Author: caryn mallard (---.swbell.net)
Date: 09-23-2001 23:20
As a bone fide member of the culture beneath the stairs---a favourite necking hideout, by the way---I should like to answer some of the thoughts and rants that have been about on this topic. I am a Lesbian, and a gamer, and out on both counts!
I read the short posts on something called DP9 with interest, because it is in just such a manner that I have always run my game (for some 25-odd years now). Yet I cannot imagine any of the longstanding lesbian or gay characters in my game finding a place in a commercial RPG supplment or scenario. Two women, happily married. Not bi-babes out prowling for str8 grrls and their stud husbands. Women wearing armour, not push-up leather bras holding huge plastio implants. Women who don't hate men, rather they simply don't care about them, instead of man-hating biker butches.
Lesbians are just women. There isn't anything "queer" about us. Except for an unhappy few, who long to be other than they are, you couldn't tell us from your sister. I guarantee that you know a lesbian. You may not be aware she is a lesbian, but you know one. Same for gays, I expect.
As for my game, I have six core players, four women (3 str8, 1 lesbian), one gay male, and one husband. We mix roleplaying and fighting pretty evenly during sessions, but we roleplay quite a bit during "down" times. Possibly because I am a woman, and possibly because I am a lesbian, there has always been a lot of sexual content in our roleplaying, a fact that holds true with all my groups over the years. From what I have observed, sex and sexuality are also prevelant in almost any game which takes things beyond dungeoneering.
Which leads to the first pitfall of gaming with mixed groups. Whenever a male is dating a woman in a gaming group, he can almost certainly be counted on to act in a proprietary manner toward her characters, even the male ones, and if her character becomes involved with someone else, to become quarrelsome or even bellicose. Which generaly results in the woman leaving the group, not the obnoxious boy.
Likewise, when males, particularly males who have little or no sexual experience with women, play women characters, they can generally be counted on to do one of two things: play them chaste, or make them bisexual (which means str8 but sexually interested in women), or even make them homosexual but conventional (they have sex with women, but do not threaten male power structures or entrenched privledges). The younger the male, the more ridiculous the clothing, as well.
In terms of how to make RPGs more inclusive, more representational, I feel that what inhibits such change is boyz themselves. Young males, and even males in their twenties and sometimes early thirties, see women as sexual creatures, persons whose primary attributes are her sex, and its availability to them. They imbue RPG women with those qualities they think to be absent in women they know: sharp sexual appetite, a relaxed demeanor (one of the guys), and just enough personality to fit their particular wishes (dominant, submissive, weepy, stoic, etc).
The challenge for women and lesbians in RPGs is to create viable women characters, dynamic and dimensional, who break out of these stereotypes and achieve prominence in their gaming worlds. We have to create women who are powerful, empowered by something beyond their sexual allure or their helplessness. A woman whose value is in her sword, just as a males might be, or in her skill at tracking and hunting, just as a man might be.
We need lesbians who aren't about sex, but about a life ceentered on women. Who live with women, journey with women, fight beside and against women, and who do not measure themselves by and as men do.
Above all, we need to fight the proliferation of fantasy constructs in the place of naturalish women. I understand no one besides me wants to play an ugly character. But there is a difference between a beautiful, shapely woman---even one with *very* large breasts, boyz---and the skanky, platsic-titted contructs straight out of modern pornography or the titty-bar, that populate todays RPG modules and rulebooks.
Otherwise, gaming will continue to be a realm where a great many women do not feel comfortable.
Whew!
caryn
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