On the goals of role-playing

[orichalcum]

So, I'm reading this book that julianyap loaned me, called Confederates in the Attic, by Tony Horwitz. It's a very interesting discussion of modern Southern attitudes towards the Confederacy, and it focuses particularly on Civil War reenactors, or, as they apparently prefer to be called, "living historians." (This makes me wonder what I am - a dead historian?)

One of the most startling aspects of their comments was the repeated emphasis on how one of their favorite parts of re-enactment was getting back to traditional gender roles, where "men could be men and women could be women."


This surprised me, largely because one of the difficulties and barriers in my own role-playing experience, especially LARPing, has been a definite goal to re-create a medievalish European feel without traditional gender differences, where women could be swashbuckling swordfighters and men could be pacifistic priests of healing.

The traditional roles have been seen as a hindrance and difficulty, particularly because they are so ingrained in our notions of the period, and hard to get out. Two examples are the sudden creation by the PCs of a patriarchal dowry system for marriages during 10KD, an Italianate court LARP, and repeated calls in regular games to "save the women and children," when most of the women, thank you very much, can take care of themselves.

But then I started analyzing my own motives more closely, cuz, well, I'm a suspicious historian attuned to my own biases and agenda, as much as possible. And I have to admit that part of my attraction to LARPing does have to deal with more traditional gender roles. In particular, I initially found Quest fun partially (although this was a very minor reason) because it was a place where I could dress in a sexy and provocative fashion, wearing low-cut, tight dresses, and yet _not_ have to deal with the catcalls and propositions I'd get from total strangers if I wore a similar outfit on the street or out dancing. Even if I got propositions, they would be to my character, who was usually much more relaxed and better at flirting than Orichalcum was (or is, arguably, not that it matters) and would generally be quite courteous. (Also, my body image fits into medieval paradigms much better than modern waif-like ones.)

I still feel like there's a strong distinction between this behavior and liking to get back to being escorted by a man while in a hoop skirt and spending the weekend knitting socks in public. (Not that there's anything wrong with knitting! Or socks!) I suppose it's that I like the options - that I know that in Quest, I _can_ pick up a sword and run out there to fight, even in my bodice.


I'm curious as to how other people feel about the idea of embracing trad gender roles, and whether this is a desirable goal, and how you feel about gender roles in more fantasy-oriented LARPs, both from the male and female perspectives.

Comments

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

One of the things that occurred to me about LARPs/historical re-enactment and traditional gender roles is that people may enjoy embracing such roles in those contexts because it is just playing pretend, and a temporary thing. They may find taking on the role quite fun, but may very well have no desire to actually live their real lives that way. For example, as a woman, you can spend a weekend wearing a hoop skirt and being escorted by men, but you don't have to live your whole life in the context of 19th century femininity. At the end of the event, you get to take off the dress, put on some pants, and go back to having the right to vote, not being told that higher education will make your uterus wither away, and having a life and identity outside of mother and wife. You can enjoy the trappings, without having to adopt the substance.
I think that both LARPs and re-enactment give people a fun way to try out different roles and personality traits, particularly ones they wouldn't want or be able to take on in their real lives. And traditional gender roles are some of the things that can be fun to play with.
However, I think that fantasy LARPs should always allow all options to both genders. It's fantasy role-playing, after all, which is all about putting yourself in the role of hero/heroine - I have always found there to be an element of wish-fulfillment in RPGs, even when not carried out to Mary-Sue or munchkin proportions. Being limited to traditional gender roles kind of defeats the purpose.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

I had a friend in high school whose big dream it was to sneak into Civil War reenactments dressed as a boy. She could have pulled it off, too.

For me, while I don't usually play fighters per se in LARP events, I _do_ play tomboys and I value being able to play them in an atmosphere that's supportive of that. If that went away, I'd be uninterested in continuing. But I think I'm an unusual example, because I'm odd about gender to begin with, and stubbornly so.

