HOW DO ROLEPLAY ACROSS GENDER!?!, I don't mean erotic fanfiction Options

[Glyph]

Logic and emotion are not mutually exclusive traits, nor are they exclusive to one gender or another. Overall, it is possible that women are more emotional, and that guys are more logical. But like any generalization about gender traits, you will find a lot of overlap within males and females - you can have weepy, emotional men and cold, logical women. In other words, the variance within a gender is more than the variance between genders.

I still think the best way to do a female character is not to set out to make one, but to go through the questions that you would ask for any character. And for those questions, decide on a case by case basis whether she will be typical or atypical. Maybe she played with a ball and glove instead of a Barbie, but still likes wearing a dress on dates. Maybe she has a close relationship with her mom, but misses her old clique of friends in her home town and hasn't seemed to be able to find a new group of friends where she's living now. Maybe she can be ruthless in a fight, but falls apart afterwards. Maybe she likes hanging out with macho jocks, but is attracted to pretty boys. That's the thing. Few people are going to have nothing but purely (societally defined) "masculine" or "feminine" traits - everyone has a different mix of them.

[Blade]

I've been thinking about that topic recently, and was surprised that people have so much difficulty with people playing character of another gender while they have no problem with them playing character of another race, or even non-human characters.
I think it's much easier for me to roleplay a female my age in the same cultural mindset than a male troll ganger mage who lives in 2070. I guess the difference is that there are no male troll ganger mage to compare me with.

[Heath Robinson]

I've been thinking about that topic recently, and was surprised that people have so much difficulty with people playing character of another gender while they have no problem with them playing character of another race, or even non-human characters.
I think it's much easier for me to roleplay a female my age in the same cultural mindset than a male troll ganger mage who lives in 2070. I guess the difference is that there are no male troll ganger mage to compare me with.

Most people don't think of other species as being all that different. Elves, Dwarves, Orks, Trolls, Halflings, Gnomes. All I hear these days is "forehead alien".

FUCK YOU, TOLKIEN! FUCK YOU!

[Fuchs]

With regards to different races, the "they are so different, play them different" stance often clashes with the "don't play a sterotype" stance.

Personally I think that the difference between a "homicidal mercenary" (Shadowrunner or atchetypical fantasy hero) and myself is much bigger than the difference between myself and a woman from my own culture.

[GreyBrother]

Logically spoken, it all comes down to Biology. Or as i said to my mother yesterday "You loving me is a biological imperative to you, unless you have an anomaly or similar." Females are attracted to males and vice versa, the male is the hunter, the woman is the nurturer. It's how humans are built. But as said, this is a generalization and the specific cases don't tend to reflect statistics.

Emotionally spoken, we adore certain traits in one another we find positive and disdain the traits we find negative. I perceived that many guys look for physically weak girls, probably (!) because they need the feeling of protecting someone. And this is just one example...

Isn't live wonderful and full of choices? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

[nezumi]

Firstly, counting pregnant women is completely unfair. Pregnancy does some WEIRD stuff to your physiology. My wife, who was going through college at the time, started forgetting words to basic things, like 'spoon' (not to mention, started throwing up on everything), and only years later did she fully regain her capacity for three-syllable words. She's not stupid, it's just when you pump your body full of hormones, there's no telling what the results are going to be. I doubt males would be much different.

As for the general male/female thing, there are some traits which can be pretty fairly linked to physiology. Look at chimps and bonabos and note the different roles and behaviors between males and females. While both may be both violent and nurturing, males, on average, are more likely to show signs of unprovoked violence, and females, on average, are more likely to show strong nurturing drives.

Like so many behaviors, these can be magnified or results through nurture. In my environment, women are expected to be as aggressive and rational as men and, in general, I think they meet that standard (or fail to succeed). In the office-working world, men are oftentimes given more leeway in acceptable behavior, and so we see a wider range of behaviorisms. (You can argue whether this is women reacting to expectations, or an intentionally limited set as women aren't going to choose that career path knowing it conflicts with their personality, but for the sake of examining it for playing Shadowrunners, it's not especially relevant.)

I don't know that women suffer when they suppress their emotional or intuitive side any more than men, except insofar that they are in violation of social expectations. I know I am very rational at the expense of my emotional side, but it rarely comes up because I have chosen a life path that avoids those sorts of confrontations, and because my wife realizes she works better with me like this. But it is sometimes a serious conflict for me, which I have to deal with.

In the world of Shadowrun, this brings up an interesting question. There aren't a lot of nurturing positions in the SR world. It's very muchso a male-oriented society, based on the ability to exceed at the expense of your comrades, of destruction, domination, paranoia and distrust. I could see nurturing personality types either really suffering, or completely inverting as a psychological defense.

