A Marxist look at the positive side of playing a different gender as well as the negatives of sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism and class in Star Wars Galaxies.
A friend of mine posted a meme on Facebook about a father who's toddler son wants to be
Esla for Halloween and the father is supportive, which I think is great.
I couldn't help but thinking about "gender roles" when I saw this and how I have or have not experimented with them in the past. I put "gender roles" in quotations because just deciding to put on a skirt, or makeup or other ways of presenting yourself in a more feminine light, for example, doesn't necessarily relegate you to a "role" that would be traditionally asserted to women or females. Someone who just wants to dress-up, play a role or try something on doesn't necessarily have the intention of behaving more feminine/masculine or transitioning to a different sex or gender. The boy in the photo likely wasn't thinking in such binary terms, he just wanted to be Elsa. To quote
Yoda: “Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is."
I will disclose I don't consider myself to be anything close to an expert on gender. Gender studies was a part of the interdisciplinary
Equity Studies course I took at U of T, so I do have some background from academia as well as experienc
e working with people who are genderqueer and taking part in discussions around such issues over the years I spent as a political organizer and in the anti-racist movement. I still have some questions in regards to biological vs. sociological effects on gender as well defining what sex vs. gender is. But I have a pretty good sense that what has been relegated to people's roles and the type of characteristics we've come to expect from people we view as one gender or another, in particular masculinity and femineity, is mostly socially constructed.
I will also disclose that I'm the type of guy that didn't really explore feminine type of things in my childhood. I never played with a Barbie doll, dressed up a toy baby, tried on any female assigned clothing, etc. I'm not sure how much of this was purely because I had no interest in such things, out of fear of losing my boyhood rep or both. After all, I was constantly in a sort of struggle to keep my spot -- usually a few slots below the physically bigger males -- as a sort of tough guy. I was never really psychically tall or big though I was athletic to an extent. I hit the home runs during house league and people wanted me on their team for floor hockey. But I was never
the best at any of those things. In those days even some
rumour that you might be a "pansy" of some sort could be detrimental. In the late '80s and early '90s word that someone might be "gay" could spread around a middle school like wildfire the way viral videos spread on social media today despite the fact we all used land lines.
With that in mind, it might come as no surprise that the first time I found myself trying out a different "gender role" didn't come along until I was 28 years old and started playing
Star Wars Galaxies.
You might be thinking: "
What, you never played a video game with a female character before?" If you have never played an
MMORPG like SWG it might be hard to understand. In SWG the character you create is unique from her name down to the height, body details, species and skin colour. It's a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game which means you are playing the role of your character (to a certain extent, more on this later) and interacting with hundreds, possibly thousands of other real humans who are also playing a role.
"
But wait, it's still just a game it's not really trying out a gender." To a certain extent this is correct. It isn't an
IRL experience but there is reflections of social behaviour because you are interacting with other people. Some of us have a very intimate relationships with the character(s) we create. As for myself, I am a writer and thus consider myself something of an artist. My own son said it best once we spoke about, many years before it happened, the possibility of SWG shutting down: "My character is like a work of art," he said. I agree with that and every character I created came with a backstory. Each character therefor had a piece of me and embodied some of my, for lack of a better word, soul.
I modelled my Dark-Side Jedi (DSJ) Stasy after my ex-partner of 17 years Stacy. Aside from being beautiful they were both mean.
Sure there are some players that just name their character something like
'BEEFCAKE GROUNPOUNDAH and never give much thought to anything but
PvP. I don't think it's fair to speculate about what type of people play on those characters, because it's almost always the case that both
roleplayers and the strict game players have their share of douchebags. But I'll get more into that later.
I first started out my character Stasy as a
munitions trader specializing as a weaponsmith. When I first started playing I didn't have much of a clue what I was doing, and quickly found out that it was a very challenging and competitive class to play as. As such I spent a lot of time collecting resources and playing on my alt.
After getting the knack of things I eventually became one of the more decent weaponsmiths on the server. But competing with the well established billionaire traders, the constant lookout for "
A crate of free resources" and the fact that you needed to have the best ingredients in order to cap your weapons meant that running out of a certain
resource at anytime could bring your business to a halt. Even though a capped crafted weapon generally went for around 4 million credits, in times of resource scarcity market prices on ingredients could be ridiculous enough that you might barely break even. After about a year I decided to move on. I sold off my business to another prospective trader and switched over to a combat class.
