Gender, feminism and their future in virtual worlds

Disclaimer: This post is all about my experiences in MMOs. It’s about what I’ve seen and should not be seen as a statement on how things look in virtual worlds in general. It’s not 100% truth, it’s all subjective and not very academic. It’s written in a rambling style because I’ve had too much coffee. Remember, please, that this is a blog, not a classroom or an academic institution. With that said, feel free to criticize me and my ideas. I always, always reserve the right to change my mind if I believe I’ve been proven wrong. Thank you.

Gender-play in MMOs is hardly a new subject. We’ve known about it for a long time – people like to play characters of the opposite sex. Sometimes they even roleplay members of the opposite sex. That last part has been the main interest of academics, especially the ones with a gender-slant, for a long time. For an obvious reason, it’s  interesting and fascinating. But it’s becoming old and for most MMO-theorists it’s old news.

That does not, in any way, make Sera Brennan’s recent post on Massively any less interesting. More often than not, the theories about why people gender-play in MMOs are written by heterosexual males or females from a distanced viewpoint. Sera, on the other hand, identifies himself/herself as a transgendered, as a female stuck in a male body (while still being heterosexual, mind you – far from all transgendered are gay). Not only does it take a lot of guts to write a post like that, it also brings a fresh perspective, written in the first person for once, about the subject of gender-play.

It got me thinking about my own experiences with gender in MMOs over the last couple of years. I believe I’m heterosexual, as far as I know I’m not attracted to men enough to call myself bi-sexual but I’ll keep an open mind, but I almost always play a female character in games when given the option to do so. It’s not about the old axiom that men like to play female characters because they would “rather stare at a female behind than a male for hundreds of hours” (that’s really getting tiresome, guys). It’s generally about female characters often being better designed than male (with a few exceptions, including EverQuest II and Lord of the Rings Online), probably because the designers are often male and have more fun designing females, or that it is much more interesting to identify with a virtual female than a male. After all, I’m male in the real world, something that I won’t be able to change until Kurzweil’s reality-bending nanomachines become a reality, so why play one in a virtual world when given an option to try something else?

Before we go any further, let’s take a look at feminism. That word is usually an invitation for trolls to come crawling out of the woodwork, stating that males and females alike are all burdened by gender stereotypes (usually wrapped in more or less veiled insults). That’s indeed very true, but feminism (for me – remember that this post is all subjective) puts the focus on the submission and oppression of women and how that relationship between male and female creates a reality in which everyone suffers. Men are supposed to be dominant, and many suffers from that, while women are supposed to be submissive, from which they suffer. By eliminating that dominance-submission relationship, feminism is able to deconstruct the gender-roles inherit in that particular relationship for the benefit of all. It’s all about where you look and (for me, again) feminism strikes from below, while other views on gender-problems looks at the problem from another direction.

I’m not going to pretend that I understand the famous feminist Judith Butler 100%. She’s a very difficult read and even though I have two of her books in my bookshelf I won’t claim to have read them in their entirety. But she brings a very important theory to the table – that gender relationships are kept alive by performativity. Most would refer to it as the heterosexual matrix, in which we all live and act;  by constantly acting as if though gender roles are real, we maintain the heterosexual matrix in which heterosexuality is the norm. It is by breaking the matrix through performing actions that we see that the whole thing is nothing but a charade (Butler would call it a “narrative”) and that even gender itself isn’t real.

To quote Wikipedia:

Butler characterizes gender as the effect of reiterated acting, one that produces the effect of a static or normal gender while obscuring the contradiction and instability of any single person’s gender act. This effect produces what we can consider to be ‘true gender’, a narrative that is sustained by “the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them.” The performative acts which Butler is discussing she names to be performative and within the larger social, unseen world, they exist within performativity.

As I said before, because of Brennan’s post mentioned above, I started to think about how all of this comes together in my own experience of MMOs. Most of this actually popped into my head when I was doing something that felt extremely male – I was helping paint my parents’ house, bare-chested and wearing a pair of my father’s old jeans. I felt more “male” than I’ve ever done. In my old relationship, our friends usually jokingly referred to Hilda as the “man in the house” as she would embody more male characteristics than me (she was stronger, more handy than I will probably ever be). In short, doing what would traditionally be a “man’s job” (painting a house) in a male way (bare-chested and sweating in the sun) felt weird and quite uncomfortable.

The thing is, that in virtual worlds all this is changed. In his post Brennan refers to being treated differently, that other players “became slightly more forgiving in party situations, simply because I acted like a female and I had a female avatar” and that they “let me have more items and they would contact me more frequently for groups”. This was very much the truth when I started out in MMOs, back in Vanilla World of Warcraft. Getting gold was no problem, getting help from characters of higher levels just because my avatar was female was easy and one guy actually went out and grinded copper for me so I could level my engineering. The question “are you a girl?” never even popped up.