[Chrysalis]

Biopsychosocial

Biological

Being physically female or male define who you are. Specifically as we become aware we also take on biological characteristics. This an also be attributed 0-1 age in development

Psychological

Being personally defined as being a girl or a boy. This is a personal definition. The definition of personal sex can manifest itself as early as 4 years old.

Sociological

Being defined by the surrounding society as being a woman or a man. This is a definition which is not defined personally, but its surroundings. This definition can already be defined before birth.

The three definitions above define the construction of gender.

As a note gender differences are sexualized, but you should not fall into that pit when defining a character's gender.

I just bought Edwards Said's book, Orientalism and simone de beauvoir's The Other Sex. Once read them do I feel on some level qualified to start defining gender through a heterogeneic matrix of man/woman self/other.

[Wounded Ronin]

I've been thinking about that topic recently, and was surprised that people have so much difficulty with people playing character of another gender while they have no problem with them playing character of another race, or even non-human characters.

That's because metahumans, modrons, and Klingons don't really exist. So it is much simpler to portray them because all you can do is fall back on sterotypes or variants on sterotypes and nobody gets offended.

[Snow_Fox]

I believe in dragons, unicorns, good men and other fantasy creatures. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Seriously I like what glyph said above. To look at it from the other side of the fence, I do not think on a biological level women are more emotional than men, but socially we are allowed to be more emotional. We see a weepy film, and it's ok if we tear up. but a guy needs a klinex and other guys say there's something wrong with him. Heck in Stripes Bill Murray makes a point of it being a big deal "Who cried when they shot ol' Yella'"
I tear up at the end of "The Ghost and Mrs' muir" and my husbaand knows I enjoyed it. He admits to buddies if a film moves him like that and it seems to break the guy code.

But it cuts both ways. often an assertive man is 'assertive' and assertive woman is' trying to prove herself.' assumes acceptable levels aof action and not some Hillary Clinton/Rosie O'donnell over the top wack out.

[Glyph]

That's because metahumans, modrons, and Klingons don't really exist. So it is much simpler to portray them because all you can do is fall back on sterotypes or variants on sterotypes and nobody gets offended.

Plus, in SR3, all of the metatypes are essentially variants of homo sapiens, and have grown up in a culture created by humans, except for a few groups that have formed their own enclaves. So you're not really trying to model an alien culture and mindset.

Just like male and female, though, metatype should make some difference. How would you go through life if everyone was two feet taller than you, or if you were huge, and things like cars and computer screens were not designed to accommodate you? How about if you were ostracized by your home culture, or venerated as a superior being? What if you were considered attractive and special because of your pointy ears? What if you matured physically much quicker than you matured mentally. Metatypes are not completely alien races, but their different appearances and physiology should make some difference in how they are played.


Another thing to consider is level of magic or augmentation. Things like hormones and energy level can make a big difference in personality. Now imagine someone who has perfect recall, learns languages from being exposed to them for a few hours, and can watch four trid shows simultaneously. Or imagine someone who is superhumanly fast and strong who only needs three hours of sleep a day. How would such people interact with the world?

[shuya]

I just bought Edwards Said's book, Orientalism and simone de beauvoir's The Other Sex. Once read them do I feel on some level qualified to start defining gender through a heterogeneic matrix of man/woman self/other.

good call on both said and de beauvoir! i've always been intrigued by de beauvoir's concept that being (or becoming, to stay in line with the philosophy of The Second Sex) a woman is essentially (small "e" essential) deviance, and the implications that such an idea has for male-female transgendered people in any setting. i personally am a male who has a tendency towards affinity for female characters in gaming settings, be it role playing or video games or what have you, as well as a transvestite and radical gender anarchist. staunchly postmodernist, i would rather embrace the concept of femininity as deviant than transcend it, of course, and i'm terribly fascinated by the overt social deviance/defiance of a biological male who chooses to be seen as female on any of the three axes of the biopsychosocial scale you mentioned...

OMG post modern gender rambling... thanks Chrys for saying something far more insightful than "emotions/logic," i think there needs to be more psychosociological discussion of the incredibly complex phenomenon of role-playing (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Snow_Fox]

You guys just realized this? So much of the world is designed for men with women being the next design. Ok underwear and clothes excepted, but for example only recently did the AMA realize that the basic dossages for adults was based on adult males. Even then it becomes: basic does is X, is a woman Y if child Z.
We aren't 'adults' we're women' and by that definition they treat us as less. (end of feminist rant)

There are lots of other examples I can give but I don't think the thread would be helped by them. Let's just say, I'm amused, that you've had the revelation. lol, I guess was can say this proved RPG's have an educational value.
Now if we can only get Hcus Pocus on board with this,

[shuya]

