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Gaming and gender???
I 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.
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His 'masculinity' is more about having been assigned male at birth and growing up to be tall and broad in a way that is much more accepted for men than women. He doesn't dislike the idea of presenting in a feminine way in and of itself, but then everyone would see him as a strongly female-gendered non-passing trans woman, which would be both incorrect and cause a lot of trouble. Cis man feels less inherently gendered, less inclined to get hate, and easier to make look flattering. But he still has some fellow feeling with trans lesbians that he doesn't get with genuinely cis straight men.
Yeah, that's very similar to where I'm at in some ways (except that I look very conventionally feminine in a lot of ways, but the effect is very similar). It's interesting and cool that it's not just a me thing :)
But I'm thinking about playing my next BG3 character as genderfluid, now that I can change presentation and pronouns in the character creator whenever I want. So I'm curious to see how that feels.
Ooh, you could do that! That could be really interesting too!
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I'm really glad it was helpful! And it goes both ways, I explained what I understood of your experience to Cam when he was figuring out if he was agender, since my own gender feelings are very different, and I think that helped him too.
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