But this has changed. Back in the “old days”, people seemed to expect male players to play male avatars and vice versa – since then, the whole concept of male players playing female characters have started to sink in (like “MMORPG” actually standing for “Many Men Online Role Playing Girls”). Usually, at least outside a guild/group-setting, it means that every avatar is treated more or less equally since the actual gender of the player is an unknown. It’s no longer important.

Of course, it can be quite different within guilds or other forms of close groups, there’s no denying that. When the gender of the player becomes known, some people will change their behavior accordingly. But that’s usually outside the realms of the virtual world itself, such as on forums and on voice-chat (like Vent or Teamspeak). Before the gender is known, the avatar is “neutral” – it might have breasts, but it’s still neutral. The heterosexual matrix, the normative, does not come into play.

This is even more pervasive in games like EVE Online. It’s known that the female player base of EVE is quite small (I think it was around 5% last I heard any official numbers), but the amount of female avatars is not relative to the amount of females playing the game. Most players expects the female avatar to be male, or gender-less, and acts accordingly. Also, one of the most famous (at least in roleplaying circles) relationships in the game is the lesbian love affair between Star Fraction’s CEO Jade Constantine and the leader of the Blood Empire, Revan Neferis. I know Jade to be male in real life, I have no idea who’s playing Revan, and to be honest – it never mattered. I never saw anyone else trying to pull the “two males roleplaying lesbian women”-card either.

One of the other things that struck me was the way members of my old raiding guild in World of Warcraft would act around each other. Here, the gender of most of the members was known, we did use Vent after all, but still a lot of members would use kiss, hugs, cuddle and other similar caring emotes in-game. Even though our raids were led by what most people would call an “alpha male”, he would still use emotes and say things in guild chat that pointed to what is usually seen as feminine or homosexual traits. I’ve seen the same behaviour in some EVE corps. It always fascinated me and again points towards some form of gender eradication in virtual worlds.

Could it be that not only would  people use virtual worlds to empower themselves, but also to get away from the gender stereotyping that constantly takes place in real life? As Brennan writes;

In a weird sort of way, virtual worlds humanize us more than the real world is able to. While the condition of anonymity can lead to some really destructive individuals, it can also lead to being able to connect to one another without the hangups of social barriers that exist in real life. We can meet individuals who are very different from ourselves, find common ground quickly, and then learn from one another, rather than avoiding those who are different because it scares us.

Here’s another thing – if you believe that this doesn’t really mean anything, think ahead. Think about the day we got the technology to finally create fully immersive virtual worlds, where we are placed in a fantasy environment and are fully able to feel and touch things that aren’t real. Think about what would happen to the gender roles in such a world, where  you not only can you play a character of a different sex, you can also fully experience what it is like to be a different sex. If Kurzweil is right about his reality altering nanomachines (take that with a grain of salt, ladies and gents), we would be able to experience what it’s like to actually have sexual intercourse as the opposite sex. If the actual physical sex of the person behind the avatar you are having sex with is an unknown, is it truly important what it is if the sensation you are experiencing is as real as it would be in real life?

So, what the heck (replace “heck” with whatever curse word you feel comfortable with) am I really rambling about? I’m talking about virtual worlds, the MMOs or the Second Life-clones of the future, as a great liberator or – as Brennan calls it – equalizer. A place where we can immersive ourselves so fully that whatever gender roles we take more or less for granted in real life becomes eradicated once and for all. In a world where the heterosexual matrix no longer functions, be it in a real world scenario (such in one of Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones) or in a virtual one (such as a private Second Life-zone or why not an orgy on a floating island in WoW’s Nagrand), our genders are shown to be exactly what they are – social and completely pointless cultural constructs.

A long time ago, one of my friends claimed that me playing a female night elf in World of Warcraft was the same as being a transvestite (a good example of the “punishments that attend not agreeing to believe” in the matrix, see the JB-quote above). When I just shrugged he said that I obviously must be very secure in my sexuality to “remain” male yet playing and roleplaying a female character (this was when roleplaying still existed in WoW). Perhaps I am. But as the virtual worlds turn, become increasingly mainstream and the gender roles within them become less and less interesting (some blatant sexism when it comes to avatar design notwithstanding), perhaps more people will bring that mindset with them when they log out. It won’t end sexism, it won’t save the world, but taken together with other societal and cultural changes, it will hopefully help make the world a better place.