The Gratitude Project again and again and again

The Gratitude Project was begun several years ago by a LiveJournal user called estaratshirai . The rules are simple. Every day between Lammas (August 1st) and Mabon (the Autumnal Equinox) one must find something to be grateful for in life. No repeats - one can be grateful to people more than once, but it has to be for different reasons.

Wednesday:

I'm grateful for the people who share my hobbies, and keep me from getting bored or lonely while Brian takes a vacation in California and I take an involuntary vacation from work due to health problems. Having people to connect with and have fun with without being out and doing harm to myself... it's good, and has been particularly useful this week.

Thursday:

I'm grateful to Stephen Batchelor, for writing honestly about dharma practice which doesn't include--and doesn't need to include--specious claims that fly in the face of established knowledge about our world. The fact that dharma practice can be taken and used as Siddhartha Gautama intended without accepting the assumptions of Hinduism which colored those lessons... it's given me a lot of room to grow, and it took a long time for anybody to really come out and say that this was okay.

Friday:

I'm grateful to Gmail for having a good spam blocker. I laugh at your Hotmail! Ha!

Roleplaying Characters and the Rape Fad

So... I know that on a lot of roleplaying boards, the way to have an edgy backstory for a tough female character is to say she's been raped. There inevitably will be at least a couple of characters like this (and should be, frankly, because it isn't uncommon).

What pisses me off is that on some boards (particularly one Star Wars board that I left a while ago), this is apparently the only way to create a tough female character or a fragile female character or... really, anybody with tits. Evidently the only kind of woman anybody can think of to RP is... well... a rape victim.

Disclaimer: I think that online collaborative writing and roleplaying is an awesome way to raise awareness and create teachable moments about all sorts of things that most people don't directly confront in their lives. Want to say something about racial inequality? A scifi setting is an awesome place for this. Want to say something about commodification of women's bodies? A well-written character who is or has been a slave, or who is tangentially connected with that whole messy business in Star Wars is totally doable and potentially hugely awesome, because it can get people thinking about things they're not ordinarily exposed to. It can also be a potentially-useful way for assault victims to work through that in their writing, and I get that, too.

It's gone too far, though. Somewhere a line was crossed. I've started being surprised when a player thinks of something to do in a woman's backstory BESIDES rape her. I can probably count on one hand the number of female characters I've RPed with from this place who were not raped at least once. Can't we think of something else for women to do in their lives besides be assaulted?

I mean, women do have other things going on besides being raped all the time. Sometimes we have other problems, or other obstacles, or even goals. Sometimes we even succeed at things. But from these characters all I see is rape rape rape rape. It's like every plotline in a female RP character's life is just a forgettable transition period between rapes.

Summary: Teachable moments GOOD. Rape as a shortcut to character development BAD.

Am I the only person who gets really pissed about this? It says something seriously creepy that nobody from this board knows what goes on in a woman's life or in a woman's head if they're not being raped.

I have no idea what to do about it, either. I don't want to tell people, "Some of you need to write this shit out of your backstories, because I'm sick of it and your little clone army of identical stereotypical rape victims is beginning to piss me off." But right now that is exactly what is going through my head.

An amusing quote about D&D alignments.

Ganked from this forum thread.

You Are Not Good. And Your Mom is Not Good.
"I have made mistakes in my life, but basically I think I'm a good person."

I'm sorry, but you are not a Good person. You go through your life, you don't stab anyone in the face, you don't break any laws, you don't take pictures of naked children, and… so what? You want a medal for that? Shut up.

The sad fact of the matter is that if you aren't exerting yourself for a cause, if you aren't exerting yourself for something, you aren't Good. You probably aren't Evil, but seriously: get over yourself. Before you can really get into the mind of a Good character you honestly have to come to terms with the fact that you, as a person, are probably Neutral. Your character is a much better person than you are.

The reverse is also true for villains, and should come as no surprise to people who play Evil characters, since most people don't consider themselves Evil. Characters are generally much more than the players who play them. Villains are blacker, heroes are nobler, and when you play one of those characters you should come to terms with that. Even though it probably hurts you a little bit to contemplate it, if you're going to even try to play a Good character you need to play them as a much better person than you personally are.

And this, people, is why most commoners are described as "neutral" or "lawful neutral" or "chaotic neutral." Nitpicking about the alignment system aside (and someone will post with it, so I'm acknowledging you in advance), this says something about people in general that sometimes needs saying. Everybody likes to think they're doing their best, and everyone wants to think this makes them an okay person.

But that's a different kind of "good" person than the kind of person who's risking something important for the sake of the prodding of their consciences. An abortion clinic bomber has more reason to believe in his/her D&D-classified "goodness" than most people, whether most people would agree or not. At least they've decided what they believe and are doing something about it, even if I occasionally wish an adventuring party would storm their evil black towers of misogynist self-righteous dickery.

To put it Walter's way, "Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, but at least it's an ethos."

Forced Feminization WTFery

Call me crazy, but "forced feminization" roleplaying boards like The D+X Institute strike me as super duper transphobic. I mean, sure, they're effectively fantasizing about being trans. But I don't think that's quite the same as respecting trans people as actual human beings the way cis people are "actual" human beings.

Overall, I'm not totally comfortable with the way transgendered people and gender dysphoria tends to get hypersexualized. The whole "it's all about chicks with dicks and how naughty and forbidden that is," because it wouldn't be naughty or forbidden if--deep down--people weren't still really attached to the transphobic idea that all of this is deliciously threatening. If trans people were just normal people, there would be nothing racy or titillating about becoming one.