You guys just realized this? So much of the world is designed for men with women being the next design. Ok underwear and clothes excepted, but for example only recently did the AMA realize that the basic dossages for adults was based on adult males. Even then it becomes: basic does is X, is a woman Y if child Z.
We aren't 'adults' we're women' and by that definition they treat us as less. (end of feminist rant)

There are lots of other examples I can give but I don't think the thread would be helped by them. Let's just say, I'm amused, that you've had the revelation. lol, I guess was can say this proved RPG's have an educational value.
Now if we can only get Hcus Pocus on board with this,

not really JUST realized it, no. de beauvoir's book is about 60 years old now (i think), and the real importance of it (for me, anyway, your mileage may vary) is her appropriation of the Hegelian "other" to describe women, as opposed to the idea of "less" that even you used in your feminist rant. it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you that the world is/has been male-centric for a long time, but what is important AFTER you understand that fact is to break free from the idea of more/lesser or dominant/subordinate (or empire/colony, as a nod to Said and an implication of control in male/female relations and the propagation of concepts about "women's roles" and the like) and create new conceptualizations for sex and gender and promote them as subversive epistemological memes outside of the entrenched dichotomies--a kind of academic "flanking action" as it were.

one of the major obstacles in portraying a character of the opposite gender convincingly (in any situation, not just roleplaying games) is storytelling's reliance on stereotypes (it's really more of a problem with how humans "learn" or create knowledge and how they "understand" things than it is a problem of storytelling as an act) to fill in information which isn't directly conveyed - as such, breaking from overarching societal norms in one's own portrayal of "the other" will create in many people who observe it a type of cognitive dissoance which is often interpreted as a "non-convincing" portrayal.

that is to say, a woman portraying a sensitive man (and sensitive men do exist) is more likely to be seen as a woman who is too sensitive to be manly, and lets her sensitivity seep through in her portrayal, as opposed to accurately portraying a man who breaks from the stereotype (this is a very over-simplified example, obviously); many male-female transgendered people and transvestites are forced to wear overtly-feminine clothing in order to "pass" as female, despite the fact that i'm sure we all know many women who wear pants; etc...

[Dwight]

Mr. Wounded Ronin I appreciate your topics, but do you think you could refrain from typing in all caps? It hurts my eyes.

It's part of the meme from bullshido.net of "HOW DO ARMBAR?!" that got started when some hapless and clueless fellow asked that question.

[hyzmarca]

On another forum, I've been PMing people trying to learn about social interaction with females. One person sent me a very long and thoughtful message, and one paragraph in particular seemed relevant to role playing in the context of a table top game.



This paragraph blew my mind, because I felt that the issue of women and emotionality is one of those things that was alternately embraced, discredited, and them embraced by the feminist establishment, while at the same time touching on the idea of logic and masculinity in females. It also made me recall some personal interactions I'd had over the last couple of years.

That is because I once had a good female friend who I'd really liked, and who is in med school now, who was very very logical and intelligent. I'd met her in Micronesia and some of the most fun I'd had out there was sitting with her on some random evenings having random abstract debates about various topics as they came up. (Haven't seen her since I got back to the US.) And the thing is that she was METICULOUSLY logical. I consider myself a pretty logical person, because I feel like logic is the only way we can ever really strictly speaking know anything, whereas emotion tends to mislead, but if I ever made a non-logical statement of feeling for any reason she'd jump on that and I felt delighted whenever she did that. (I actually did something with her I had never done with any other female either before or since, which was I asked her out to dinner a few times, but she kept telling me she couldn't because she had diarreah.)

But, this is the thing. People have told me every now and then over the years that when I articulate the kinds of things I'm attracted to that even though I'm a heterosexual male that I seem to be attracted to male-type personal qualities, rather than female-type ones. Was my aforementioned female friend in fact "dude-like", as the PM quoted above puts it? Would many males in fact be turned off by her exhibiting a supposedly masculine trait like ruthless logic?

Okay, but setting aside my acoustic-guitar-summoning personal boring story, there's the other topic of women, emotionality, and the ideas in US society that sort of fluctuated back and forth concerning those. Basically, before the feminist movement you had the idea that women were all emotional and nice whereas men were logical and mean. Later, you started to have the idea that that was totally wrong. However, I think as early as the 80s (as I've encountered in my reading), you basically had some people calling themselves feminists who put forward the idea that yes, women are emotional and nice, and that is good, because our society is masculine and crazed with sex and power, and that is why all sorts of abuses occur and why we're going to destroy ourselves in nuclear war. I read some book written by some female doctor from Harvard in the 80s saying that nuclear arms proliferation was symptomatic of male obsession with sex and power and that female emotionality and nurturingness needed to enter society to bring us back from the brink. And then if you do a Google search you find people critiquing that sort of viewpoint when talking about Abu Ghraib.

Do these viewpoints have any elements of truth? Or are they merely reflections of intellectual orthodoxy and social expectation in the United States bouncing back and forth between today and the 1950s?