During both my time playing
Stasy as a trader and combat classes I would Roleplay (RP) from time-to-time.
A lot of RP'ers get a bad rep in MMOs and as I will demonstrate there is good reason for it. But I was new to it at the time and didn't really know this. The idea of RPing a character in a
Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU) with other people just seemed like a naturally fun thing for someone like me to do. I know people that even do
Live Action Role Play (LARP) and though I don't think that's something I would ever do, they have expressed having a lot of fun doing it.
Of course, one of the things you do as a character aside from create their attitude through acting, is the visual. In SWG you could change your character's hairstyle and of course there is a wide range of clothing to choose from. All the best designer clothing was crafted by
domestic traders with the tailor specialty.
(Checkout counter of the Star City Mall on Naboo.)
Kind of sounds like playing dress up with a doll, doesn't it? I took pause when I realized this, but at age 28 was mature enough that I barely gave it a second thought. I didn't care and I was having so much fun.
People got to know my character through RP: She was from a
moisture farm collective in
Bildor's Canyon on the Jundland Wastes but through tragedy orphaned to the Empire. Intelligent, fiercely loyal to Imperial ideas and jaded she was a shrewd saleswoman always on the lookout for potential buyers of her munitions at the parties she attended; from swank ballrooms to grimy backwater
cantinas she could fit in anywhere. She kept an ear open for traitors and would not give a second thought about shooting you on the spot with a
Scout Blaster if she thought you could be a rebel.
Before I proceed a bit of a disclaimer: I'm not intending to bash the people that played SWG. Because I'm pretty sure that there are good and bad people to be found in the RP and PvP communities of all games. If anything, in fact, SWG is probably known for having the least amount of assholes out of other MMORPGs. I enjoyed a lot of good times with RPers and have great memories like attending a
Galactic Moon Festival (the
Star Wars version of Halloween) rave in the middle of nowhere on
Naboo with a
French guild, acting as a co-pilot with with an ace of
a section of the Imperial Navy during deep space battles, I crafted
weapons for and drilled troopers for the army of a
secret Sith cult on
Lok; hung out with some shady characters on
Tatooine that I thought might be rebel sympathizers (but sold them crates of
DH-17 carbines anyways) and many other fun adventures.
But then there was the bad stuff: the sexism and misogyny.
Too often RP devolved into the same old tired sex slave thing over and over. Someone would want to kidnap
Stasy and force her to a brothel or the service of some gangster. Now this isn't entirely out of canon, it is implied that many slaves captured by pirates are sold to such a fate though never explicitly shown. Most did not want their male character relegated to such a role, save a few who were interested in the
Nightsisters. And of course whenever there was an evil band of slavers there had to be the liberator to rescue the slaves. This
white knight role was almost always reserved for the male. When I once suggested the role could be played by one of my other characters named
Mei, a female
Zabrak who was an
officer working for
CorSec, I was quickly told that the only option would be for her to fail and end up in the brothel as well. A male
Jedi took the role instead.
This kind of thing even took place in regards to roleplaying master/apprentice relationships in force training. I seen it occur with both those playing Darkside/Sith and Jedi. Too many so-called "masters" were only interested in taking you as an apprentice with the understanding that you would be taking part in some
girl-on-girl action or something like that.
Then there was the person that invited
Stasy up to their
yacht, supposedly to show how they had it all decked out. I was interested in some ideas for how to
decorate mine, so I went along. Of course the ship was empty and they began to strip their character down to the bra and panties. I wasn't used to the layout of that ship yet, so I ran around for the next few minutes searching for the escape pod while they typed "Touch me! Please touch me!" over and over.
I personally have no problem with people who want to
cyber on their characters. Nor do I think it particularly matters what sex/gender the people are behind the keyboards. But I wasn't interested in doing that. I thought that this must be what it felt like for a woman that was hanging out with someone who they thought was just friends to suddenly drive to a cheap motel without warning.
