Again with the gender thing...
Aug. 16th, 2010 11:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strangetomatoGender is weird, huh?
I've noticed that people on lj (and other places online, I assume) tend to make something of an issue out of people getting their gender wrong. Someone made a secret about me at one point, saying that they always thought I was a guy, and I wonder how they thought I was going to react to that. I don't really care. If anything, I think it's nice to be anonymously without gender on the internet, and I usually don't select a gender when given the option in profiles and such. If people don't know, then you don't have any of the baggage that comes with it. It's the same reason I use SO instead of husband. Husband feels like such a loaded term to me.
I see people rushing to correct people when they get the gender of a simmer wrong, whether it's themselves or someone else. I notice, too, that it's always males. That's not surprising. It makes sense, given the predominantly female nature of the sims fandom (and fandom in general). We're going to assume y'all have ovaries unless we're told the difference. But why is it so important to correct people?
I was curious about it, so I thought I'd ask (rather than make a simsecret or some such nonsense). For those of you that have done it (and I know a number of people on my flist that have), why do you feel the need to inform people that you or someone else is a male? Note that I'm not here to pick a fight or anything of the sort. I'd just like to hear your side of it.
(Oh, and... for the record, fanseelamb is a female. :P This one seems to come up over and over again.)
And another thing...
I've always been one of those people that tries to be conscious of the gendered messages I give to children in the way I talk to them, like not telling girl's they're "pretty" while telling boys they're "smart" and crap like that (which people do ALL of the time, if you listen to them), but then I noticed I was treating Petey (my first male cat) in a distinctly different way than his big "sister," Suki. How much of that is personality, and how much of that is me projecting? (He's a total Momma's boy, by the way. :P) It's crazy how we slip into these things. The cats are both spayed/neutered, so it's not like they even have any sex-based behaviours to speak of. And they're cats! Do they even have gender?
What do you think? Have any thoughts or interesting stories to share?
I've noticed that people on lj (and other places online, I assume) tend to make something of an issue out of people getting their gender wrong. Someone made a secret about me at one point, saying that they always thought I was a guy, and I wonder how they thought I was going to react to that. I don't really care. If anything, I think it's nice to be anonymously without gender on the internet, and I usually don't select a gender when given the option in profiles and such. If people don't know, then you don't have any of the baggage that comes with it. It's the same reason I use SO instead of husband. Husband feels like such a loaded term to me.
I see people rushing to correct people when they get the gender of a simmer wrong, whether it's themselves or someone else. I notice, too, that it's always males. That's not surprising. It makes sense, given the predominantly female nature of the sims fandom (and fandom in general). We're going to assume y'all have ovaries unless we're told the difference. But why is it so important to correct people?
I was curious about it, so I thought I'd ask (rather than make a simsecret or some such nonsense). For those of you that have done it (and I know a number of people on my flist that have), why do you feel the need to inform people that you or someone else is a male? Note that I'm not here to pick a fight or anything of the sort. I'd just like to hear your side of it.
(Oh, and... for the record, fanseelamb is a female. :P This one seems to come up over and over again.)
And another thing...
I've always been one of those people that tries to be conscious of the gendered messages I give to children in the way I talk to them, like not telling girl's they're "pretty" while telling boys they're "smart" and crap like that (which people do ALL of the time, if you listen to them), but then I noticed I was treating Petey (my first male cat) in a distinctly different way than his big "sister," Suki. How much of that is personality, and how much of that is me projecting? (He's a total Momma's boy, by the way. :P) It's crazy how we slip into these things. The cats are both spayed/neutered, so it's not like they even have any sex-based behaviours to speak of. And they're cats! Do they even have gender?
What do you think? Have any thoughts or interesting stories to share?
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-17 04:40 am (UTC)Although with the correcting thing, in my case, if I correct someone about gender it's for the same reason I'd correct them about anything else: What the person corrected said was factually incorrect, and if said person continues with this assumption, it might get embarrassing. XD I know if I had somebody's gender wrong, I'd feel very sheepish, even though there's no way of knowing. (This goes double if I'm talking directly to them.) I don't mind not knowing, if someone is deliberately obscure about it, but...well, my next point.
Contrary to the common internet meme that "There are no girls on the internet," I usually assume anyone I encounter online is a woman. (This is probably because my online experience is dominated by fandom and the feminist blogosphere.) If someone online isn't forthcoming about their gender identity, my mental picture of them is usually an androgyne leaning toward feminine. (Although I went back and forth on fanseelamb, because I thought she might have been a gay man and I'm not sure why?) I almost never take usernames into account unless they specifically denote gender somehow, and even then sometimes it's a curveball: I thought AlfredAskew was a guy, for about ten seconds before I read her MTS profile.
Also, I'm not following you officially, I just realized. Mind if I friend you?