I recall encountering some hispanic females who explicitly claimed to be emotional. There was one pregant hispanic female who was telling me that because she was pregnant she was more emotional and that she'd therefore started crying when someone close to her suggested that the father of the child had another wife in Mexico. So this would suggest cultural orthodoxy rather than quantifiable fact, I suppose.

Is logic masculine? Is emotion feminine?

If any of this is true, then what the heck does it feel like to be emotional rather than logical, or vice versa?

Are the above statements just entirely cultural constructs?

A relationship between division of labor, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology probably plays into it. Pregnancy can increase the difficulty of spearing a buffalo to death, already a rather tough proposition. In ancient hunter-gatherer societies, men went out and killed stuff while women stayed in the village. The result was that women did tend to be better adapting to dealing with social conflict, while men were better adapted to dealing with physical conflict. This division of labor served early mankind well, and led to our dominance. But what that means is that groups of men deal with things differently than groups of women, in general. Men don't address emotional issues publicly because stopping to address emotional issues can get you killed when you're being dragged by a mammoth that that you've just driven a sharp stick into. Women do address emotional issues because failure to do so can lead to dangerous social conflict that threatens the stability of the tribe.

But evolution also has made us adaptable, and we do adapt quite easily. A women in a hunting group, a goal-oriented group, will adopt behaviors that are generally considered masculine, not because they are denying their femininity or their femininity is oppressed but simply because accomplishing specific goals quickly, safely, and efficiently requires certain behaviors. A man in a social group, a stability-oriented group, will adopt behaviors that are generally considered feminine, because diffusing social conflict without creating the conditions for even greater conflict to arise requires certain behaviors.

[Kerenshara]

As a complete aside, I thought I would share something germane to the thread and what a lot of people have said. Many males have observed that they don't perceive that much difference between men and women and how they think and act. I am not going to argue one way or another on the statement. What I AM going to do is share some insight a professional psychologist of my aquaintaince shared with me. It was facinating.

There are standardised protocols for determining a generalized personality profile, and one of the "measures" is what we might call "gender identity". Her observation to me was that what she has seen in her work with patients is that the higher the "intelligence" or "IQ" of the patient, the higher they scored on that particular measure, to a point. If the measure goes beyond a given point, you deviate into having what might be termed "gender identity issues". As you probably have surmised from my description, going higher on the "measure" indicates an increased tendency or occurance of traits and behaviors typically categorized as belonging to the opposite sex. (How many idiot transgendered have you run into?) Put simply, she said that highly intelligent people tend to be able to think a lot like the other gender. Or, in political terms, something like a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican. You haven't crossed over into having conflicts with your own biological identity, but you're a lot more feminine/masculine than most men/women with an IQ of 100 - flat average.

Now, to put that all in perspective, compared to the general population, most gamers display significantly above-average intelligence. Most fall at least one standard deviation out on the curve, with a disproportionate number falling into the second deviation - or beyond.

So, logically, that would mean that smart gamers should have less trouble crossing genders because they already understand (Grok to those of us who have read a certain book) intrinsically many aspects of the other gender. Now, there are always going to be differences and misunderstandings, or there would never be divorce or make-up-sex. But I think that is why so many people think there's not much difference mentally or emotionally. Ask somebody with a 80 IQ if they think there is a big difference, propose it like it was here, and the answers would likely be a lot different.

Assuming there's anything to what she says. Personally, once she explained it, I looked more closely at a lot of things, and a bunch of things suddenly made a lot more sense to me.

I want to think about it for a while before I put my own spin on the actual OP question. But as to chocolate... if you have to ask, you're never going to understand. I don't know if the "studies" I have heard about are genuine or urban legend, but supposedly there is a chemical that interracts in a subtly different way with the nuanced brain/hormonal chemistry of a woman that produces an enhanced effect not typically reported by men. In either event, I know where I happen to stand on the issue. And as it applies to Kerenshara, there are two ways to buy your life back if you ever anger her to tears and you're male: walk away and hide, hoping she forgives you (she doesn't forget); Or you can bring her REALLY good chocolate with your tail (yes, that too) between your legs and express your contrition. I will let you work out which one probably works better for yourselves.

[Wounded Ronin]

So, logically, that would mean that smart gamers should have less trouble crossing genders because they already understand (Grok to those of us who have read a certain book) intrinsically many aspects of the other gender. Now, there are always going to be differences and misunderstandings, or there would never be divorce or make-up-sex. But I think that is why so many people think there's not much difference mentally or emotionally. Ask somebody with a 80 IQ if they think there is a big difference, propose it like it was here, and the answers would likely be a lot different.

Assuming there's anything to what she says. Personally, once she explained it, I looked more closely at a lot of things, and a bunch of things suddenly made a lot more sense to me.