After awhile it seemed like having the /rp tag up was more or less an invitation to do cybersex, so I completely dropped it and focused on
PvE. I wanted to make all my toons the best possible and start making more credits. Even though
Stasy had around 500 million credits in her bank, by SWG standards of those days I was merely upper middle-class and my other characters were sort of poor. Having given up the trader profession I moved to one of the other avenues of wealth:
loot. PvE players by far seem to be the easiest to get along with, perhaps because the only thing to check your ego against is the
NPC and
AI. If you
fail in PvE, you usually only have yourself to blame. Of course instances were a group effort and sometimes
pickup groups (PUGs) could lead to frustration among players but it barely ever boiled over into name calling. There was the one time that I witnessed when someone was called a "nigger" for fucking
up during the
Exar Kun heroic but I'll get more into racism later.
Another avenue for credits was being an
entertainer. Ents gave out a
buff which was vital for any player taking part in PvP or in any serious PvE. You could find ents in the
cantina usually 24/7. I played as an ent on my character
Anaha (later a
smuggler) and
Lithia for some time (later switched to
spy). To get buffed a player would watch the ent for a few minutes and then the entertainer would grant them the type of stats they wanted. It has to be a real person as
AFK buffing was not possible the way it was with
medics. In return the recieving player would tip the ent. It was considered bad etiquette for an ent to ask for payment up front and to tip anything less then the bare minimum of 10k (unless you were clearly new and had no credits) was downright rude.
But ent was the class to play if you enjoyed socializing. Generally you could do this through RP or otherwise. Either way ents tended to be the people with all the best info and gossip; they would know what guild had the most people, who recently left one guild for another, who had beef with who and if you tipped high enough what buffs your enemies were taking. People would sometimes do nothing but log in and chat with an ent all night and often it had nothing to do with RP at all. Sometimes people just wanted to shoot the shit about whatever (Chuck Norris?).
9 times out of 10 if your ent was a sexy female human, Zabrak or
Twi'lek wearing the
Oola nylons and dancing seductively the player would watch your ent instead of the
Wookiee guy playing the
narlogon. Not only did female ents get more viewers generally they tended to get higher tips on average. Further, ents that were
known or
thought to be female
IRL got exceptionally higher tips in general. Before you think that this was some type of benefit of being female
IG or otherwise remember that the males are mostly doing this for the perceived benefit of getting in good with the ent. Not too mention the amount of creepy messages and being creeped on female ents would receive in general. So even if they did receive more you have to bear in mind they put up with a lot more too.
It was not uncommon for female ents to get 1 million credit tips or more. This was like the SWG equivalent of a rapper like
Rick Ross making it rain at a strip club. The reason rappers like Ross do this is not purely out of the goodness of their hearts, it makes them feel good and builds their status. Some ents would have a list of the top tippers in their player bio and to have your name on one of those lists was part of building rep. I'm guilty of having
Stasy drop 5 million on a popular ent once, just to get my character's name on her list.
In some ways I think it is virtual transphobia. Instead of people learning to appreciate and have fun with the characters they find interesting and/or visually appealing people act as if the person behind the keyboard being actually female is more "pure". In some ways it is a like a trans person being judged by how "passable" they are. We can't always help it when it comes to what we find attractive, but unfortunately many of the reasons we find some people unattractive are superficial and socially constructed. People should work on overcoming such boundaries.
One time I had
Stasy wearing a turban and sand cloak at Chulman's. I was called a barrage of racist names like "Paki bitch" and "terrorist" via /msg all of the sudden out of nowhere. It was one of the very rare occasions that I had saw any racism in SWG. Though there was a few people that would call someone "nigger" if they felt like the were not putting in their fair share during group heroics. Equating Black people with laziness is a common part of the systemic racism in that exists North America and elsewhere that perpetuates white privilege by helping to secure the best employment positions for white people. This type of racism against Blacks and other
PoC is so bad even the bourgeois instituted
Affirmative Action (Employment Equity in Canada) just to try and level the playing field.
Xaos Kun, probably the most notorious player of SWG
was often called a "Chinese kid" because it was implied that he did nothing but play the game all day, lived with his mother and cheated to win. Because apparently that's what Chinese kids do.