[ladybird97.livejournal.com]

I agree with kenjari - it can be fun to take on the gender roles of the past, but only because at the end, you can put it all away and go back to modernity. As a historian, I get more fun than some other women might from playing out the historical limitations on women - for me, it's a way to explore how women of the past actually negotiated their way through those limitations and found ways to exercise their power despite the restrictions that society placed on them. That's why I've chosen to play a woman in several historically-based RPGs. But I would never choose to play a character like that because I thought that that's how women 'should' act today, and I would not take kindly to anyone telling me that that's how I should act in real life.

The good thing about a fantasy setting is that if you want to, you can bypass those historical limitations. In a LARP, I can choose to play a fluttery damsel-in-distress, or I can choose to be a kick-ass woman with a sword who protects men in distress. My actual ability to kick said ass with said sword is bounded by my real-life ability to learn how to fight and to stay in practice, of course. But I can still play the character, even if I can't actually fight that well.

Despite all that, even when we're building and playing in a fantasy setting, we're still working against hundreds of years of assumptions about gender roles. Without an explicit statement about egalitarianism, people who look at a medieval setting will probably just assume that men hold most of the positions of political, military, and religious authority, because they know that that was the case in medieval Europe - you've pointed out several examples of how that actually has happened in a LARP group made up of well-educated people who would never in real life suggest that women should be subservient to men. (At least, I hope none of them would. See above, Not Taking Kindly to that :)

So I guess we have to go on making explicit statements about gender equality in the medieval-fantasy settings that have gender equality, and keep playing kick-ass-swordswoman characters :)

[jendaviswilson.livejournal.com]

I think that things like the spontaneous dowry system and such aren't so much about outward manifestations of subconscious sexism as they are a natural reaction when one is not given a clear alternative. For example in 10KD there was an obvious need for a marriage part of the economy, but the mechanics were not clearly spelled out so the PCs implemented the default mechanics of the period.

And some periods are pretty much impossible to play with egalitarian gender roles, for practical reasons (hoopskirts) as well as conceits central to the genre (knights saving fair damsels), unless one goes out of one's way to construct enough background. At any rate, playing in those periods does not necessarily mean advocating stereotypical gender roles in real life.

Even if one sticks to a more or less true-to-period setting, there is always room to bend the gender roles for specific characters for more dramatic impact. Like the action-corset woman in that young Jules Verne show. She wouldn't be nearly as cool if all the women in that setting could run around swashbuckling on airships.

The Problem With Hoopskirts

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that playing a lady in a hoopskirt certainly doesn't mean that you want to be subservient in real life - or advocate slavery, for that matter. But what intrigues me is the expressed desire of these women and men to play out that subservience and dominance, and also the lifestyles (outdoorsy and military for men, domestic and refined for women) associated with those roles.

I play non-fighter characters frequently, but I almost never play women who believe that they should respect and be obedient to their menfolk at all times. Neither does Ladybird, who often plays more stereotypically female roles than I do - but it's clear who's the Baroness in Gwyneth and Alvard's relationship. :) I'm intrigued and surprised, because that's not something I seek out through LARPing, and I hadn't realized that other people did particularly.

[lastclearchance.livejournal.com]

Two quick comments:

1. You've reminded me of something: there was an interesting short piece in Bitch magazine about the taboo of menstruation on reality television. Near the end of the article there was an interesting aside about historical sexism of this type from a contestant on PBS's Colonial House:

"'There were certain social behaviors that we engage in now that are contrary to the way the colonists engaged.... But it was interesting to see which issues people were willing to draw the line on and which ones they weren't. They wouldn't treat the [Native Americans] as the colonists would. But it wouldn't even cross their minds that it wasn't OK to be unfair to women. When you'd say, 'But that's sexist,' in response to something the men did, they'd answer, 'But that's how the colonists treated women, so I'm going to do it.' And I'd say, 'Then why don't you be racist?' But they wouldn't cross that line.'"

