An introduction, and a rant
As promised, here is my introductory post as an occasional co-blogger (guest blogger?) here at Feminist Gamers. I’m Maureen O’Danu. Yes, that’s a pseudonym. See, I’ve been on line for a decade plus, and I long ago realized the potential for employment difficulties for an outspoken pagan woman in the Midwest who has relatively radical views on feminism, homosexuality, and racism. Nope, ain’t no discrimination in this here city, nohow.
So, anyhow, I’ve been pen and paper gaming since 1979 (I was thirteen, do the math), picked up an Atari in my twenties, then a Nintendo, a Sega Genesis, a PSI, a PSII, an Xbox, and now a kick-ass gaming computer. In the last couple of years, I’ve primarily played World of Warcraft, and my favorite genre has consistently been roleplaying games, whatever the medium, but I’ve played some in just about every genre, and stood over my sons’ and husband’s shoulders while they played in addition to playing my own games.
I don’t remember much about my very first gaming session. I was the only girl playing, I probably played a half-elf mage (I was big on mages in those days because they were smart), and I probably cheated on my charisma roll (at thirteen, I didn’t understand that charisma is not synonymous for beauty). The plot of the session is a complete haze. We were all noobs (such noobs that the word hadn’t even been invented yet and even Gary Gygax was a noob), and were probably making stuff up as we went along. Kill orc, get experience points, argue over how many experience points we were supposed to get, con the GM into giving us extra treasure, wash, rinse, repeat.
I was thirteen, right? Seventh grade, maybe eighth. (Actually, I think it was the summer between). We were at my house, because the apartment I lived in had a pool. There were four or five of us, and I didn’t like any of the guys “that way” (I already had a crush on the waste of air that eventually became my first husband).
I was shocked and frightened in a vague sort of “this didn’t really happen” way when the GM declared that my character had fallen into a pit and one of the other players decided that his (Neutral, if I remember correctly) character (a warrior?) raped my character, but that he then knocked my character out and the GM ruled that my character didn’t remember anything.
My character didn’t remember, but I sure as hell did. You’d think I’d swear off role playing for good after that, but no, I actually laughed it off and kept going, determined to keep creating strong female characters with agency and personality. That group kept together for about a year, then I moved, and moved again, and didn’t find another role playing group to play with consistently until college. (BTW, for me, college meant 23 years old, newly divorced with a newborn, living well below the poverty level).
An old high school friend took me in when I left my ex, seven months pregnant, and I spent the last two months of my pregnancy discovering the internet (mostly bulletin boards in those days), and role playing, while doing the very early, very hard work of trying to rebuild my personality after an abusive relationship. My buddy (his screen name on WoW is Gnott, so I’ll call him that) was a GM in a longstanding game, and a good one (this was AD&D, now, not second edition, which sucked). No rapes, no stereotypical gender roles, and lots of dice rolling and fun to be had. When my son was a month old, I moved to New Mexico to (okay, I admit it, give the ex one last chance) be closer to my family. Within a few months my son and I were living alone in a two bedroom apartment, and I had sold the car I got in the divorce to pay an old tuition debt and go back to school.
I couldn’t find a D&D (or AD&D, even sucky 2nd edition) group, but some of my neighbors had a Star Trek gaming group. I played a really cool half Romulan engineering officer, but yet again, the fracking (yes, BSG fan, too) GM had a rape fantasy he just had to enact, and this time I lost interest for several more years.
Fast forward a few years, and I was in Missouri, married (this time to a guy who while not completely pro-feminist at least tries – and since he’s cooking my dinner right now I’ll hush), with a four year old and an eleven year old. My oldest son was struggling with bullies and socialization, and 3rd edition D&D had just come out. I decided now was the time to try gaming again, this time as a family. My four year old rolled a chaotic neutral rogue, my husband a mage, my oldest son rolled a ranger, and I think I rolled a druid, that time. I was GM. We had a blast until hubby’s character died in our third session and he ripped up the character sheet in a fit of anger. I tried to explain to him that there is a reason you can always go to the nearest town and get a rez (to save favorite characters, that is), but he pouted for months. (Yes, he’s the good husband. I didn’t say he was perfect).
We rolled another group and invited my husband’s cousin to join us. She created a dwarven berserker named Hayzeus that plowed through the game like a steamroller, and yet another group melted away.
