Gaming and gender???
Oct. 8th, 2023 08:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineI feel an unexpected solidarity with straight men and other men attracted to women who play games as hot women, because I also do this!
I mean, I feel my, uh, tastes in hot women are rather better than many of theirs (to go by their character creation choices, lol), but I was thinking about how I make characters I find attractive and interesting more than characters I want to be, even if Who I Am As a Person bleeds through (I feel so bad about taking people's stuff, even if it's not marked as theft...). They're not really idealized Elizabeths.
At the same time, I was thinking about it some more, because I was talking with a (cishet male!) friend of mine about how he doesn't really get the link a lot of other men have between their sense of gender as men and their attraction to women—for him, these things feel completely separate. But that's not the case for me. Insofar as I have a sense of alignment with womanhood, it's tightly bound up in my attraction to women. I'm most comfortable presenting as wholly female when I can present as the kind of woman I find attractive. My "womannness" does feel pretty purely like an artifact of socialization and convenience, to be sure. But while being ... female-adjacent rather than female per se can feel a bit uncomfortable at times (I definitely don't feel like I have an internal, intrinsic gender, just a sort of affiliation by force of habit), I'm most comfortable with it in a specifically lesbian context.
IDK where this is going, just something I've been thinking about, mostly via BG3 and my disinterest in playing as someone with my own wobbly sense of gender.
I mean, I feel my, uh, tastes in hot women are rather better than many of theirs (to go by their character creation choices, lol), but I was thinking about how I make characters I find attractive and interesting more than characters I want to be, even if Who I Am As a Person bleeds through (I feel so bad about taking people's stuff, even if it's not marked as theft...). They're not really idealized Elizabeths.
At the same time, I was thinking about it some more, because I was talking with a (cishet male!) friend of mine about how he doesn't really get the link a lot of other men have between their sense of gender as men and their attraction to women—for him, these things feel completely separate. But that's not the case for me. Insofar as I have a sense of alignment with womanhood, it's tightly bound up in my attraction to women. I'm most comfortable presenting as wholly female when I can present as the kind of woman I find attractive. My "womannness" does feel pretty purely like an artifact of socialization and convenience, to be sure. But while being ... female-adjacent rather than female per se can feel a bit uncomfortable at times (I definitely don't feel like I have an internal, intrinsic gender, just a sort of affiliation by force of habit), I'm most comfortable with it in a specifically lesbian context.
IDK where this is going, just something I've been thinking about, mostly via BG3 and my disinterest in playing as someone with my own wobbly sense of gender.