OK, this is the thing though.

Back when I was in 3rd grade, I took an IQ test. I didn't know I was taking it but a number of years later I found the old paperwork from it and my IQ was either 128 or 130. Which is pretty high.

But the thing is that I'm really good at standardized tests; for example I got 800 verbal and 710 math on my SATs many years ago. So I believe that if I, as an adult rather than a third grader, were to knowingly take an IQ test while being "serious" about it, I could likely score higher than my original score back in third grade.

So, if I've got more IQ than average, why do I feel so much difficulty with the "roleplay across gender" thing? Wouldn't that seem to contradict your statement?

[Snow_Fox]

not really JUST realized it, no. de beauvoir's book is about 60 years old now (i think), and the real importance of it (for me, anyway, your mileage may vary) is her appropriation of the Hegelian "other" to describe women, as opposed to the idea of "less" that even you used in your feminist rant....

seperate in inherantly unequal.

[nezumi]

First of all, statistics do not apply to every case.

Second of all, IQ tests are weighted by age. If you answered identically to how you did in third grade, your IQ would come out very low (because you're older). It's probably worth retesting, to verify you're still so far above 100.

Thirdly, this will be modified by your real-world experience and understandings, I imagine. If you have trouble playing an average guy from Omaha, playing an average girl from Omaha won't be very much easier.

[Wounded Ronin]

Thirdly, this will be modified by your real-world experience and understandings, I imagine. If you have trouble playing an average guy from Omaha, playing an average girl from Omaha won't be very much easier.

Wow, holy crap. You're right. I hardly know anything about Omaha. I didn't even think about that. The only material in my head that references Omaha is that old rock song about being a musician on the road in Omaha.

[martindv]

simone de beauvoir's The Other Sex. Once read them do I feel on some level qualified to start defining gender through a heterogeneic matrix of man/woman self/other.

Lucky you. My French isn't good enough to read the original version and the American translation is shit.

[Glyph]

Personally, I think a lot of the problem with traits that are defined as "masculine" or "feminine" is that it is too much of a generalization. Not that there are not gender differences, but the differences are usually that a female is more likely to exhibit slightly more of a given trait than a male, say, liking chocolate, and from there, people extrapolate "liking chocolate is a feminine trait". Which is nonsense, because obviously, there are females who don't like chocolate, and males who do like chocolate.

[Snow_Fox]

Lucky you. My French isn't good enough to read the original version and the American translation is shit.

Try Vera Britton's Testament of Youth. An early 20th century british feminist. lots of women praise this book but 30 pages in I would have been happy to have used the volume to beat her about the head an shoulders.
no writing style, no sense of pursuasion just beating you about the brain with her world view, no sense of humor. She was a trend setter but her achievment was in setting the trend, not writing about it later. She is the sort of writer who drives away people unless they already agree with her.

[Wounded Ronin]

Personally, I think a lot of the problem with traits that are defined as "masculine" or "feminine" is that it is too much of a generalization. Not that there are not gender differences, but the differences are usually that a female is more likely to exhibit slightly more of a given trait than a male, say, liking chocolate, and from there, people extrapolate "liking chocolate is a feminine trait". Which is nonsense, because obviously, there are females who don't like chocolate, and males who do like chocolate.

See, this is the thing.

I think I went on a big circle in terms of my beliefs about this over the years. First, I imagine that I had started with the social default that assumed certain differences between men and women without necessarily articulating those differences. Next, I had wanted to believe that men and women were totally the same. But now I'm thinking there may indeed be some gender differences. It's this sneaking suspicion I've had over the years being gradually filled in by observations, things I've read. It's like glimpsing the matrix or something.

Here's a link to one such experience:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...t=0&start=0

So, the whole gender influencing roleplaying and gameplay styles is a painful cliche exemplified by Sara Felton from Knights of the Dinner Table. (Although, supposedly Sara is based on Jolly's wife, who from her photo *looks* like she might be one of those character-interested players...) There's probably been a thread about it before. But, I wanna tell a story in which the cliches were totally exemplified by me (the male player) and two females who were playing. Don't worry, I'll tie it into Shadowrun.

So, first, The Story:
===================================
A friend of mine, knowing my love for 1st edition D&D and the orientalist cheesefest known as Oriental Adventures, ran a one-shot 1st edition D&D game for me. I was using an overpowered Oriental Adventures sohei, and we were all using 1st level characters. Because it was 1st edition D&D we actually rolled up 6 characters apiece, a la a Paranoia 6 pack, because we accepted that there might be PC blood flowing tonight.

Anyway, we start the adventure and the GM, in the spirit of 1st edition, is letting the dice fall where they may regarding weather conditions and encounters and so forth. But, like a good GM, he dosen't just name the monsters, but rather describes them without naming them.