Two months later, husband (Elwood) decided he wanted to try his hand at GMing a game. Sure enough, not three sessions in, my celibate Halfling monk was tricked into drinking a love potion by a faun and was left pregnant. My beloved husband, the GM, ruled that there was no place where she could get a safe abortion, so I walked out on that pregnant character absolutely furious at my husband. I haven’t let him GM since. Every fight we had for over a year, that Halfling monk and her half-faun fetus came up. Because that was complete bullshit. And he never fracking apologized. He justified it as “something that randomly happened on the roll”, because, you know, everyone thinks to add “acquaintance raped by a faun” to their random encounter rolls. Especially for the male characters. And more especially in front of impressionable minor children. Yeah, I’m still pissed. It’s been four-ish years, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to go back to pen and paper with my family, other than a couple of random sessions. I have hundreds of dollars worth of books, and the revelation of my husband’s undersoul drove me from the game.
What the hell is with the fracking rape fantasies, boys? I am so sick of them. I play characters that represent either who I am or who I wish I could be. If men play parallel characters, how come so many of them find it necessary to create characters that are rapists? Why are female characters consistently having to deal in fantasy with the same bullshit misogyny that happens to them in real life? At thirteen I couldn’t walk down a “safe” suburban street without being whistled at. At twenty-three I had to file police reports almost weekly to keep my ex husband from harassing me. And at thirty-six, I had to give up a game I loved and wanted to be immersed in because the person I most love and trust in the entire universe used it to enact his own little rape fantasy.
How do I rap this up? This is an introduction, and I think it might be a bit overwhelming as an introduction, but that’s me in a word, so I’m told. I think my next post will be some more about role-playing, this time in video games, and some of the ways I’ve learned to minimize the misogyny in those situations.
March 12th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
I think you make some great points there. Particularly, it’s always bothered me when fantasy or sci-fi authors (*coughterrygoodkindcough*) create really socially regressive worlds or fantasy gamers have a world just as misogynistic as ours. It’s freakin’ fantasy, shouldn’t we have people trying for something a bit different or better? Whatever happened to imagination, after all?
March 13th, 2007 at 11:47 am
If feminists are always blamed for overly “victimizing” women, it’s because some men seem to believe that rape is a perfectly reasonable interraction with a woman. It’s not a question of good or evil, in the fantasy world, it’s a matter of opportunity. If you find yourself in a situation with a woman of compromised capacities, well, obviously you’re going to rape her, right? Hell, you can rape rape rape until the cows come home and you still get to call yourself neutral, because what else were you going to do to pass the time in that pit? Talk to each other?
March 13th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
That’s massively creepy, O’Danu. I know AD&D isn’t a consent-based game, but I can’t imagine being in one where the GM would do that without getting your input at all.
I wouldn’t let him GM either.
March 13th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Moira, if it makes you feel any better, I finally got an apology out of him last night when discussing this post. He really didn’t get it, that it was that disturbing to me.
March 13th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
I can’t say I know much about this aspect of the rpging world. I’ve always played with my father, brother and/or ex-boyfriend, so the worst my PC’s went through was torture, like all the other PC’s when we screwed up and got in a situation that warrented it… course many of the male gamers also played girls and they wouldn’t want their PC’s raped any more than I’d want mine raped, so I guess maybe that’s one possible reason? Also there was always, always at least one other female player in the group, sometimes two or three depending on who was availible. Something about a group of females who weren’t above hitting their male partners in the arm for being obtuse or perverse may have prevented the dementia of rape fantasies from occuring in-game.
I guess I was lucky in the gaming world where I wasn’t in RL.
March 13th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Oh geez, the rape in rpgs thing! I ran a years-long campaign once in a homebrewed D&D world, and at one point I introduced a female elven NPC to my all-male PCs who had obviously been a victim of sexual abuse (the situation was clearly laid out enough that my brother actually said, when they were discussing what to do about this elven tribe they’d stumbled across [from which the NPC had escaped], “these are evil patriarchal elves! It’s our moral duty to fight them!”). They rescued the NPC from her immediate dangers, offered her food and protection from the elements - and then asked me if she was good-looking. When I said that she was reasonably attractive, if undernourished, they made joke after joke about their characters having sex with her. I pointed out to them how messed-up that was, especially in this particular instance - the NPC had been abused! Joking about further abuse and objectification was decidedly not funny! - but they didn’t knock it off until I screamed and left the room for a while.
