something changed.

But look! See how gendered these options are? It took me time to understand women (insofar as I ever did) to be able to play one. And that took actual sexual maturing to make it happen. Like, actual, long-term sexual experience. And because it's me, the largely-straight male, having those experiences, it makes it a different experience than if I were a woman. Just like it's a different experience if I were gay.

Gender is really close to the core of a person, I think. I don't know if it has to be that way, but I think it usually is. So when you play a game where you're kinda trying on variations of yourself, you'll necessarily play a character that's gendered in a particular way (in addition to having input from every other aspect of your personality).

So now I roleplay as a man. "Adult" has other implications that maybe I don't want to imply when I say that. "Man" says some specific things, given the nature of manhood I've inherited, internalized, and grown into my own. It means a particular perspective on child rearing, on violence, on skill and knowledge. I think Vincent said "man" because it's what he meant. But I know for goddamn certain that he didn't mean that there's quantitative value to it over roleplaying like a woman or something else.

Identifying and exploring what's masculine and 'being a man' and all that in gaming is a big chunk of part 2 of my manifesto.

Actually, you know what? Upon furhter recollection, I want to revise a marginalia I just marginaliated, all front and center.

Vincent said:

Of course I'm sexist. But I don't admire it in myself, and maybe that counts for something.

I don't think you're sexist. I think you and I and everyone are part of a sexist system, so yeah, we're going to do and say sexist things until we become aware of what those things are and decide to change them, and even while we're trying to change them. It's not a matter of individuals being in or out. You can't not be a part of it. You just have to decide if you're going to fight or acquiesce.

Ditto what Ninja Monkey said. There IS a meaning, a positive meaning, to being a MAN. This whole thing resonated with me because I've had a long, hard time coming to terms with that, and now, at 31, I feel like I've barely come to terms with that. It took a decade of spinning wheels and one short, fucked-up, failed marriage, but I'm finally starting to get a handle on that portion of my identity.

Thing is, there are so many negative aspects to what "manliness" means in our society that one hesitates (or at least I do) to identify oneself with that, and for most of my life I shied away from the whole idea of masculinity, resented it, even, because it seemed to have no place for, and even a harsh condemnation of, a sensitive, artsy-fartsy guy like me. So yeah, there's issues there.

And now that I've come to consciously acknowledge that yeah, I'm a MAN and that is good, there's a whole other danger in steering clear of the whole set of sexist attitudes that permeate our culture, as Matt said. So it's tricky, and I still have more questions than answers.

My opinion, which (surprisingly to me, anyway) seems to be unusual here and not represented, is this:

Gender is something I have.  It's not something I am.

Does that have any role-playing relevance?  Probably not.

*puts on sex ed teacher hat*

Sex is biological and genetic and hormonal fact - male, female, or the rare genetic deviation there from.

Gender is sexual behavior, attraction, orientation, and activity - gay, straight, bi, poly, trans, femme, butch, macho, etc. etc. etc.

*takes off hat*

Role-playing-wise, I think that nearly everything one brings to the table - gender, ethnic background, actual skills, and if the dog puked in your shoes that morning - can have relevance.

Meg, I'm not sure if you're responding to Roger or me. I'm saying that gender, complete with societal causes, buries pretty deep.

Living in western society, there's a five-box system.  Five boxes, give or take.  The boxes are: white; middle-class (you can sub in "college-educated" for this one pretty interchangeably); male; straight; able-bodied.  If you can tick all of the boxes a number of things are true, the two most important things are:

Firstly, you are, in terms of money, employment, social status, better off than you would be if you couldn't tick all of those boxes, ceterus parabus.  This is because of biases inherant in society—biases founded in things like racism and sexism—and this means you are the beneficiary of these biases.  To make that explicit: you as someone who can tick all of those boxes are the beneficiary of racism, et al.  Even if you didn't mean to be, even if you don't like to be, even if it makes you feel like crap thinking that you are, you are.

Secondly, being in a position to tick all of those boxes limits your perspective on the issues facing people who can't.  It takes a considerable effort of imagination—of empathy and sympathy—to understand at all the position of the people who can't tick all of those boxes.  This is an ongoing effort that would, from a standing start, take years.

These two things make me sad, to think of them as being true.  Sadness isn't a reason not to believe them.  One uplifting thing though, and I think it's genuinely uplifting, is that these things seem to be generational.  We are less bigoted than our parents, and our children will be less bigoted than we.  One of the ways in which we make this true, is by being aware of the problem and acting on the awareness.

Which is a long winded way of writing that, Vincent, when read you describing yourself as sexist and as not liking that about yourself, I think that's a hopeful thing, a positive thing.

And for what it's worth, me too.