The Inimitable Tiff

For a number of us, erotic roleplaying is a double-edged sword. It is, for some, a path to sexual freedom and a means of enacting another significant dimension of a roleplayed character’s life. But it is also an exercise fraught with a myriad of pitfalls created by the institutional sexism that still haunts many gaming and geek spaces.

Rather than have this piece entirely in my own words, however, I wanted to give voice to actual ERPers who are women and/or feminists, or people highly sympathetic to feminist ideas. This idea came about during a personal conversation with one of the people I’d interviewed. As we got to talking about our experiences in gaming the issue of how difficult it can be to roleplay a strong female character who is also sexually active came up; we discussed it for a good couple of hours, discussing the links to dominant cultural ideas about women’s sexuality, or as Jessica Valenti might put it the ‘he’s a stud, she’s a slut’ double standard. It operates heavily in the world of roleplaying as well, and to me it became important to not only speak to this issue but to let others speak to it- the often invisible women and feminists who ERP.

Holy cow, ERP is so not my bag but damn these ladies are smart. I love reading stuff like this. So awesome that it’s just right there on the internet, not tucked away in some academic journal like the dusty 20th-C feminism we studied I was in school.