All Eyes on Me

I'm now waiting at Watertown Toyota while my car is inspected to try and determine the reason my check engine is on. The car has been running normally as far as I can tell, but I'd rather figure out what's going on sooner rather than later when it might have developed into a problem. I just hope it doesn't take forever, I still have things I need to do today, and nothing bugs me more than wasting time.

I also don't particularly like being here. Watertown Toyota has been good to me in the past, so I keep coming back, but i hate the way they talk to me, like i'm either an idiot or a little kid. Maybe because I'm a woman or maybe just a young woman, but they act like they must talk slowly to me about my car or I won't follow. Now, its true that I don't know a thing about cars, but I'm not an idiot. And even when they don't talk like that, they're kind of condescending anyway. The last time I was here the guy was very helpful, but kept asking me if I had a father or a boyfriend to do the stuff he was suggesting for me. Again, I may be ignorant, but I'm not helpless. :-P

Ah, well. If my car is okay and I don't have to pay a ton for it, I guess I should be grateful.

Not exactly sure what got me thinking about this, but I found myself pondering my feelings about porn, and since they turned rather analytical, I thought I'd codify them in a journal entry. I didn't intend for this to be the behemoth it turned into, but once I got started I found a lot of ground I wanted to cover. This is mostly about the issues porn raises for women, though I have tried to give fair examination to both the masculine and feminine perspectives on them. It occurs to me that I have mostly neglected the straight female use of porn in favor of the straight male use of it. I'm addressing the feminism of visual porn specifically, of which men tend to be the viewers and women the viewed, so this is the relationship I am analyzing. But I don't believe in double standards, so if I establish a rule for one, that means I believe the other must obey it as well. This entry gets a little, well, frank in spots, so if you'd rather not discuss such things, please read no further.

I've written a few show-program bios in my time that were intended to be funny, but  I think I kind of hit the sweet spot here, so I decided I'd share it with all of you ahead of time:

"Phoebe Roberts (Count Paris) knows that if there's one acting challenge that is relished by every five-foot-four, hundred-and-ten-pound girl with a high voice, it's portraying the masculine antagonist who is supposed to present the hero with a viable romantic threat. Blessed with this most coveted opportunity, she has donned her man-pants and practiced her man-walk with great diligence in the service of bringing to life this admirable figure that other characters just can't seem to stop praising when he's not around. The male parts among her previous roles of Dromio of Ephesus (Comedy of Errors), Cordelia/the Fool (King Lear), and Puck (A Midsummer Night's Dream) have also done much to prepare her for this, her manliest role yet. She asks that you all enjoy the show, and remember that you don't need to be taller than your Juliet to be a man of wax."

Heh. I am pleased with myself.

Talked to my brother a little bit about my role as Fleance in Macbeth. He told me cross-casting doesn't happen as often in actual theater as often as one might think-- while college theaters often make use of whatever actors they have available, it usually only happens in real theaters when they specifically intend to do it. He thinks my size and delicacy made me seem like a good choice for playing a young boy; when I mentioned that they made a point of comparing my height to those of the other auditioners, that confirmed it for him. I've always been comfortable being cross-cast. Sometimes it allows me to play a particularly interesting part-- Dromio, Puck, the Fool --and sometimes it's an acting challenge in itself to try and be believably male. And I while I may be capable of looking boyish fairly easily, acting it is pretty tough for me because of my high voice and fairly feminine carriage. I sometimes wonder if that affects my larp casting, at least by people who know me. I've mused on getting cross-cast in larps in this space before, but I'm thinking about how infrequently it happens to me. Even though I always say I am cool being cross-cast on my casting questionnaires, I almost never actually get a male character. No matter, it's fine either way. But I wonder if it ends up this way because people who know me can't see me as a grown man. I suppose I get that, given that I'm kind of small and have such a girly voice. That's not the case at all in my theater experience, but again in that instance there tends to be a necessity because there just aren't enough guys for all the male roles. But the final word for me on it is that while I don't necessarily prefer it I'm completely fine doing it, and sometimes I particularly welcome it. So, my GM friends, don't be afraid to give me a guy role if you think I would be suited to it.

People's feelings on it tend to be mixed. Most guys would really rather not be while more girls tend to be okay with it even if it's not their preference. It's kind of funny when you think that in previous times in the theater men played all the roles. Still, I don't know why it is, but for some reason a woman playing a man is easier for me to accept as "male" than a man playing a woman is as "female." Not that I've never seen a guy play a woman convincingly, but I think it takes more for it to be believable. I've even known a few girls, like witticaster in larps and Frances and Brenda in theater, who actively prefer to be cross-cast. Never really met a guy that way, except for perhaps morethings5 whom I gather sometimes on a whim decides he would like to play a woman.

A lot of games are written with characters that are gender-flexible in order to conform to preferences of the player. In general I am not a fan of this; the gender is usually, at least to me, so intrinsic a part of each character I write that I would rather cross-cast the player. Even if a lot of the genders in Alice don't necessarily factor much into their characterizations, I chose them based on the character they are inspired by in the book, and I am pretty attached to them being played as I wrote them. Unfortunately, that means for a very low number of female parts. Alice has fortunately never had much of a problem finding a way to honor the requests of the players to which this is something important, but a lot of girls still end up playing guys.

Despite my preference for fixed genders, in Oz I decided I needed to have if not all then most of them be flexible. Oz is a smaller game than Alice, with only fifteen players, and also based on a fairly famous source material. I didn't want people to look around at the genders of the other players and be able to say things like, "Okay, four of these females have to be the witches, and since I know a little about the source material, I know two of them are good guys and two of them are bad guys." So in order to combat that, I decided that most characters would be gender-flexible so that no one could metagame using the genders of the characters. In the first run of Oz, there was one character who's intended gender was flipped, the one played by contradictacat in honor of her preference, and it worked fine. The game is probably better for this flexibility, though it's not my preference in these things. For the next run, I expect the genders to be at least somewhat different than they were. I just need to make sure I thoroughly edit the sheets for pronouns.