Tonight, my fingers are crossed: let all go well

Nervous about the test drive tonight. I want to walk in, find that the car is exactly what I was expecting, that the price has not skyrocketed, that the trade-in value of my old car is enough to knock out the cost of the warranty over BBV so there won't be issues with my loan-- basically, if everything goes well, I want to walk out of the dealership owning a new car that drives well, safely, efficiently, reliably. There's not really any good reason this shouldn't happen, but I worry anyway.

D&D last night was excellent, including such highlights as fighting a black pudding with a green slime! I'm behind on the summary, I know, but this car-buying nonsense has sort of gotten in the way of doing anything but worry about it for a few days. In the meantime, here's how the black pudding troubles went down:

[Llewain opens a secret door. Behind it is a massive black ooze! We shut it quickly, and Esra desperately tries to remember details about such creatures.]

Esra: Wait. Wait! I think-- creatures like that are known to dissolve metal, not just people. You shouldn't attack it with anything made of metal unless you want to lose it, and your armor--
Llewain: I've maces made of stone, then!
Denar (who has become Kelta, long story): Yes, and my weapon is made of shell.
Sabine: Well shiiiit.
[Llewain throws open the secret door again]
Llewain: Foul ooze! [he strikes it with a stone mace]
[It splits into two oozes.]
Esra: Oh, dear. Let's see if we can't stop this here.
[He polymorphs one of the two oozes into a canary, which then flies away. Sabine strikes the other. It splits.]
Iris: Confound it, Sabine!
Sabine: [innocently] What?

[Eventually we give up and run back out. We discover, down a not-secret corridor, a room of green slime, which is clinging to the ceiling.]

Llewain: Wait. I have an idea. The fire didn't kill the black ooze from before, but we've seen this slime at work before; anything it consumes is turned into more of it.
Esra: Oh! And as Sabine demonstrated for us before, that sort of slime is quite flammable.
Llewain: Exactly. You all hide down in the interment room, and I'll lead the black ooze into the green slime. On the far side of the room I'll leap through the door and once they've been consumed you can set alight the slime and it will be safe to cross.
Iris: ...Well, if you're sure.
Llewain: It ate my armor and I'm in tattered rags, I think I'm the best candidate.
Esra: About that-- [he unties his yellow sash] Here you go, if you like.
Llewain: Oh, thanks. [He ties it thoroughly as underpants.]
(Danny: And later Esra will be all *snifffffff* Mmm, Llewain
Dev: Pfft! No! You mean Asha. Esra will be like 'no thanks, you can keep it, I have more where that came from'!)

On my mind: Unintentional sexism in tabletop RPGs

Earlier, Danny mentioned to me that Zak S of playing D&D with porn stars had posted in response to a poorly drawn, sexist comic marginalizing gamer girls as either fake (sexy gamer girls) or disgusting (smelly gamer girls obsessed with their games; ie, the lady nerd). Unrelated to my feelings on the comic in question (which summarily end at 'Oh, stereotyping. You know nothing, but you think you know everything!'), this got me to thinking about the Golarion RPG setting, past games I've played with the guys, and the way female characters get portrayed in general.

I recently made a footnote to a post explaining why I rarely play female characters in tabletop. The ugly reason is: I feel more comfortable playing dudes. I'm a lady myself, but I like the challenge of playing a dude. Am I buying into the social fallacy that unless I'm a dude I can have no agency? Maybe, which is what bugs me. So, I'm making the effort to play girls in upcoming games (Scarpur, the foul-tempered lady kobold; and then Aigua, the whimsical adventuring lady monk) who are specifically not the genre standard. They're not ugly, but they're not pretty. They're not young. I play old guys, why not play old girls? I figure I need to make an effort to change that, because I have a problem with it, which means I have a problem with me.

But I'm not the only one who has trouble portraying non-standard girls! So I think about it a lot. For example, let's talk about Golarion. I think the setting is pretty awesome. It's based around science and pseudoscience, with liberal borrowing from awesome speculative thought in the late 1800's and early 1900's; there's all sorts of neato nations and histories in the setting. I bought setting books for Pathfinder before the game was even out because I was curious about it.

There are also NPCs in this setting, with plot hooks just begging to be used. Danny recently started reading up on Golarion (which is awesome) and was telling me about some of the stuff he'd read last night, including an NPC with a very interesting backstory. She was brought back as an undead leader for a region, meant to control it; however, her organs were removed before she was revived, and anyone who's holding one of her organs can control her. Pretty creepy and awesome, right? Nothing about this is gender specific.

Oh, but also, she was a prostitute before she died.

Now it's certainly not Danny's fault, and I wouldn't be surprised if he just omitted that detail anyway, should he decide to run in Golarion and use this character, but really? She was brought back to life to run nations and she couldn't have been...a thief who was murdered for stealing? A mercenary who people respected and revered? A political leader? A poor farmer? A nobody seamstress or something? She's a prostitute. Really.

This is the first place that female NPCs get dragged, in a lot of situations, and it's not always the same people calling the shots, but it's treated like an acceptable job function that is just a natural part of being female by a lot of people in the tabletop world, and I don't really like it. If you say 'okay, so where are the male prostitutes?', most people laugh and think you're joking. Or hey, if you were to play a male prostitute, you'd still be a joke character by their definition, even if you played it seriously. Because men don't get defaulted to prostitution. Apparently, women don't come with marketable skills beyond 'sex for cash'. Men do, but women don't.