So me, the male player, is classifying each monster in my mind as its entry in the D&D rulebooks and as a first level character my uniform response to most encounters is, "I run away." The women, however, are getting all interested in the creatures based on their description and are trying to see how they react and all this kind of flavorful character based stuff.

The GM, to his immense credit, didn't just make the monsters eat everyone, but rather had them react to the characters in interesting ways, which actually made for a more interesting game. But my character was running away the whooooole time.

The kicker was when in a dungeon setting the party encountered some zombies. He described the walking corpses so vividly that the women's characters were, like, shying away in revulsion. (He was really a terrific GM.) Of course, I thought, "FINALLY! Something I can kill!", and my character leapt forward like a hungry toddler to a plate of spaghetti.

So, the moral of this story: REAL MEN ROLL PLAY! RAAAHHHH!!!
============================

The Shadowrun connection:

I've noticed that in Shadowrun novels, generally speaking, novels about downtrodden Barrens kids becoming shamans or diffident teenage deckers becoming involved in something dangerous with a group of pros and manages to make it seem to be written more by female authors. On the other hand, high-powered troll fests with vampires and lesbian physads and dual wielded SMGs seem to be written more often by male authors. The same trend, see, but in even more comical contrast.

As a result, I've decided to write a short story representing what would happen if a female writer ever collaborated with a male writer.

Barrens kid: Man, my life is hard. I'm sure suffering. But I'm plucky.
*a team of shadowrunners erupt from the ground, wailing on guitars. Miniguns are slung on their backs and belts of ammo criss cross across their torsos in a stylish Vietnam War fashion*
Sammie: All my delta grade cyberware made it easier for me to erupt from the ground. I, uh, know kung fu, also. For when I shoot so many ninjas with my minigun that I run out of ammo.
Physad: I'm a lesbian elf!
Decker: I actually suck at combat, but I take advantage of the minigun's high rate of fire and the Cannon Companion suppressive fire rules to help the team. And to compensate for my lack of action hero-ness, I automatically win in the matrix.
Barrens kid: I also want to care for my baby brother, who is the last memory of my dear passed away mother. Oh my, what's this? I've been chosen by Cat. Yay, I'm a shaman! How comforting! I draw strength and faith from my totem.
Sammie: GEEK THE MAGE!
Physad: Hey cutie, I'm a lesbian!
Decker: I'LL NEVER GET WOMEN IN MY WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE BECAUSE I USE COMPUTERS! RAAH, FIRE MINIGUN IN RAGE!
Barrens kid: Nooo, I don't know how to cast invisibility or Physical Barrier or any of that crap because according to storyline I wouldn't have any reason to have any of these tools yet. But I can't die now, I have so much character development to undergo. Quick, I must appeal to the storyline!
Shadowrunners, in unison: WE HAVE A BIG KARMA POOL! REROLL FAILURES! REROLL FAILURES!
Barrens kid: Hmm, multiple hits for D damage, and I have Body 2 and Karma 1. *explodes into an unappetizing blend of Cat shaman goulash and swordfish mustardball*
====================================


Gender examined:

More generally, when reading fiction, I feel like in many cases I can sort of guess whether the author was male or female. It's hard to put my finger on it, and it's more of a gut feeling, but I'll try to characterize it. The female authors tend to have characters who are, well, nicer. You read about them, and you like them more. You feel more like if they were your friends you'd feel good having lunch with them.

I guess a good example of this would be the Ellis Peters character Brother Cadfael. Brother Cadfael is a medieval benedictine monk in England who solves mysteries using forensics. He's supposed to be this rugged badass veteran of the Crusades who has pwned countless people in battle before having his fill of violence and becoming a monk.

So, he could have been written in a number of ways. He could have been emotionally distant from everyone due to trauma. He could have been a juggernaut of visceral desperation, kind of like Howard's Conan. But instead he's at peace with himself, nice to people, helps young lovers escape, benevolent, and only clever and badass when he needs to be. So, like, if he were your neighbor, you'd feel warm and fuzzy about him, which wouldn't be the case with someone like Howard's Conan. A lot of times, when reading about male characters created by female authors, I find them to be ever so slighly on the effeminite side.

On the other hand, I think that male writers are more likely to be "turned on" by rugged badassery. Just look at the portrayal of Conan by John Milius in the film "Conan The Barbarian"; Milius was inspired by Zen-inspired ideals of rugged and individualistic martial strength. Conan, Rambo, and Dirty Harry appeal strongly to the imagination because of their combination of physical dangerousness but also mental fortitude in the face of danger or adversity. These are the characteristics that are articulated for these characters by the storyline the most. At the same time, there's nothing warm and fuzzy about any of these characters. They don't help young lovers escape, and if they were your neighbor they probably wouldn't be very comfortable dinner guests.

