wickedqueen.net

Really EPIC asshaberdashery, though. Srsly. And it happened at WisCon, my first and favorite con, by way of a miserable self-hating gamer girl named Rachel Moss, who as it happens is also a graduate student at my own institution.

You may want to take a moment to catch up with the Angry Black Woman’s comprehensive explanation of what happened. (And skip to the bottom if you have no idea what WisCon is.)

I use the term “gamer girl” above with a healthy dose of irony–Moss does seem to indicate herself that her primary fannish interest is in game, and she is female, but in general I try to take care with my application of the label “girl.”* Here, I mostly want to highlight something that I see as a problem: many people who have reported on the Incident and/or discussed its ramifications have identified her as “young” or “very young,” often in an attempt to render her in some way pitiable–not excused; very few people are on board for that, but somehow slightly less responsible, or at least that’s how it reads to me.

Moss is 25 years old. She’s a year younger than me. She’s a graduate student at UW-Madison, just like me. Unlike me, she apparently struggles with an eating disorder** and has for many years. Like other posters on the subject I hasten to clarify that I think it is very sad that she has an eating disorder, and should never be grounds for attacking her–or, conversely, seen as an insult when I note that she has one; she has spoken about it publicly and it is, if I may say so, profoundly fucked up to act like saying “eating disorder” is equivalent to “her mother’s a whore.”

However, having an eating disorder and being an asshole are not the same problem. They do seem to be at least peripherally related; Moss hates other women, and what she hates in them seems to be all the things she most fears to see in herself: fat, “inadequate” or somehow unconvincing gender performance (as I’d interpret her transphobia), disability, etc. Claire Light puts it beautifully, and acknowledges some unpleasant similarities inside her own head that I would bet almost all women in this culture have experienced:

But watching fat people get smacked down makes me want to cry because while most of me is an ally, a small part of me still tugs me towards the smack-down crew, and how can we fight this when I’m also the enemy?

There’s still a little voice in my head that agrees with such awful people as Rachel Moss when they say awful things about fat people. I’ve come close many times to stomping that little voice out, but it’s a tough one. It’s the same voice that tells me I’m fat, but it’s okay as long as other people are fatter. I know a lot of you out there know that voice, even if you won’t admit it.

Rachel Moss knows that voice, only she has completely failed–if she ever tried–to stomp it out. She’s let that voice take over, and it’s a monster’s voice. That’s what she’s turned into for the time being: a monster, who’s projected her hatred of her own body onto the bodies of others, to get some relief. Who can really doubt that that’s what’s happening with women who hate on fat women?

I definitely know that voice. I have done the “fatter than me” count in a room more than once. But the thing is, I don’t agree with it. I know the voice is fucked up and wrong. Even if–especially if–I start feeling like I believe it. Recently, I was discussing weight and body image issues with one of my favorite WisCon goers, and I noted that the big problem I have in entering discussions like that is that people often assume that because I am a small woman with a fairly intense workout schedule, I am judging them for lacking my “discipline” or however you want to term it. I’m not. I do sometimes get a little nuts about a couple of pounds of personal weight gain, mainly because I put on about 40 in my first two years of grad school and I recall that it starts with two or three, and also I prefer it when my clothes fit. And I like being strong, and knowing that I can bike 50 miles, etc. But this is my personal standard. It takes a lot of work. When other people are not as fit as me, I don’t think they are lazy slobs; I figure they have other stuff to do, because, eschewing false modesty, most people are not as athletic as I am.*** Most people don’t spend the time on it that I do, most people don’t bike 100+ miles a week, most people don’t do weight training ~3 times a week. Why the hell would they? Keeping in top shape is kind of like chasing storms or keeping a log of all the trains that come through town: important to some individuals, mind-bogglingly boring and/or insane to most.

So I don’t have an eating disorder, but I can get a little hyperfocused sometimes. On myself, not other people. And other people do have eating disorders–a depressingly large number of them, in fact. So far, only ONE person has come to WisCon two years in a row with the express purpose, on her second visit, of taking photos without permission and posting them online to mock people for being fat, disabled, trans, not white… In her original post, from what I saw, Moss was mostly focused on misogyny and fatphobia, but she didn’t shy away from asserting her authority to racially categorize all participants and thereby delegitimize their identities, and the racism that followed from the SASS crowd is, to a sheltered white academic, truly staggering.

I think Claire is absolutely right, both in her assertion of the psychological motivation behind Moss’s acts and also in her implication that Moss is very different from most women, who hear the voice but who do not develop a full-blown case of demonic possession by the patriarchy. For fucksakes.

