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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mythago" data-source="post: 6205886" data-attributes="member: 3019">What do you mean, what would it "be"? What about having a male author or a male audience would make the books "be" something else? (I guess the author photo on the jacket would be different.) Your non sequitur aside, you still haven't explained your claim because Shades of Grey is a novel written by a woman and with a  female targeted audience contains very explicit sex scenes, any female  player who is bothered by 'the dwarves and hobbits go to the whorehouse'  is engaging in a double standard. Regarding your other points:Sexist game writing and "free speech": You should probably think carefully about what you mean by 'free speech', because that term gets used rather vaguely, and often people forget it's a two-edged sword. Writing Chicks Be Trippin': The RPG is free speech. Mocking the dudes who wrote the game as loser neckbeards? Also free speech. Announcing CBT:TRPG is the best game since the Sliced Bread OGL and you particularly like the Putting Her In Her Place random table? Free speech. Writing a review that CBT:TRPG achieves new heights of lamedom and would embarrass the average Maxim reader with its juvenile bigotry? Also free speech!When you talk about "narrative functions" and "author's intentions", it might be helpful if you expanded on that instead of merely presenting these phrases as if they were a) self-evident and b) clear rebuttals to any charge of bad behavior. Bigotry, even unconscious or intentional bigotry, is very often the enemy of good writing and interesting narrative; it injects the author's failings into the work. Is it possible to write an interesting game with these elements anyway? Of course! Are "narrative function" and "authorial intent" magical Power Words that make bigotry reasonable and beyond criticism? No.Sexist roleplaying - Yes, I do hope we all know that if I am LARPing, and while in character I shoot somebody dead because they are role-playing my character's worst enemy, that I am in fact a murderer, and the police are not going to be especially impressed if I explain that I really did like Bob very much, but I was only role-playing murder and so it doesn't count if I, coincidentally, also happened to murder somebody In Real Life.A more apt example than murder: "Am I a jerk because my character is a jerk?" A lot of the time, the answer is going to be yes. Surely you've had the common gamer misfortune of sharing a table with the guy (or gal) who just so happens to roleplay an evil, obnoxious backstabber who argues constantly, steals from other PCs, doesn't pull their weight and messes up important beats in the game - in other words, messes up everybody else's fun - and then whines but I was rooooooleplaying! when called on it. It's possible to roleplay a jerk without being a jerk; it's not easy, and it's certainly not automatic, as if a LARP-style hand gesture magically dissipates any real-life jerkitude. Similarly, it IS possible to play a character who's a bigot without ruining the game for people who are targets of that bigotry, but it's often very difficult and "but I'm just RPing!" is not magic.  Sexism within gaming groups - What happened to "very open to interpretation"? Do you truly believe that normal people cannot disagree on whether behavior in a gaming group is sexist? We might all agree on extreme examples, but look in this very thread for how people differ on whether less-obvious things are or aren't "sexism". This especially gets complicated when people throw in all the other factors that you mention in other contexts, like "intent".Sexism within the roleplaying community in general, or, sexism between people that don't know each other - There's no rational reason to artificially segregate this. If I walk into a convention and join a game full of people I don't know, and somebody makes a crack about dumb broads, is that not "sexism within a gaming group" as well as "sexism between people that don't know each other"?  "Normal men" - You'll note that the topic of the thread is not Men Behaving Badly, or Them Other Boys Don't Know How to Act. It is Sexism in Table-Top Gaming. Also, women can be sexist, including sexist towards other women, you'll be wholly unsurprised to hear. (In the comments to the link I provided earlier, you'll find a number of women excusing or even justifying the whole Fake Geek Girl thing.) The whole issue of 'normal men' is something you dragged in yourself, in your earlier comments about how mean gaming ladies pick on "virile men" and don't understand manly behavior like pretending your imaginary alter ego is having imaginary sex with imaginary prostitutes. Nobody, that I have seen, has suggested that sexism is some kind of endemic and uniquely male flaw. In the absence of someone claiming that it is, need we really derail the discussion into a pointless and redundant assurance that the (primarily male group of) people discussing the issue are not hating on the male gender?</blockquote>

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