rpanons | [M] Great job

Rundown:

rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

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Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.

Concerns?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

These are going to sound double-standard-y and I'm not saying they're fair, but they're the things that have made the difference between the male players I adore having around and the ones I look for polite ways to block.

1. Do not play a character in order to ship. Do not even joke about it, or vaguely suggest that because a ship is canon and the canonmate is already in your game, the other player should be obligated to play it. In fact, it's safest to eliminate the word 'ship' from your vocabulary entirely. If people want to ship with your characters, they will come to you. I'd say that the #1 negative perception of male RPers is that they're looking for porn and don't care about story, character development, or anything like that. It's even worse if the other player is your preferred sex, because there's a widespread fear that straight male players will blur the IC/OOC divide. Line-blurring had happened to me before with both heterosexual male and lesbian players, but for many women, it's worse when it comes from a man because there's an inherent cultural imbalance of power, even if you really are a super awesome respectful guy. Once bitten, twice shy and all that. You have to understand, it's hard for some women to be assertive if they feel uncomfortable, because society has taught us that that's Not Okay. So, as PA as (unsure) seems, it might be the most that a player can manage in that situation, and the situation most likely has nothing to do with you, personally.

2. Socialize, and get to know the people you play with. If you're on plurk and your timeline isn't one of those "ONLY RP, NOTHING BUT RP" types, talk about normal things like your nutty co-workers, your favorite fandom, cool things you found online, and so forth. This weakens the perceived imbalance, because the more we know about you, the more likely we are to think of you as a peer. If I was asked to list my plurk friends, I wouldn't think "nice person, whiny person, some guy I know, angry person, yaoi person, person who posts too much of other people's fanart, PA person, etc" with 'person' implying female unless otherwise described. I'd think something more like "person who is having some financial trouble and I hope it improves, person who secretly loves drama, person who writes witty reviews of video games, over-enthusiastic fan of a series I'm not familiar with, parasitic person that I wish I could unfollow without risking drama, person who's extremely driven and I consider an inspiration, etc." Those aren't in any respective order, just a random sampling of things I think.

3. If you have something to say about sexism, TREAD CAREFULLY. Be aware of your privilege, even if you don't feel like you have privilege. You might be in the unfairly shunned minority on DWRP, but you're still in the favored class once you close your plurk or DW window. You're still more likely to get a job than most of us, to get respected by co-workers than most of us, to be able to walk down the street after 2 am without feeling threatened than most of us. Your best options are to avoid sensitive subjects entirely, but if you're sufficiently outraged, it's okay to post about it. Just be sure to be respectful, and never be dismissive of the opinions of your female friends, even if our opinions might not make sense to you. We have a lot more experience living with this sort of thing than you do, which doesn't mean we're always right, but it means that our feelings are worth consideration even if they vary from your own. Women aren't just being whiny for the hell of it when they talk about feeling uncomfortable in their workplace. Many of us, especially the older ones (I'm almost 30), have been taught that we're supposed to shrug off that kind of treatment. We tend to think of things like Plurk and OOC chats as safe places, and we use them to vent. That doesn't mean a man isn't welcome, but if his response to a woman's troubles is "well not all men are like that," it's not only irrelevant, it's accusatory and derailing and belittling. Of course we know that not all men are like that. If we didn't, you wouldn't be on our friends list. A more appropriate response would be "wow, that sucks, I'm sorry," or, if you disagree with the woman's assessment (which is perfectly fair), simple silence.

This is pretty much a list of worst-case scenarios. One of my favorite people to talk to on plurk is a straight guy, so it's not impossible. I didn't even know there was a stigma to being a guy until I met another player a couple years later who tried to guilt me into playing a bunch of fetishes in a PSL when I'm generally a fade-to-black person.

As a guy, you have an extra hurdle to climb, and in order to overcome it, you need to try to understand and respect why that hurdle exists (and please, please don't complain that it doesn't apply to you, because that invariably makes you look like a Nice Guy. The classic adage of 'show, don't tell' works well here). That hurdle might not seem fair to you. It isn't fair, really. But it's a matter of respecting the comfort level of people you want to be friends with, and a real friend respects the feelings of their friends, even if they don't objectively understanding because they've never experienced those feelings them firsthand.

If what you're doing is in line with all of that junk I just covered, then yes, keep doing it. Some women will always feel uncomfortable playing with men, and that's just a fact of life. It took me a few years to be comfortable again after a bad experience, and I don't consider myself the touchy type. I don't think you need to announce your gender up front before plotting or anything, but if you want to avoid that sort of thing in the future, you might want to try going by a very clearly gendered handle so that you don't end up starting plots with people who might drop them when they find out you're a dude.

You seem like a cool guy to me. The main thing you need to do is to accept that whether or not you consider the complaints of your female co-players to be legitimate in theory, they are going to happen in practice. There are a lot of girls who are totally fine with RPing with guys...as long as those guys don't make them feel pressured to play ships/smut, because really, we've dealt with that crap for most of our REAL lives and don't need to relive it in fantasy-world. We don't want a women-only utopia or anything. We just want to be around people who respect us and try to understand us. After all, it's our free time, and many of us spend most of our non-free-time being shown that we have no hope of advancing beyond being ordered around by a guy.

[M] Great job

waaaaay tl;dr