And that is bullshit.

I can think of plenty of situations where this has come up in games where I was playing alongside someone who thought it was totally reasonable to want to play a lady prostitute. Did it ever occur to them that they could have played a lady...something else? Or a male prostitute once in a while to even things out? I don't know. I assume that they didn't know or mean any harm because in most cases these are people I consider to be my friends and companions. I like them.

The one time I did play in a game with someone playing a male prostitute, he was a cat-boy ex-sex-slave, and he was played by a fellow lady at the table. He also was in a homoerotic relationship with the male leader of the party; that game was silly and fun, and I have really fond memories of it.

In a one-shot Vampire game, one of our players played a "business woman" Malkavian vampire who used her talents to make herself look sexy and human so she could fuck her way to the top. On top of this, she was subject to the Malkavian problem "generally clinically insane", so she wore a business suit but was actually just a prostitute who didn't know it.

In another game, one player who we ended up not inviting to the game wanted to play a Pathfinder Gnome lady. Except, he wanted her to be a prostitute after having been The Shit in her hometown (where here, 'The Shit' means 'Original Character Fiction levels of awesome'). Why? Because when she left her hometown, she left behind her fabulous wealth and friends, and needed to make money and get by somehow, so she fell back on her "talents". (For the record, one of the reasons he was not included in the game proper was this bad character concept; but it wasn't the only reason.)

In yet another game, the same player with the gnome decided he wanted to play a young woman who was extremely sexualized. He regularly informed us that his character had scratches all over again from having wild sex with her werewolf boyfriend, who was still in werewolf form when they did it. The worst of this character showed up when, during a dream sequence where we had to awaken to our true identities from pseudo-selves the dream had assigned us based on what it thought would make us happy, he informed us that his now-schoolgirl character 'just fucked the teachers when they called her to task at school' in the dream. When called on this, he informed us that he did so because that was just how girls get through high school. You can imagine how awkward it was for us all to be at the table with that statement hanging in the air.

I wish I could say that this player was always a jerk and write him off, but he is only this bad sometimes, and he does have other problems that exacerbate his issues. One of them, as you might imagine, is misogyny. As my friend, I do want to defend him, and to believe that he can improve. I know he's been better lately; in the current game he has even gracefully accepted being transformed (by accident!) into an ogre woman without making any nasty remarks. Still, as a woman, I'd like to see more positive female characters in tabletop, not less. These are all examples of players who I still play with by my own volition, so what I'm saying is, these aren't the worst: these are just 'the bad'. This idea that women, at the base of 'what do women do to get by', are prostitutes, bothers me a lot. Not least of all because I like sex, and think that liking sex shouldn't be something people consider remarkable anymore than they consider liking special kinds of foods remarkable.

So lady characters in general. I'm trying to take myself to task over playing male characters most of the time. For example, here's every female character I've ever actually played.

I started with Liz. She was stupid, but not sexualized. The joke was, she had once been a dog, but a magical accident turned her into a half human. She hated that, and wanted to become a dog again, to go back to when life had been simpler. The caveat was, she could only become more human and smarter.

Several years later, there was Mirzam. Finally, another girl! Mirzam was a young magician and favored daughter of a horsebreeding family in the Anima setting, with adoration for her stunted-growth friend Ariadne and her heart in the right place. How can I best describe Mirzam? She barely had any character at all. She was air-headed, and an air-themed magician. Literally.

Then Matachin. Matachin was a rude elf-druid from Sigil who didn't bathe and talked a foul streak a mile wide. Oh, and a pathological liar. The game was so short I unfortunately didn't have time to do much else with her.

Most recently, there was Sri, an ex-sailor turned slave Barbarian who was bought as a bodyguard by another PC at the start of the game, and ended up constantly bossing her mistress around. Sri was the oldest member of the party at thirty, and not particularly remarkable for her physical appearance. I feel like she was a step in the right direction for me with female character variety.

Now, I don't want to seem like I'm saying it's bad to play characters that are sexual ladies. Would it have been okay to be porny with these characters? Totally, yes. There's no reason I couldn't get porny about ANY of my characters. Even the old men. Or the weird little gnome things. Or my old lady kobold. Hawt hawt kobold on kobold action!

So long as it actually made sense for the character, I would be willing to mention their sexual proclivities and even have them come up. The whys and hows are simple: It's fun to play a guy or girl who sees a sexy vision, and totally falls for it. A large percentage of the monsters in D&D, for example, figure heavily around "seduce people to trick them: now eat them". Thus, should sexy funtimes be mentioned in D&D? Sure, if you and your players are comfortable with it. I just want to see sexy funtimes be an option, not an assumption, for what's part and parcel with a lady character. I'd like to think that a lot of folks out there agree.

Edit: Associated icon for this post now 15% more appropriate?

Surprisingly good experience, that

I have a new car.

It is a million times cooler and nicer than my old car, featuring such amazing functions as working windows and radio.

Oh, also: so much debt.