There's also the fact that "forced feminization" seems to carry the same overtones as rape fantasies. "I want this, but I'm not allowed to want it because it's naughty and bad. Therefore I think it'd be swell if the choice wasn't mine and I wasn't accountable for it." Lots of women enjoy a good rape fantasy without actually having the conscious opinion that sex is bad, just as I'm sure lots of people on this board get off on forced feminization without having the conscious opinion that trans people are bad. More likely they're actually congratulating themselves on how cosmopolitan they are for creating a scenario where "but for the grace of God," go they themselves.

But y'know... just as there are implications that rape fantasies are reflective of anti-sex pressures on the people who have them (even if the people who have them wouldn't classify themselves as anti-sex), I get a real vibe that this whole thing is reflective of anti-trans pressures on the people playing there.

Maybe I'm prattling on about something totally obvious, but I'm trying to articulate this in a sensible way and I don't know if I'm succeeding.

I understand that the people on this board are--more likely than not--here to get their rocks off and not to explore the sociocultural implications of how the media (including erotica) portrays trans people. The hypersexualization is, whenever it happens, quite dehumanizing in the end.

Considering how rough trans people have it even now... I think they've been dehumanized enough. So this board bothers me.

But again. Fantasy is fantasy. People can fantasize about non-consensual sex without thinking it's right. I'm just not sure people can fantasize about being forced into a trans lifestyle without recycling a lot of old transphobic tropes. I think I'd be too worried about the cultural forces I was strengthening to truly enjoy a board like d-and-x.org.

That's the only drawback to being a progressive social scientist. Certain things become less fun once I start considering who is or might be harmed by them. Because, whatever people may say about me behind my back, I don't actually like people being hurt. The fact that I'd even have to sit and think about whether this is feeding into something nasty kills any potential fun... even if I were to decide in the end that I'm overreacting and being paranoid and nobody cares but me.

How do people feel about this? Trans issues get neglected a lot, and I don't want to do that to them. I don't want to miss a huge chunk of the injustices people perpetrate on each other, but I must admit that I'm not very good at considering these issues (or at least, I don't feel like I'm on steady footing here). Feedback?

"Leave me alone!!" "Wherever you go, everyone's connected."

Communities!

So, for a while now I've been sort of searching for an online roleplaying community that fits my needs, and the answer so far has been to spread myself rather thinly across many boards.

First, there was RPGWorldWorld, which is very much the anchor of my internet wanderings. It's where I started, and despite its slow activity and general lack of focus on play-by-post roleplaying, I think this one would hurt the most if it died. It was home, even if I eventually had to strike out elsewhere.

So then there was Hidden Realms, a very active forum with one of the tightest and most consistent fantasy settings I've seen. The writing is great, which generally makes it worth it to deal with one of the more corrupt staff establishments I've had the misfortune of being stuck with. To their credit, some of the staffers realize there are problems, and they have my gratitude and my sympathy that they're still being represented by a powermongering schemer and a couple of that person's flunkies. IC the place is great. OOC? Don't even bother.

An even more glaring example of the above is The Gungan Council, to which I will not even link. It is the only board that I have straight-up left due to the abusive behavior of several staffers combined with the enabling behavior of those who still have consciences left. Mind-blowingly active, but the OOC community is so foul that I am literally confused and offended at the very idea of participating there ever again.

After leaving TGC, I joined Chaos Theory. Eventually I became a staffer there, and helped keep our postcount up and some kind of a flow of new members through frequent activity drops. This forum is a high-maintenance girl, and a real pain in the ass to keep active. But she's my baby, and I still think she's got the potential to be the best Star Wars roleplaying forum around (if we could just break a few bad habits and convince a few more users to come where they'll be treated better).

And then! Yes, and then. I joined The Jedi Praxeum (not linkable because all the urls I have for it are dead). Chaos Theory was wearing me out, and I wanted to take a vacation someplace where I didn't feel under so much pressure to keep the place alive. Unfortunately, the hardline conservative member base and the irrelevance of all plots that did not glorify the site owner and his characters made me feel like this wasn't the place for me either.

Realizing that OOC community was extremely important to me, I started looking for places to discuss some of the things that matter most to me. Religion, politics, etc. I joined MysticWicks, a Pagan community so immense that I can spend most of my time in a single subforum and never feel a lack for things to talk about.

During the 2008 American Presidential Election, I also joined VQTE. It's a political community that's still getting on its feet, but it has an extremely attentive admin, which I've learned makes all the difference in the world. I post here partly because the place has a great atmosphere so far, and partly because I know how hard the admin is working, and I want him to know he's not doing it alone.

Then a player I met through TGC and occasionally still speak with through Chaos Theory linked me to another board. Empyrean Fates has that great gritty urban scifi/fantasy vibe that everybody loves, and an approval process to ensure that nobody has to write with half-assed undeveloped characters. The main admin seems chill as fuck, and the rules show a sense of self-reflective humor that I find refreshing and encouraging.

But you've seen how many boards I'm on. Whether I actually have time for this place as long as I am holding on to RPGWW, working to improve HR's political climate, sustaining CT with what sometimes seems like duct tape and sheer force of will, as well as participating on a religious and a political board, as well as being a very active blogger... I think I may have a full plate.

But we'll see. Next time I need a vacation, I may pop over to EF. I already have some ideas of cool things I could do there. All I lack is the will to table some other projects for my own sanity, so that I can recover some of the mana I've been spending all over the damn internet.