I was inspired to mull over this by a piece in Critical Miss, where the author stated that he never lets players cross gender with their characters. What, never? Never at all? Not even hardly ever? I can't see me lasting long in his group, since females constitute about half of the characters I run. More than half, actually. But not all. Well, not quite all...
Certainly some players seem to have problems. I could mention a guy that I will refer to only as Dave, though he does also have a surname. Dave only ever ran male characters, usually Chaotic Neutral sneaky little thiefy types with no scruples whatsoever. Until the day came he decided to get adventurous and rolled up a Swanmay. You know - Good alignment, looks pretty, eyes brimming with tears, turns into a big white bird. Result - the sneakiest, littlest thiefy-type Swanmay that ever left all her scruples in the reedbed. Dave admitted it quite openly - he couldn't run female PCs, or at best he could only run them as male PCs with bumpy bits.
And there was another Dave, who also had a surname, who only ever ran females. They were all Lawful Good, no matter what alignment was on the character sheet, and they all looked like mail-order fashion models. We knew that because he had pictures of them stuck on the back of his character sheets, clipped out of old Marshall Ward catalogues. Betcha didn't know that female paladins wear pinstripe trouser suits with padded shoulders? So he couldn't run female characters either, only two-dimensional idealisations of women. (To his credit, he did admit it).
I, of course, did not fall into either trap. I knew that roleplaying represents a marvellous opportunity to explore the mystery of the opposite sex and expand my understanding of the other half of the human race. Or indeed the elven race and all the others. My first triumphant foray into this exercise in broadened empathy was a Traveller character called Anne S Thetik, who you might deduce had some medical expertise. This is not impossible, but I can't say for certain because I don't remember too much about her. She definitely put her vacc suit on at some point, but that's not particularly outrageous in Traveller. She only lasted one session anyway.
My first Real Proper Female Character was Paeony Willowhair. She was a halfling, a thief/mage (we ignored race/class limitations, like all sensible people), and ... a lesbian. Aha, you think, a randy nympho mini-dike. Not at all, that would be gratuitous stereotyping and shallow characterisation. I don't do such things. Paeony was a perfectly normal girl, just like any other hobbit with a +2 spetum, and went steady for ages with a very nice NPC druidess called Polly (who was Lawful Good, no matter what it said on the character sheet, and probably wore a shell suit with matching handbag to keep her mistletoe dry). They would have had a long and meaningful relationship but for one thing. Said druidess kept on getting kidnapped. It was great the first time - Paeony could fight like one of the Furies to save her beloved from the clutches of the Nameless Forces of Evil, and she did. What's more she won. It was okay the second time. After that it began to wear a bit thin. I mean, it's one thing to come home and find your other half isn't there because she's out shopping or working late, but when you know she's missing because the GM's run out of fresh plot ideas you begin to wonder if the relationship is worth all the effort invested in it.
So, in a dramatic and rousing scene of role-playing intensity, I told the GM to piss off, and a beautiful love affair was over.
Just to prove how deep and realistic things got, Paeony even cheated on Polly. Yes! But this was no sordid affair of the flesh, oh no. You see, Polly was a druidess, and revered all things natural. But when Paeony hit 5th Level she was entitled to a free 3rd Level spell and after long and careful deliberation (about 0.02 seconds) plumped for Fireball. And she had to try it out, didn't she? So when Polly wasn't looking, Paeony snuck out of town and vaporised an innocent bush. Any shallow pseud of a roleplayer would have had her feeling guilty for this gratuitous bit of pyromania and hammed it up to the nines, but I was concerned about realism and so had Paeony feel not the slightest scrap of guilt whatsoever.