If you think about it, it's absolutely roll playing versus role playing. Cadfael presumably has really big stats because of the heaps of people he pwned during the crusades but he dosen't spend that time actually rolling his combat skills. Instead, he spends most of his time on inter-character interactions that largely wouldn't require dice rolls. In contrast, Dirty Harry spends a huge amount of time making Intimidate and Pistols (signature .44 magnum) checks.

This, of course, begs a question. Perhaps "roll playing" is not correctly conceptualized as an absence of character development. Perhaps "roll playing" is rather the representation of a certain masculine aspect of our collective cultural mythology, as portrayed in popular films and novels. Many people look down on straight up "roll playing", but is it really right to look down upon a certain archetypal cultural construct? Do we look down on the myths of Hercules because they're basically about him being big and strong, and say that the myth about Persephone is better and more correct because it has a lot of emotion but not a whole lot of combat rolls?

Perhaps "roll playing", which I define as munchkinization and systematic statistical analysis of in-game possibilities to chose the character's action, can be seen as the persuit of the perfect representation of a rugged masculine character. It's easy to *say* that your character is being rugged and tough, but how can your character truly be rugged and tough compared to all the other characters who were created with the same amount of resources? Perhaps you refine the rugged toughness of your character to a higher level of perfection through careful management of statistics, so as to portray the archetypal Clint Eastwood style hero better than the other people at the table are doing. And so, perhaps "roll playing" is not the absence of character development, but rather the refinement and perfection in the portrayal of one character type.

Here is an example. Suppose that in a role playing game I want to portray the hero of the Illiad, Odysseus. Odysseus was supposed to be a pretty powerful hero, but he was also supposed to be cunning, sly, and ruthless towards his enemies. So, in order to portray Odysseus, I first munch out in chargen to make him as powerful as possible. Next, any time my character makes an in-game decision, I have Odysseus make the best possible choice at any given time because I statistically analyze all possible outcomes. Am I not portraying Odysseus better than if he were only of average strength and made typical (but not optimal) decisions?

I maintain that roll-playing, done to a systematic and painstaking extreme, is anything but the absence of a developed character. Rather, it is the path to the refinement of the perfect portrayal of one part of our archetypal popular culture mythology.

It was gaming that in the first place made me start to think there might indeed be insidious differences between men and women.

Also, Harry Potter. Eating choclate is supposed to make you feel better after a Dementor pwns you, in Harry Potter. But who eats chocolate? I don't. I don't even like it that much. The only time I eat chocolate is if I have some very high-quality European chocolate available. Otherwise, it actually tastes sugary and gross and it's not worth the negative health impact to actually eat. I'd rather do some booze instead and actually get something from it. The only people I see eating chocolate a lot are women. That also made me begin to wonder if somehow, for some reason, women are attracted to choclate, which of course would be another emotionality related thing...

[knasser]

[font="Lucida Console"]As a complete aside, I thought I would share something germane to the thread and what a lot of people have said. Many males have observed that they don't perceive that much difference between men and women and how they think and act. I am not going to argue one way or another on the statement. What I AM going to do is share some insight a professional psychologist of my aquaintaince shared with me. It was facinating.

There are standardised protocols for determining a generalized personality profile, and one of the "measures" is what we might call "gender identity". Her observation to me was that what she has seen in her work with patients is that the higher the "intelligence" or "IQ" of the patient, the higher they scored on that particular measure, to a point. If the measure goes beyond a given point, you deviate into having what might be termed "gender identity issues". As you probably have surmised from my description, going higher on the "measure" indicates an increased tendency or occurance of traits and behaviors typically categorized as belonging to the opposite sex. (How many idiot transgendered have you run into?) Put simply, she said that highly intelligent people tend to be able to think a lot like the other gender. Or, in political terms, something like a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican. You haven't crossed over into having conflicts with your own biological identity, but you're a lot more feminine/masculine than most men/women with an IQ of 100 - flat average.

That's interesting. I can contribute my own experience to this. I have a very high recorded IQ. Also, during the 'I Must Seek My Identity' phase in my teenage years, I read quite a bit on psychology and at one point came across a test that was obviously related to the area of research your acquaintance studied. The test was an assessment of how "male" or "female" your psychology was. Now this was in the early Nineties so I don't know how research has moved on from there, but it told me that I had a female brain. Fortunately, I considered this a good thing, desirous of the World judging me unusual, back then. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) . A second test years later added support for the results, although it was a much less formal test. It was an online quiz to determine if you were male or female. You had to do tests such as clicking the odd image out of a series. They were ambiguous, so you could pick an odd one based on colour, or shape, or whatever. It was a fairly long test with a lot of variety. Tens of thousands of people - at least - took the test and at the end of it you were told whether you were a girl or a boy and you confirmed if it had guessed correctly. There must have been something to it because you could see the results on a scatter chart with blue dots for boys and pink dots for girls (yay, gender-role reinforcement!). There was a large roughly lozenge-shaped cloud of blue on side and a pink one on the other, and the occasional stray dot in the "wrong" cluster. I was on the male side, but only just, a definite outlier for my sex.

