# [SOCIAL-SUMMARY] Gender RL vs. gender in-MOO

"Walter A. Aprile" (aprile@nl.cs.cmu.edu)
Wed, 30 Aug 1995 17:25:35 PDT

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    Hello,

     I posted two questions on the subject about 10 days ago,
    so now I'd like to summarize the answers and try to reach
    some conclusions.

    The first question was :

       Do you have any policy that enforces that the gender
       people use in your MOO must match the gender they
       have in Real Life ?

     There is a consensus that somebody's RL gender is hir own
    business, and that no MOO ever does or did concern itself
    with ensuring that the .gender property has any relation
    with RL.

    The very idea of such a policy is actually perceived as

    -stupid : why bother with gender matching, if we are not
     going to deal with age, religion, marital status, ecc. ecc.

    -useless : why would anyone want to do this ?

    -impossible to enforce : how can you check the gender of someone
     who is on the other side of the Atlantic ?

    and even downright obnoxious. kmp@harlequin.com made the point
    that:

     This is probably the closest chance many guys ever get to feeling how
     irritating it is to be pestered sexually on the basis of so arbitrary an
     issue.  Why remove their opportunity to step into someone else's shoes and
     learn what a hassle it can be?  Or for that matter, the opportunity of a
     woman to step out of her conventional role and interact for a while
     without the "benefit" of such attention.

    and joeshaw@eskimo.com wrote that:

     I think that playing a character of the opposite sex would be an amazing
     RP challenge.

     So, it seems that among MOO administrators more or less everybody thinks
    that the idea sucks (BTW I agree).

     Now, why did I ask that ? Some weeks ago I felt like socializing and
    chatting, and so I logged on an unmentioned talker. I picked the
    F gender pretty much at random. Several happy connections followed,
    and everything was fine (I got occasionaly pestered, of course).
     Later on, it happened that one of the wizards realized that I am
    male. All Hell broke loose.

     I was really surprised to see my character erased by the same wizards
    that had been quite friendly up to that moment. It has been a painful
    moment, since I try to observe etiquette and netiquette.

     Now, I don't give a damn about that place. The funny thing is that
    nowhere in the player registration section they said that they do have
    such a policy. It turned out that to them it was "obvious".

     Since in my MOO there is no such a policy (I usually change gender
    at least once a day, and I even become plural when I feel really grand),
    I wondered what was the norm. Thus the question.

    Conclusions: There are users and administrators out there that believe
    that players in MUD-type environments must have the same gender that
    they have in RL. I'd advise everybody to put some sort of warning in
    the player registration process, and explain what to expect.

     Followups to this discussion should go by email only, since it has
    been pointed out that this list is not appropriate for social issues.
    (Question: where does one discuss social issues in MOOs ?)

    Thank you,
               Walter

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