A number of people have reposted and analyzed Moss’s opening remarks about the con–the con that she, remember, paid registration fees to attend not once but twice, although as a Madison resident she probably didn’t pay for lodging:

[WisCon] is like any other sci-fi con, except that well over half of the attendees are female, about a third of the panels are political, there is no gaming, and absolutely everybody is a huge bitch.

LiveJournal user hederahelix noted that contrary to her third assertion, Moss was sitting next to a gamer at one panel at least–since she sat next to hederahelix, and hederahelix is a gamer. I was on a panel about gender swapping in gaming during which there was a great deal of discussion about both MMOGs and table-top RPGs. At that panel, we also discussed the sexism and misogyny inherent in gamer culture on a number of levels: the automatic equation of healers with women, the reaction of a mostly male player base to the hiring of a female community manager at NCSoft, the way that male players often attempt to roleplay women (and absolutely refuse to hear “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” from actual women)…

I said that Moss is not particularly young, and I don’t think she is, at least not in any way that excuses or even explains anything. But she reminds me of an angrier and more poisonous version of 14-year-old me in the sense that she is obviously looking for an environment where she has no competition for male attention, and I think what she hates most about WisCon is that it both fails to provide much in the way of that commodity AND fails to acknowledge that commodity as inherently valuable.

When I was 14, I was the only female member of the RPG club at my high school. I was a sophomore, and for an entire year it was me and a bunch of role-playing guys. The next year, four or five other female students joined, and at the time I would have preferred it if they hadn’t. I was younger than everyone else, I was funny-looking, and I wanted the gamer guys to myself. And even then, I didn’t try to chase anyone away, I didn’t give up on it myself, I didn’t turn around and attack the other women in the environment. I thought a lot of crazy things at age 14, and I made a lot of bad decisions. But even then I realized that other women were not the automatic enemy. And I was not a complete asshole.****

On a more positive note: the thing that I love most about WisCon is the way that its attendees celebrate ourselves. It is, I suspect, this very quality at which Moss grits her teeth like the Grinch looking down on Whoville.

Many people have commented that the photos held up for mockery by Moss and others show people who appear to be having a wonderful time. Many of them are photos of my friends: hilarious, kind, wonderful, brave people. People who are not afraid to BE. WisCon is one of the few places where I never feel like I am Too Much: too smart, too weird, too flamboyant, too chattery…

Not that I make much effort to tone these qualities down in Real Life; I have pink hair for godsakes. But at WisCon, I feel like people GET it. Instead of mere wide eyes and the occasional burst of helpless laughter, my ensembles garner heartfelt appreciation. No one wonders WHY I am wearing a lovingly restored lime green go-go dress with hot pink fringe dangling big plastic flowers. They just marvel at the matching go-go boots. They appreciate my nerd/folk mix CDs (speaking of, I met my goal of distributing 100 of them this year).

So on the one hand, I’m not much moved by people pushing pity for Rachel Moss, who set out to deliberately humiliate and harm a number of people whose happiness I value highly, and who is DEFINITELY not sorry about anything other than possibly getting caught. But on the other… okay, yes. I do pity her. I pity anyone who can stand two years running in the middle of all that exuberance and Not Get It, like Kay with a chip of ice mirror in his heart. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then why come back? There’s got to be something there that she wants, and she hates everyone who has figured out how to let themselves have it.

I love WisCon. I am extremely bummed that I missed almost half the con laid up with the Wischolera (and how awesome is a group of people that collectively comes up with the term “Wischolera”?) but I am already looking forward to next year, when I’ll be living right by the conference hotel again. I just don’t have much time to spare for people whose lives are governed by fear.

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ETA: It occurs to me that many people may be totally confused about what WisCon IS. It’s a feminist science fiction/fantasy convention held in Madison, WI over Memorial Day Weekend every year. It attracts a lot of academic types, enough that there is an academic programming track; I presented a paper on gender-swapping in MMOGs there a couple of years ago, and it was really nice to be talking to an audience that didn’t need a 15-minute primer on “What is a virtual world” before I could get to the substantive content of my paper. A lot of very cool people attend from all over the country and even outside the US, and of course they (and the late night parties at which we get to hang out and drink ever night) are really the best part of the con. Some of us are, I suppose, “huge bitches”; others of us are really fairly small bitches with tall shoes to compensate.