I eventually moved all of my characters to Starsider which had become
the server to play on. I began to do mostly PvP and as you might guess the sexism and misogyny got worse. Now up to this point I had never used the voice chat very much. I never denied being male but never specifically mentioned it either. But since I wasn't doing RP anymore I didn't need to stay in character. Voice communication did help coordinate in PvP so I picked up a headset and little by little people got to know me more personally.
However before it was known who I was behind the keyboard I received a lot of hate from people I rolled over in PvP. I can tell you this: a lot of dudes do not like being beaten by someone they think might be a girl. I know this because 9 out of 10 times when I would PvP on a male character like
Bereskoc and beat someone I would simply get a /msg like "GF" (good fight). But on
Stasy it was a different story. I got a lot of stuff like:
"reported for cheating"
"fucking
buff whore"
"e-bay jedi cunt" (implying that I must have bought the character levelled by another player, likely a male)
"stupid bitch
LoSing" (in other words I should stand still and "fight like man")
"you must be an ugly cow"
And so on.
On average I got more million credit and higher bounties on any of my female toons, but most especially on
Lithia when I had her as a spy, because people hate stealth classes. When I rolled with
Stasy as a DSJ /
Beast Master blend I got the most amount of hate though. Getting killed by someone with an unconventional setup (a girl and her
kitty cat) was too much for some to handle. I mostly PvP'ed alone though sometimes in groups. Anyone who observed me closely would see, however, that it was simply about tactics and timing. If my
Category C GCW and Category D buffs were on cool down, for example I would back off. Stay near the NPCs in invasions, etc. then go on the offensive when the timers were done.
Then there was the one guy that threatened to actually hunt me down and rape me IRL. I ended up in a PUG with him one day several weeks later and when I called him out over voice chat he left the group.
But this is the type of shit that women and girls have to put up with IRL. I have two daughters, but I've been lucky enough to never experience either of them coming home crying and telling me about something like this happening to them. It probably has, but they chose to keep it to themselves. What I experienced was really just a fraction of what is going on out there and I had a huge electronic barrier between myself and the perpetrators that were hating on me. In the end I was able to /ignore them and move on.
Star Wars in general is progressive when it comes to most things and
there is some same-gender romance in the Legends. SWG should have gone a step further with this
the way SW:TOR did. During the
Ewok Love Fest one of the quests was to pair couples. This was a great opportunity for SWG to implement some same-gender romance but instead if you tried to pair two females or two males the NPC would just say "I'm not interested in a same-gender relationship."
Classism did exist a bit in the game; if you happened to be an O.G. who had been around awhile it was likely you would be richer; likely a
billionaire. But anyone in SWG could get far by working hard so mostly people had an equal opportunity (in as much as anyone in a market economy can). However the
Trading Card Game did allow people the chance to get special loot by purchasing packs with real currency. Even though all of the loot was aesthetic and didn't give any real advantage to the player, someone could still sell those items for IG credits; even though you weren't supposed to people did it anyways all of the time. Some of the rarer items sold for quite a bit; hundreds of millions of credits. I admit that bought and sold some of these items myself.
This meant someone with a lot of money could translate their IRL currency into IG credits by purchasing packs, though the loot cards were random draws. This did have the effect of boosting the SWG economy because in theory a player rich with IG credits would want the to buy the rare item and the person who sold it would then use the credits to buy items crafted IG by players. In a way this gave the opportunity to some newer players to catch up to the veterans by getting the gear they needed, which then would allow them to participate in heroic instances and PvP, which meant more players on the field and so on.
In conclusion, I think MMO(RPG)s like SWG can be a great way for people to explore another gender, "gender roles" and sexuality. A lot of this can be done through RP but people really need to cool it with the sexism and misogyny. Many roleplayers have to become more open and creative and stop coming off as creepy perverts who just want to cyber all of the time if they want their community to thrive. Some of the people who PvP need to stop making assumptions about who is behind the keyboard and hating on women is not kewl.
Marxists should encourage equity and be at the forefront of calling out bigotry everywhere, including in games. Any type of discrimination that exists IRL is bound to appear in any online game. But people need to call it out when they see it. Don't tolerate sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
ever! We can't always count on admins but you can shun people from taking part in group play and /ignore the assholes who display such behaviour.
Take a lesson from Caiden and just play the role of who ever the fuck you want and not worry what people think. Play to have fun!