2. You've gotten me thinking in a wider context about how a LARP would respond to a male character in a traditionally female role in the game--whether it be a "man in distress" or otherwise.

[epilimnion.livejournal.com]

You're right on about the differing perception of racism vs. sexism, historical or otherwise. The disparity has always enraged me. I've been in situations where sexist things have been said, and a few people responded with "why is that bad?", when, if you had simply replaced "girl" with "black man", they would have been outraged. [the phrase in question was "not bad for a girl"].

Perhaps it is because of the biological angle? But then again, there were plenty of "biological" defenses of racism as well.

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about the exact same thing when reading lastclearchance's comment, too.

[gee-tar.livejournal.com]

I love traditional role reversals like having a "man in distress." Heck, I can think of at least one game when I've personally been a "man in distress" and in need of rescuing.

Actually, these days, I've encountered such reversals so often (I guess it's people I hang out with) that I forget they're even reversing stereotypes and so aren't quite as interesting. I've become gender blind and now simply think "person in distress" or sometimes even "sentient creature in distress" with the emphasis on the distress rather than the subject in question.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

I think in general, when people have conflicting pressures on them to behave in different ways, and they choose to behave one way normally, then there's a natural urge to want to satisfy the other pressure somehow. Furthermore, I think that the choice to behave in one way means that we often reject too harshly the parts of ourselves that don't adhere to that way.

In this particular case, I think there's a fair amount of societal pressure to adhere to traditional gender roles, and while most of us here reject them to some degree or another, the pressure is there, and the rejection means that there are certain aspects of ourselves that we don't feel comfortable with in our day-to-day lives. So one advantage of role-playing is that it lets us explore the parts of ourselves that we don't want to be part of our normal lives.

As a couple of examples, I feel uncomfortable being macho and take-charge in real life, but it's nice to be able to let go sometimes when role-playing. Also, I feel extremely uncomfortable about unquestioning obedience to authority, yet I came up with a Quest character who's a religious fanatic. I find that having a clearly defined moral compass is a highly seductive point of view, and it's fun to play around with, but it's not how I feel I should live my real life.

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

I have fairly similar feelings with regard to the religious fanatic characters I play at Quest, too. It's really interesting to roleplay that kind of perspective, but I don't think it's a very good approach for the real world. I think at the last game, in fact, our respective religious fanatics came into conflict, and it was lots of fun!

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

Oh most definitely it was! :) That was the game I hadn't known I was hoping for, for that character.

[redhound.livejournal.com]

Traditional gender roles, like most traditional mores, have the advantage of being clear. (Or, at least, of seeming so from a distance.) If you suffer from the anxiety of unclear social protocol, a historical time of clarity may seem appealing. It's also worth noting the "I'd love to go back to the Middle Ages! Being a noble would be fun!" syndrome; I suspect few of those traditionalists are playing women whose husbands beat, abandon, or cheat on them, or men who can't feed their families.

I also think it's a mistake to conflate LARP and living history, for reasons aside from source material. Living history, in my experience, isn't roleplaying as we usually understand the term. It's much more performative than immersive, while roleplaying is usually the reverse. The point of living history is that people are curious what that time was like, and the most immediate way of finding out is to get a bunch of people to act it out. All that sock-knitting is prime people-watching time.

Then, of course, there's the issue of source material. I think fantasy, as a genre, plays to the strengths of roleplaying, which serves as a venue to transcend the real. This is one reason why there aren't a lot of pure historical LARPs, or pure historical RPGs (successful ones, anyway); historical accuracy says "thou shalt not" when roleplaying is all about "you can".

Which is why traditional gender roles tend to go down poorly in LARP, I think; most people implement them not as "I should" but as "you can't". Nobody troubles themselves about a woman playing a character who prefers taking care of others to taking command, or a man playing an assertive character who sacrifices himself protecting his loved ones; they get irked by someone telling all the women to leave the room so the men can share their male lore.