They’re great guys, and I love them all to pieces. If the way they behaved in that gaming session isn’t evidence that patriarchal mindsets influence everything, right down to RPGs, I dunno what is.
This looks like a great new blog you guys have here - I’ll be interested to see where you all take it! Are you aware of some of the other feminist gamer blogs out there? I see that you’ve got shrub.com on your sidebar, but there are more!
March 13th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Thanks, Revena — obviously, the blog is still in its infancy, and I’m still working on formatting, getting my blogroll up to speed, etc. However, I watch my dashboard like a hawk; so anyone who links to me will probably be quickly trackbacked. Definitely spread the word to your friends, I’m excited to see these comments coming in!
I’d wanted to do a link to the Kotaku story that shrub.com did, but couldn’t find much to say other than “right on!”
March 13th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
Oh, and now that I think of it (back on topic), there was a time I was pen & papering with some friends, and the DM (a male) decided to have Pixies cast cantrips on my amazon priestess to make her dirty. So of course, I go off in search of a lake or pond to wash off in (cleanliness is next to goddessliness, after all), and of course one of the other characters decides to wade into the pool after me… so, I guess it is next to impossible to find a guy to roleplay with who won’t act like a total cobag.
March 13th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
I found a couple of guys to roleplay with who weren’t jackasses. ‘course, they were gay and married to each other. (Not that sex wasn’t part of the game, just that rape wasn’t a part of it.) They’ve since moved back to Albuquerque, alas. That was the best game I’ve been in, ever. We’d have sessions lasting eight hours or more, and not once roll the dice.
March 13th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
My gaming group guys are not usually jackasses. But they do have their moments. I definitely have more fun on the rare occasions that our group has more than one woman in it. I’ve seen woman-heavy gaming groups, but I’ve never managed to be a part of one.
On the subject of other blogs to network with/get to know - one good way to find out about who’s posting what is Jade Reporting, which is a linkblog collecting links to posts that have something to do with gender and gaming (in other words, the linked blogs and news articles and discussions are not all feminist - but the ones that aren’t often spark good blog posts :-P). It’s mostly video gaming right now, but I have it on good authority that they’ll soon be including more tabletop stuff, too: http://genderingames.shrub.com/
I write for (among other things) a feminist general media blog called The Hathor Legacy (http://thehathorlegacy.info/), where I do a weekly link round-up on Saturdays. I’m planning to include a post or two from you guys this week, so hopefully you’ll net a few more readers that way.
It’s an exciting time to be getting involved in feminist gaming conversations! I’ve seen a lot of new blogs popping up, lately, and Tekanji (of Shrub.com and Jade Reporting) and I are working on something related to all of that right now that I’m super-excited about.
March 15th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Ya. Rape in rpgs, it does seem to appear fairly regularly.
When I was quite new to roleplaying and fairly young, I had a character in a fallout game when the party raped a bunch of female npcs. Not pleasent. Horrible actually. Then there was a cyberpunk game when the male gm said my character got drunk and woke up naked in a bed with a male pc. Then there was another cyberpunk game when my character found out she had been drugged and raped by the enemy (female gm this time).
Now I can do better about protecting myself but at the time, I hadn’t dealt at all with abuse from when I was young and didn’t know enought to dump a boyfriend that tries to physically make you do things you dont want to do.
My main gm at the moment is my boyfriend. He is great and we know thats never going to happen in his games.
I gm a lot and love it, but its hard at times to hear more and more horror stories from women gms and roleplayers and wonder if youve ever made a bad call and been someone else horror story. I put in bad people, and the party gets to kill them. Bad stuff happens but the party can prevent it. Still all those other people thought what they were doing was ok.
Still I wouldnt cause that to happen to a pc. Its so wrong. Id kick out a player that had his pc do it too.
March 16th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Well, PnP doesn’t always have to have it one way. At a recent session of our group (which is a mixed crowd of folks); someone I work with came rather close to getting himself violated by the GM’s succubus who was angling for a piece o’ his meaty behind; whilst the rest of us remained locked outside of the room poor old Thor had bumbled into.
Still, some odd folks out there >.>
March 17th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
I’m surprised by how prevalent it seems to be (since I’ve never encountered it), but then since I’ve seen rules for online gaming that specifically ban rape, I guess I shouldn’t be.