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*Not quite as much as I do with the term “lady”; if you hear me use this word or its plural, you may assume that I am mocking some misguided person’s ideals of “modern chivalry.” This is pretty easy to cue into given how much I tend to extend the “a” when I say it.

****At age 14, I admit, no one is a complete NON-asshole either.

Yes. The bottom right corner of this PS2 advertisement does actually say Because your girlfriend bores you shitless. How you managed to actually GET a girlfriend remains a mystery.

This is just another manifestation of how the general gaming culture, even as it is propagated by the people who ostensibly want to sell it to anyone who will buy, is extremely hostile to women. You hear these marketing people flapping their jaws about how they think women just don’t like SHOOTING ALIENS or something, and THAT’S why they don’t game (putting aside, for a moment, the many women who do–they’re still vastly outnumbered by men outside of casual gaming), and then they turn around and produce this shit. Gee, I wonder why women think they wouldn’t have a good time gaming. Could it be because half the market goes out of its way to suggest that all the OTHER gamers are witless misogynistic man-children?

You may recall NCSoft’s addition of female NPCs to City of Heroes–specifically, non-combatant air-headed gangster girlfriends. Do you notice a common theme here? Oh, those women! They’re boring! Because they’re stupid! Because all they talk about is clothes and stuff! Silly women! Can you believe they got the vote?

Well, to be fair, there’s a second PS2 ad suggesting that sometimes women are boring because they talk about other people’s interpersonal relationships. And in case you didn’t click through, here’s that CoH screenshot:

Pretty much the only women with whom you interact, apparently, are “girlfriends.” (Note the NPC’s designation in that screenshot.) Women exist in this world solely in relation to men (and not even in any other relationship other than “annoying pet”; what, gamers don’t have MOTHERS?), who apparently tolerate them for sex, since they’re so damn boring otherwise. All these women think about is their appearances, probably so that they can keep the poor bored guys enthralled for some more of that sex, which I’m sure is really awesome and satisfying. Naturally such boring and stupid creatures wouldn’t have any interest in the manly pursuit of GAMING.

Hey, Sony? Maybe what with getting your ass handed to you by Nintendo and all, you might want to consider some new tactics that don’t specifically alienate one of the major groups Nintendo is wooing. Or, you know, I guess witless misogynistic man-children ARE a niche.

Thanks to belleweather for the link.

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ETA: This is not to suggest that I think that clothes are stupid and/or boring. No one who has ever met me would credit it. This is, of course, the flip side of “women only talk about things that are frivolous and boring”; that is, “if women talk about something, it must therefore be frivolous and boring.” I find clothes vastly more interesting than cars or football, and you know, pretty much everyone HAS them. We won’t go into how extremely cute my outfit is today, even though this is my blog and anyone who doesn’t like it can take their PS2 and go jump in the lake.

ETA: NOTE TO POTENTIAL EMPLOYERS AND MY PARENTS: No, I was not participating! Read the footnotes, geeze. It just HAPPENED TO BE amateur night.

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I have mentioned before that African American women love my hair. Just yesterday I was walking down the Infinite Corridor and was informed by a young black woman (she looked about junior high age): “Man, that makes you HOT.” Something along those lines, anyway. I remember thinking that I don’t understand how the kids talk these days, although it seemed generally positive.

At any rate, I have identified another group with a special appreciation for my hair: exotic dancers.*

Proportionally, exotic dancers seem to love my hair even more than African American women. I see a lot of the latter in any given day and only a small number of them say anything about my hair. Of course, I recognize that dancers are working for tips. They also got to see my hair under a black light, a condition in which it is particularly striking.** Unfortunately, I suspect I will never be able to conduct a truly controlled study to determine, for good and all, who likes my hair BEST. But I will say, over half the professional dancers I encountered last week were very enthusiastic about it.

The amateurs, not so much. An interesting difference between professional dancers and the women who participate in amateur night is that the former see a group of women and make a beeline for them, whereas the latter LITERALLY cannot be paid to come close.

Another thing that dancers like (in addition to my hair, the nominal topic of this post in case you lost track) is $2 bills. Another member of my party knew this and came prepared. I realize that $2 bills are worth twice as much as $1 bills, so they’ve got that going for them, but dancers seem to love them far out of proportion to their doubled economic value. One woman told us that they are lucky, which I of course found subculturally fascinating.*** Another woman told us that she gives them to her daughter, a fact that I suspect she would never have disclosed to a group of men–that’s not what they’re buying.

At one point, I was in the bathroom and heard two women discussing how “there’s nothing like a strip club to make you feel bad about your body, god, I need to do some crunches!”

