Interesting post here about online identities in virtual worlds.

In Guild Wars, I typically play a quite feminine-looking female character. In real life, I’m a straight, relatively normal male who has no crossdressing tendencies at all (that I know of). So why do I play a femme in Guild Wars? A few reasons. The female character models in that game seem to be better-designed, for whatever reason, and have better posture. They also have more clothing choices and more varied physiognomies. This is obviously not true of every game, but for reasons unknown to me, it is obvious that more thought and design prowess went into the female character models and clothing in GW.

But that’s not the only reasons I play a female character. For me, there is some value in exploring radically outside of your usual comfort zones, especially in a safe environment, and though interacting in Guild Wars in no way mirrors real-life exchanges, there is some transference from the femininity of the character I play to my meatspace self. It’s a way to envision inhabiting a female body, and all the differences that would entail. It’s a very limited simulation of a common human experience that, in truth, I can never fully understand. Around 52% of the world’s population is women. Anything that can lead me to any further insight, even a little bit, into their condition, is worthwhile to me. I realize how limited this is, especially in this case, but anything is better than nothing — and without radical surgery that I have no desire to undergo (I’d make a hideously ugly woman), it’s all I got.

At Alas, A Blog, in a post long ago (you can look it up if you like; I do not feel like it), a poster and many commenters stated that they thought it wrong for a male to play a female character online (strangely, they thought the converse was a-ok).

I have a few responses to that. The first one is: Fuck you.

The second is that this kind of simulation of experience being verboten just worsens the separation of, and misunderstandings between, the sexes. There is no way males not being allowed to play females will make the world better. And though males being able to play females also might not make the world better, males being forbidden to do so will definitely make the world worse for everyone, women included.

Let’s do a little thought experiment here. Imagine earth in 2359 where you can take a few pills full of Dr. Snurflefung’s femmebots (heh), and within a week, you, as a man, will be changed into a woman at the chromosomal level. No surgery involved, and it’s all completely natural, and some more pills will change you back, just as you were.

Though this technology may never be possible, let’s pretend that it is.

How would the world be better-served by not allowing men to become women, if they desired it?

Don’t you think that there might be a little more understanding, a little more camaraderie, a bit fewer gropings and harassments on the subway, a bit fewer rapes, if some men, even many men, had been women for a while? It doesn’t even have to be — in fact, probably won’t be — the men who would be committing the gropings and harassments who would take these pills. As they truly hate women, this would be unlikely. Far more likely is that mostly-good men who now say nothing, and stand by and do nothing, when these incidents happen, would be far more likely to speak up, both in the public sphere and during any such incident.

Banning the “femmebot” pills, in this case, would actually actively hurt women — and I think men being urged, or not allowed, to play female characters in games would have exactly the same effect right now, for a variety of reasons.

Reductio ad absurdum is always great for giving a bad argument a case of the vapors.

I really enjoy playing my Guild Wars elementalist character. She’s a badass. She can knock people down and set them on fire like nodody’s business.

And she is me, and I am her, indivisible.

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