Most criticism of male players running female characters seems to be levelled at the way those characters are nothing more than stereotyped bimbos with oversized mammaries, thereby betraying the player's shallow misconceptions about women. Such characters, say the critics, are not remotely like real women. Well, all I can say is that Throsidianakha was not a stereotyped bimbo. For a start, she was a dwarf. For another, 'Sid' wore a false beard and always talked in a gruff voice that didn't half hurt the throat. And the other players never realised that 'he' was really a 'she'! Not even when I failed a surprise check and let loose a falsetto scream which quickly descended in pitch (like the stoning party in Monty Python 's Life of Brian), which I did loads of times, nor did they ever attach anything to me constantly patting my own (real) beard to keep it in place. So, no stereotyping there, I'm sure you'll agree, so she must have been at least something like a real woman.
Sexual fetishism is something I think should be strenuously avoided at all costs when running a female character. So when I had one who habitually carried a bullwhip, you can bet your life there was some other reason. You'd be right, too, because with her floppy wide-brimmed hat and obsession with ancient ruins, Mandy-Anna Joan was no 'Randy Mandy' but a perfectly reasonable half-elven archaeologist adventurer. She was also the only character I ever ran who ended up pregnant, and all I can say is it was brilliant. No matter how dire the situation, no matter how fervently the other characters would call out, "Mandy, help us, the orcs are attacking/we need this rock rolled aside/the helpless puppy is drowning," I had the perfect excuse to stand back, look innocently shocked and say, "What? In my condition?"
But ... fantasy is fantasy, nonetheless, and hence a little too divorced from modern ways of thinking. When we started playing the Star Wars RPG, I could roll up a truly liberated woman, completely severed from all the Boris Vallejo garbage that hangs over the swords'n'sorcery genre. Lin Lithgow was her name, and she was the legacy of feminism epitomised. No cliched nurturer was she, because when we got to Endor her eyes started rolling like a pair of fruit machines and little credit signs fell into place as the magic words 'fur trade' settled in her emancipated mind. Then she got captured by the Empire, and proved she was definitely not a shrinking violet like certain princesses I could mention. (The Empire didn't actually threaten to blow up her home planet, but if they had I'm sure she'd have let them. Just so long as she wasn't on it at the time.) Two other characters broke into the base to rescue her and this was her undoing. It went like this:
First character (having just fumbled Demolition skill roll):
"How many charges shall we put on the door?"
Second character (doing no better): "I dunno. How many've we
got?"
First character: "About twenty."
Second character: "That should do it!"
Lin Lithgow: "I'm hiding behind my mattress." (OOC
aside to GM) "It worked in the spaghetti western, you
know..."
GM: "The charges do 1d6 of damage each. Two of them take out
the door. The mattress absorbs a third. Lin, you've just taken 17
dice of damage - what's your Strength?"
Me: " Er ... 3d6..."
And then it was back to the fantasy, with my determination to explore every last corner of the labyrinthine female psyche quite undiminished. I had noticed, for example, that all female characters run by male players (and female players, come to think of it, which is a bit odd if you ask me) were a bit above the norm when it came to looks. They might not all have been Lawful Good necromancers wearing a floral-print skirt with matching sleeveless blouse, but they did tend to have the kind of face and body that could model for the Mail on Sunday Magazine. So when I created Vanessa, I went to the 'Description' box on the character sheet and wrote "Pigging ugly." Not content with doing things half-heartedly, I gave her diction to match. Vanessa didn't just drop her haitches, she hurled them to the floor and cracked the flagstones with them, in a shrill whining tone that could etch her name on the blade of a Sword +1/+3 vs Lycanthropes. Strangely, none of the other player characters liked her. None of the other players liked her. Come to think of it, the GM didn't like her either. Just goes to show how conditioned they were on class and gender issues.
I must confess, I did slip up a bit with Gail. She was just another elven fighter/mage who could shoot well from cover, use her spells to get the drop on the enemy, all the normal boring common-sensical routine player character stuff.
Moreen O'Donerty was of a far higher calibre. Being a bard, it made sense for her to sing her spells, and I cunningly filked from all the old Irish folk tunes I could remember. Captain Kelly's Kitchen proved the most versatile, but I used the other one as well. And Moreen fell in love. Ah yes, she did indeed, for sure. With Sir Brian. He who could no wrong, could say no word out of place, and it was plain from every gesture he made that he returned her love a hundredfold. Shame on all those who said he was a cheap charlatan masquerading as a noble framed for a crime he never comitted. He was a worthy lover, proud and yet modest, so modest that he kept trying to stop Moreen proclaiming his valour in verse after verse that extolled his every exploit.
