<Snipped quote by Kassarock>
Thanks for this post.
To the argument that playing a role you like is the chief joy of roleplaying, I'd counter that some people have the most fun not by tailoring that one aspect of the story (their own characters) endemically to their own tastes, but by contributing to immersion on the whole. Sometimes that means making a personal sacrifice for the greater good, in a sense, in the form of playing homelier characters, or ones who match a weird, alien beauty standard, or ones who tell different stories through their deformities, disfigurations, ugly personalities, mistakes, regrets ... (basically, who make the world feel more lived-in.)
<Snipped quote by GeekFactor>
Interesting insights all around; thanks for sharing. If you're willing to expound, what were the signs that tipped you off to male players playing female characters badly (and vice-versa)?
I don't play enough women to feel called out, but should that ever change in one of my many self-imposed writing challenges, your advice may prove indispensable.
Some of the easiest and quickest to spot are the over-sexualized gals. Often lesbians, but not always. Often aggressively seeking to hook up with others. Many times these characters are young women, on the cusp of "sexual awakening". Or they're hookers/prostitutes/"bad girls with a heart of gold", etc. They're often used to blatantly fulfill personal fantasies of the male player. There's little subtlety to them, they're tough, they're aggressive, they're bold, they're basically men with breasts. There is a great complexity and tenuousness to a young woman discovering her womanhood and the brutish "bull in a china shop" demeanor doesn't really jive.
On a similar note is the tendency to overplay aggressiveness (sexuality aside) in general. I don't mean blatant, physical violence or anger. But women behave and communicate in an entirely different way than men do and it's very easy to project "what I think the other gender is like" rather than what the other gender actually *is* like. Again, some of these differences are so subtle, and I may not be able to explain them well, and if I fail there, forgive me. Men tend to be direct and forthcoming in their words; they say what they mean, they don't beat around the bush, they speak words to accomplish something or make something happen. Women are far more complex and indirect in their words sometimes. They speak to express thoughts, feelings, wishes, disappointments, and believe that doing so will then result in the actions. For instance, let's say we're roleplaying a farmer and his wife, and there's a hole in the roof that needs to be fixed. All the farmer's wife has to say is, "Tom, you need to fix that hole today, there's a storm coming in!" But in her mind, he can see the damn hole, he should be able to figure out that it needs to be fixed, so she says, "You know, I were real disappointed when our supper got ruined the last time it rained and all that water came in." Whereas Tom simply needs her to remind him that there's a hole in the roof that he's perfectly willing to repair, she'll express how his neglecting it made her feel, thinking "Well, if he cares about me and the kids, he'll perk up and get it done!"
That may be a clumsy example, but there you go. Men who RP women will almost always forego those subtleties and just plunge ahead with "speaking their mind" bluntly. They may even realize that this isn't an inherently feminine trait and skirt around it by claiming that their female character is "unusually blunt" (which goes right back to most of them being too bold/aggressive to be believable as women).
To be fair, it's somewhat easy to pick out the women trying to RP as men sometimes, so don't think that my reply is some kind of dig against male players, because it isn't! It's just that there are differences in the sexes that go far beyond the physical. And it's tricky to have the awareness of who one is, and who one *isn't*... to make it believable.
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