Huh, I thought. You’d think amateur night would be more of a consolation than that.

I mean, no, I do not think I am as hot as the PROFESSIONAL dancers,**** especially not the one who was double-jointed and could cross her ankles behind her head. But this is kind of like acknowledging that I could not take an Army Ranger in a fight. They’re PROFESSIONALS and they’ve dedicated way more time to their pursuit of choice (being smoking hot, killing people with spoons) than I am willing to put in, so it’s not like there’s any SHAME in it.

Anyway, I have my hair. Even the dancers are impressed.

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*My information from a friend of mine who worked for several years in the profession, as well as what I gleaned from that Lerum 2001 article I read for the social psych prelim, suggests that dancers do not like being referred to as “strippers.” I have to agree that the term eclipses a truly impressive degree of athletic skill, not to mention various other professional competencies that most people probably don’t think of when they hear “stripper.”

****But I am totally as hot as the amateurs. The main difference between us, I would venture, is that I recognize the fact that I lack the necessary social skills for success in exotic dancing. Nudity? No problem. Making nice to strangers? Not so much. Also, I saw one of the amateurs almost fall off the pole while hanging upside down. I try to avoid any job that entails the risk of cracking my skull open, naked or clothed.

It still fucking kills me that I missed him when he spoke at UW last year.

Thanks to sonatine for the link. I have to agree with her fervent desire for George to be our gay boyfriend.

Also: this seriously AIRED on ABC? For serious? When?

A Theology of Cheap Beer

(One thing I don’t like about Cat and Girl is that doesn’t provide permalinks until a new comic is up, so I’ll have to remember to come back and fix this link tomorrow. ETA: Whew, I remembered.)

It’s so fucking true, though. They did start remaking My Little Pony and Carebears and Strawberry Shortcake (although the new version’s hat totally sucks), but they’re remaking them AS children’s toys, not in the kitschy/trendy mode that boys’ toys get rereleased in. He-Man and Thundercats now have multiple seasons out on DVD, but I haven’t seen any Rainbow Brite or Gem anywhere, and I somehow doubt that people are primarily buying Thundercats for kids.*

Admittedly, the former shows figure larger in my personal childhood than the latter, but man, what I wouldn’t give for a CD of the music from Rainbow Brite for the purposes of ironic rocking out. I do own the soundtrack to The Chipmunk Adventure, you know, and if it came out on DVD I would snap it up in a HEARTBEAT.

You do get a little Carebear and Rainbow Brite stuff at places like Hot Topic, but it seems like it doesn’t stay out very long. I still regret not buying a Rainbow Brite hoodie at Ragstock like two years ago, because I haven’t seen one since.

Just to be a little hypocritical here, the new Transformers trailer IS totally fucking awesome. God, I can’t wait. Optimus Prime, my first love, now in LIVE ACTION.

And in another vein altogether: We have a history: a web card

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*So far, the only thing that has stopped me from buying Thundercats on DVD is a) it is super freaking expensive and b) I know, I KNOW that I would not really enjoy watching it as a 25-year-old adult-type person, and I don’t want to trample on this fragment of my happy childhood.

So Mark Foley–that’s Mark Foley (R-FL), despite the O’Reilly Factor’s bold, thinking-outside-the-box damage control strategy of captioning him as (D-FL) in its coverage–is being hung out to dry, and not just on the internets.

And don’t get me wrong, he deserves it, although I’m pessimistic about party leadership really being held accountable for its equally damning failure to do anything about him during the long period before the story went public in which they totally knew all about it.

When the news first broke, a friend expressed skepticism about how inappropriate Foley’s behavior had actually been, suggesting that it was really just another gay witchhunt. I didn’t think so, but I could see how someone might: the first chat excerpts were pretty tame. It was only subsequent excerpts that made it abundantly clear that no, Foley really had been making professionally and ethically indefensible sexual advances on 16-year-old pages. However, I’m really annoyed by the constant tossing about of the term “pedophilia” here.

Hanne Blank puts it very well; most of what I have to say would be repetition:

The tangle of age, agency, majority, and what defines a “predatory” or “exploitive” relationship has always been a very difficult and sticky one as far back as the age-of-consent reform campaigns of the 1880s. Determining who is and is not a child, who is and is not capable of consent, and where the legal lines should thus be drawn in relation to sexual communication and interaction between persons of disparate ages has never been cut-and-dried.

My considered opinion, after having spent most of the last four years of my life working on issues pertaining to the sexuality of minors, is that when it comes to sex, Americans define “child” for the convenience and comfort of adults who are terrified of adolescent sexuality.