Relevance of my personal experience? Well obviously not a great deal in terms of statistical significance, but it offers me some insights.

Firstly, my sexuality is hetero. I'm of the opinion that sexual preference is not tied to masculine-feminine psychology except in so far as social treatment and culture might influence one. If there is a correlation between thinking "like a male" and being attracted to girls or thinking "like a girl" and being attracted to men, then it's certainly not a requirement because I've seen too many exceptions. So anyone trying to role-play a different gender should not feel the need to conflate sexuality with mode of thinking.

Secondly, I think there are two prime factors in relating high intelligence (we'll leave aside whether IQ is actually a good measure of that conglomerate of attributes we call intelligence) with stereotypical gender-thinking. The first is that the smarter you are, the more you are able to adapt your thinking and behaviour to different circumstances to achieve the best results. Logically, that means that if a stereotypically male or female mode of thinking is more suited to a particular circumstance, then of course the more intelligent someone is the more they'll appear ambiguous in their thinking. The second prime factor is that if you're generally smart, you have probably been (a) the sort of person who is willing to be different as you grow up and (b) analyzed and judged behaviours that society gave you on their own merits before integrating them into your own self. Both these factors lend themselves to a correlation between being smart and a freedom from stereotypical gender-behaviour.

Of course circumstances influence things. If most of your friends are male and they like to play football on a Sunday morning, you're a great deal more likely to play football yourself than you are, for example, go shoe shopping together. Thus can tendencies within gender can reinforce themselves. Of course the question of why you mostly hang out with your own gender then arises and the answer to this is probably a collection of reasons ranging from just associating more with people who resemble you and have things in common with you to, I think, the much more significant factors of social conditioning and later on, sexual desire. From a terribly early age, boys and girls are segregated and treated differently. Boys where one set of outfits, girls another. Boys go to one loo, girls another. They change in different changing rooms, they can't see each other in states of undress even before the age where sexual desire becomes a significant factor (note I separate desire from sexuality itself), they play different sports. I think it's probably impossible to actually separate out the immense conditioning of this on people's modes of thinking in the general case and we have to turn people who separated themselves from such conditioning early on, but even then such people have usually been subject to a lot of negative feelings of exclusion which tend to manifest in exaggeration and pride in the traits that caused them to be excluded (which is an understandable reaction, quite frankly). Once you hit puberty, there's also no getting away from boys and girls looking at each other from a sexual point of view, also. And this also reinforces gender separation. Your girlfriend goes out shopping with female friends, no guy cares (and a lot are grateful for the opportunity to let their standards relax and slob about on the computer for a morning). But if she goes off to play football then there's no complete getting away from knowing there's going to be a lot of guys running around with her in her shorts, fancying her and having the sort of fun time that could lead to other fun activities. It takes a lot of trust in a relationship to deal with circumstances like that which reinforces and maintains established gender divisions. So when you're role-playing across gender, it's useful to start not from "I'm a girl so I probably don't like football", but from "if I play football, my boyfriends going to be in a snark with me. Also I might flirt with that striker again who looks so cute in shorts, so I probably shouldn't go." Pay more attention to the environment and how it shapes your behaviour and how people behave toward you and a lot of behaviour of the other gender will become more natural to you. And apply it the other way around. Imagine society rewards and is proud of you for sleeping with someone just for fun that you just met, rather than calling you a slut. Imagine you don't have to worry about a prospective partner being bigger and stronger than you and getting pushy and that you're physically in control of the situation and whatever happens or doesn't.

Ask somebody with a 80 IQ if they think there is a big difference, propose it like it was here, and the answers would likely be a lot different.

Again, I think this may be because of a lesser ability to look at the different factors affecting other people. If it doesn't occur to you that a woman putting herself in the middle of a mostly male football team isn't putting herself in a position of probably sexual interest which she might not want, then you might just think "girls don't like football - they're different." (Not that there's necessarily something wrong with being in a position of probable sexual interest (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) ).

(Note to US readers: football = soccor to you).

Anyway, these are just some thoughts that might help prompted by Kerenshara's comments above. Some people are male, some people are female, and they tend to get treated differently which if you're really going to role-play, you have to be aware of. The internal stuff is a spectrum, a range, not a binary attribute you fall into one or the other of.

That's all the essay I have time for on a Sunday morning, anyhow. My high-IQ, sensitive female brain appears to have been dumped in a 6'1" 220lb body so I'm elected to go and move furniture now. Just another example of gender-oppression, I'm afraid. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Peace to people of all genders, (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

K.