However, gritty realism had to come to the fore when it came to a game of Twilight:2000, so Evelyn Hetheredge-Whyte (B.Sc, Metallurgy, Oxon) did the British Army in general and the 17th/21st Lancers proud. The situation was clearly far too grim to be left in the hands of (shudder) Americans, so it was a good thing she was there to point everyone in the right direction. An irksome responsibility, but then no one else in the party had played hockey for Roedean and it would be a bit much to expect a lot from them. They certainly didn't know a natural leader when they saw one, so it was a bit of a jolly bad show all round. (People got on better with my other character in this campaign. 'Big' Bertha Koethe was a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Austrian girl - always cheerful, ever affable, never turning down an opportunity to pursue her Neo-Nazi ideal of shooting the shit out of all the scummy slavs infesting post-apocalypse Poland...)
When we started playing SpaceMaster, I was immediately aware of how this system really opens up the role-playing opportunities. Why have a two-dimensional sordid-male-fantasy Amazon Mercenary when you can go for something really challenging, like an award-winning interior designer called Keanna Millet. (Keanna being an anagram of Anneka, and millet being a wholegrain cereal. Like ... rice. The perfect personality for a mission to seek and destroy a ruthless gang of space pirates, I'm sure you'll agree.)
Which finally brings me to my current brace of cuties ... I mean, deeply developed three-dimensional female characters. We're back playing AD&D again, so Lucana is just a fighter who knows she's cut out to be a hero. My dice haven't twigged this yet, so she hasn't quite got around to do anything really heroic, but she's trying. (The other players agree, she really is trying.) Longthumb is another hobbit, who seems a bit fickle with her affections. Sooner or later, the latest female character to join the party gets to realise that there is a 3'3" bull dike following her every step, gazing up at her, adoringly, like a wide-eyed puppy pleading for a bonio. Not that Longthumb ever does anything untoward. She doesn't get in the way, she doesn't have casually straying hands, she doesn't voice any thinly-veiled suggestive remarks. She just somehow manages to be ... well, there. An unmovable force in a very resistible object.
But the best - the very best - female character I rolled up sadly never got played. To explain her origins I have to digress a little. Being a bit tired with the same old hackneyed demihuman races, we'd got into the habit of pillaging the Monster Manuals for a bit of innovation. So it ended up with a situation where Paeony, on yet another quest to find her kidnapped Polly, was a good head and shoulders above everyone else in the party. There was a brownie, a pixie, a sprite with a cockney accent, and an atomie. And then Gavin had this brilliant idea, the most brilliantest AD&D character concept I have ever encountered. I forget the guy's full name, but it was something like Juan Pedro Domingo something something something etc. So he was Mexican, right. And a fighter, if I recall correctly. But the brilliant bit was the race - Juan Pedro Domingo was a Mexican fighter leprechaun. Who wore a full size sombrero, so all you would see would be a giant hat bobbing across the floor. Like I said, utterly brilliant. And I was so captivated by this concept that I just had to create his sister, Juanita Francesca Isadora Bella Bella Renata Linda Paella Caballera (I've got an O-Level in Spanish, you know). Alignment - chaoteec! Main weapon - a blowgon, and also a clob. Class - houri! Yup, a sultry femme fatale. Of course, I was sensible about it and gave her hefty penalties for trying to seduce anyone over nine inches tall, but the only characters worth running are the challenging ones. I saw a great future lying ahead for Juan and Juanita, a mind-blistering saga of adventure, romance, tragedy and impeccable shoe repairs. This was going to be the campaign to top all other campaigns before and after.
And then the GM said, "No." (Perhaps he was afraid we would upstage his new barbarian NPC in her pastel beach shorts and halter top.)
So ... who says male players can't run female characters, eh?