It’s hard to imagine a situation where I would think a 16-year-old high school student having a sexual relationship with a 53-year-old politician was not, to a greater or lesser degree (mostly greater), exploitative. Similarly, high school teachers who have sex with students are behaving extremely unethically, although, depending on the state, not always criminally. These are cases where even the absence of a direct supervisory relationship does not erase an extreme power imbalance–and certainly, when you’re talking about teenagers, age alone is a big part of that imbalance (although not all of it). As Hanne points out elsewhere in the post, teenagers, while physically mature sexual agents, are just learning how to handle themselves AS sexual agents. The gap between a 16-year-old and a 26-year-old (let alone a 52-year-old) is much bigger, qualitatively, than the gap between a 26-year-old and a 36-year-old.

Being sexually attracted to a 16-year-old, however, even if you are a 52-year-old Representative who should really, REALLY be able to control yourself sufficiently not to send that 16-year-old dirty text messages, does not make you a pedophile. In general, we hope that 52-year-olds, while they may find some 16-year-old bodies attractive, would prefer to have actual sex with people to whom they are a LITTLE more intellectually and emotionally similar. This is, of course, open to the snarky observation that some 52-year-olds are still pretty emotionally similar to high school students, but obviously we hope that most of them have not made it into Congress.

So yeah, a lot of people should lose their jobs over this, and it’s possible that some criminal charges might also be appropriate, depending on how much coercion Foley may have employed. And obviously I don’t put a lot of credence into Rush Limbaugh’s theory that evil lascivious teenagers conspired to ruin Mark Foley’s good name by drawing him into temptation. But I also think that this culture’s refusal to recognize adolescent sexuality, to the point of insisting that being attracted to a 16-year-old is pedophilia, is pretty fucked up.

“I feel like something LIGHT and BRIGHT tonight.”

“Oh, baby, I want to taste the rainbow!”

From “Analyzing Gender in Public Places: Rethinking Goffman’s Vision of Everyday Life” (Gardner 1989):

…access information demonstrates the creative strategies of women who must deal with public places, which Goffman’s view neglects, along with the heavy obligation on women to remain apparently unavailable.

…

The first notable conceptual absence in Goffman’s sociology of public places was, for me, the reality of street remarks, that is, free and evaluative commentary that one individual offers to an unacquainted other in public places (see Gardner 1980). As common an occurence and possibility as this may be for all women, it is one that, by Goffman’s analysis, is delimited to the young and attractive and carries with it no dark contingencies.

…

For young women especially, however, appearing in public places carries with it the constant possibility of evaluation,, compliments that are not really so complimentary after all…

…If the woman has ratified the comment before it becomes clear that it is no compliment at all, she will feel taken advantage of all the more. …When a women responds with ‘Thank you,’ as in compliment etiquette among the acquainted, a man sometimes escalates into outright suggestiveness or abuse. A middle-aged man in Santa Fe pleasantly tells a young-middle-aged woman how lovely her dress is. When she thanks him, he offers to take the dress off for her.

…

Access–in Goffman’s sense of openness to and availability for interaction–is the theme in urban gender relations whose importance both for women and men Goffman underestimated.

Gardner repeatedly makes the point that women are faced with contradictory constraints on their publlic behavior in wanting to appear, at least, not rude, but also wanting to avoid negative attention, primarily from men. The old bait and switch compliment routine is, I think, a particular problem; I frequently receive remarks on my hair in public spaces, and obviously I don’t find this surprising, given that my hair is bright pink. If I felt that all remarks on my hair from strangers were an imposition, one could reasonably argue that I should stop dying it pink.

The problem is that I am always conscious of the possibility for uncomplimentary escalation when the remark comes from a man, based on experiences like having a guy on the corner near my apartment tell me, “Nice hair,” only to follow up with (after being thanked, no less) “Does it match down there?” paired with a vulgar gesture. I feel more comfortable about male strangers on the street when they are with a woman, which I think I tend to interpret as a de facto check on any such behaviors.

But anyway, going back to the point of the post as projected by its title: people frequently complain about the widespread use of cell phones in public, particularly by people walking on the street. Certainly you will see hoardes of cell phone users at any given time on State Street; I frequently call people when I am walking between campus and home. This behavior is often decried as an undesirable consequence of technological saturation in our society.

Gardner notes that many of the women she interviewed engaged in extremely complex charades of male companionship, going so far as to keep men’s outerwear in their cars and shout to imaginary boyfriends when opening their doors–strategies designed to create the impression of close accessible masculine aid, should the need arise. Women may also use “involvement shields (Goffman 1963) such as dark glasses to maintain an integument against which street remarks may not penetrate or through which their effect cannot be observed.”

Cell phone use actually combines these two types of strategies: on the one hand, the woman is clearly talking to someone, who might be expected to provide aid from afar if they detected aggression against their conversation partner. At the same time, being visibly involved in a phone conversation creates a definite interactional barrier; I have at times purposely employed it to avoid being panhandled.

Ironically, if one observes that this behavior is concentrated among young women, as I have a general sense that it is, it might reinforce perceptions of young women as a group as being self-absorbed and flighty/gossipy/superficial, unable to detach themselves from their phones even when they ought to be more considerate of others in public. In fact, young women talking on the phone as they walk may well be quite conscious of their environment and feel a real need to display a level of detachment.

Lady gamers gets voice changer (Thanks to j00j for the link.)

The software comes with presets which turn lady voices into big deep Blessed-esque ones. You can also create your own new voice by mucking about with pitch and timbre settings, and other features include advanced tune and noise reduction.

In essence, “AV Voice Changer Software is somehow a unique product for female online game players who want to prove that playing online games is not a pastime for men only, and that their talent can make male partners goggle.”

If you want to make men goggle, visit Audio4fun.com to download a free trial.

So, let me get this straight. Female gamers “have a common concern about the long-lasting existence of ‘male chauvinism’ in the world of online games” (I like how that’s in quotes, like we imagined it or something), and so they’ll be interested in voice-altering technology that will allow them to conceal their gender even when using applications like TeamSpeak to coordinate group play.

Well, okay, maybe, although avatar gender-swapping doesn’t actually seem to be a massively popular strategy among female gamers (Yee 2003); many of them do cite male chauvinism as a problem in MMOGs, but are more likely to choose a less sexualized female avatar like a dwarf or Tauran than to play a male character. In my experience, “average” (i.e. sexualized) female avatars get treated as “female” unless they do a lot of work to explicitly contradict the gender claim made by the virtual body, so there’s little reason to expect that a woman who doesn’t play male avatars is going to feel compelled to masculinize her voice in TeamSpeak.

But the BEST part here is how the makers of this software assert that by going so far as to masculinize their voices lest male players find out that they’re GIRLS, female gamers will prove themselves! Yes! Nothing will show people that women can game like CONCEALING ALL SIGNS OF THE PRESENCE AND PARTICIPATION OF ACTUAL FEMALE GAMERS.

It’s like they’re from Bizarro World or something. How does one argue against a basic lack of any critical thinking skills?

I discovered last night that the correct spelling of “Marie Laveau” was not taken on the Pinnacle server on City of Heroes, so I created an illusion/storm controller by that name for a little evening play.*

Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen, is a lightish-skinned black woman with the “big” afro (it looks like a pretty normal afro to me):

I started a pick-up group in the interests of leveling faster. One of the first members, a male blaster, showed up at the mission door and said to me, first thing, “Nice hair.”

Then he got wiped out by some mobs that I’d just warned everyone were hanging around the mish door, but I just thought it was interesting that obviously “black” hair got a comment when I have never, in months of play, gotten a comment on the pink “wild” hair of my primary character, Andromeda Sparks:

In fact, the big and small afros are pretty much the ONLY obviously black hair available in CoH. There are dreadlocks, but they’re short and not immediately distinguishable from the “punk” style. There are several braided styles, but they’re more in the Princess Leia mode. Given the attention many players pay to asthetics, I think it is not unreasonable to assume that a lack of “black”-appearing hair leads to fewer black characters created, although of course the majority of players are probably white, too.

My general impression of CoH is that the character population is overwhelmingly white–genderswapping is rampant, but raceswapping seems uncommon. This may be partially because, as noted, non-white options are extremely limited in character creation. There’s probably also little incentive from a mechanic standpoint; that is, people are unlikely to give preferential treatment to non-white characters the way they are perceived to do so for female ones. Actually, I’m a little surprised I haven’t seen more creepy fetishization of Asian women in that direction–this may come back to the difficulty of building non-white characters.

Anyway, we’ll see how things go with Marie. Race online is understudied.

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*Some people express dismay that I keep creating new characters. I didn’t want to play Jillian without my twin, and I don’t like to play Andromeda on the laptop, which is what I use in bed. And I’ve kind of gotten into controllers playing Jillian, so I wanted to try another one.