The Only Girl On the Team

Exactly two weeks from now, Your Future Overlord will turn seven years old. Somehow it comes as a shock to me. Logically, I know that's what happens. Children grow older, get bigger. I did. You did. We all started as tiny human creatures at some point in the history of the world. I don't think we ever quite experience it, though, until we watch our own tiny human creatures morph and stretch over the years to become bigger human creatures.

Some things about my tiny human creature haven't changed. She's still pretty girly. She loves pink and purple, dresses and skirts, curls in her hair, and fake sticker or clip on earrings. The idea of having holes punctured in her ears for real ones makes her cringe, presently. That's one of those things I still leave up to her as her choice. Some day she may decide she wants piercings. Or she might not ever. I'm fine with that. It's her body, and that's what's important for her to learn. Her body. Her choice.

There is one thing that caught me totally by surprise, however, and that's when she came home from school one day at the end of kindergarten with a certain paper. I thought it was a cute little project. On the paper the kids were to write ten things they'd like to learn to do. The shocking part, to me, was that my daughter had listed football.

It's funny, because we're not a sports household. We don't have cable TV, mostly because we decided it was a waste of money to have five billion channels devoted to the sports we don't ever follow. I was never a big fan of sports in my younger years and would often openly criticize them. It still doesn't make sense to me that we pay people billions of dollars to entertain us. That goes for the movie and television industry too, really. But I digress.

All summer long, all over Facebook, I kept seeing advertisements for sign ups for youth football. I think they might have even sent a flier home at the end of her kindergarten year. I took my time, continually asking her if she was sure she wanted to play football, and not do cheer leading. I tried very hard not to make it sound like I was pressuring her to do cheer leading instead, as was strictly enforced on girls when I was a child. I didn't want to influence her decision one way or the other, but I did want to be certain she knew what she was talking about and not going to change her mind on me halfway through the year like she does way too often.

So! The first chance I saw to sign my girl up for flag football, I did. I held my breath. I anxiously awaited the scathing email telling me that girls could not play football. After all, that's what I was told consistently, to my aggravation and lament, when I was a child.

Girls can't play football. Only boys can. Girls have to be cheer leaders. Girls are weaker than boys. They might get hurt. And: Girls can't play baseball. That's the boys version. You're a girl so you have to play softball.

Like boys don't ever get hurt playing football, but that's okay because boys can take it! My fellow sisters of the world, I hear you laughing and scoffing and sense you collectively rolling your eyes while you think, "Yeah, buddy, well I'd like to see you endure childbirth." I know, I know. Also: I hated softball mostly because the ball was bigger, and I have little hands. I thought it was logically easier for me to handle a baseball. It was also intuitively easier for me to overhand throw than that weird damage your rotator cuff underhand thing they do in softball. But what do I know! I'm a girl!

What I was not surprised to discover on the very first day of practice was that Your Future Overlord was the only girl on the team. Not only that... There were two flag football teams, and she was the only girl on either one. So far, she's the only girl I've seen on any of the flag football teams in a whatever mile radius in the "league" we play in.

I even prepared her, because I know my girl. For the longest time she was apprehensive about working with boys. When we first started Jiu Jitsu (yes she does that too - maybe I'll write another article about that), she cried whenever she was paired with a boy. It's something we struggled with for a long time. Expecting more emotional outbursts, I told her that it was likely she'd be the only girl, that mostly boys play football and it was likely the entire rest of the team would all be boys.

Well, I was right about that. To my tremendous relief, she took to playing with them right away without any issues. They're all around the same age as her, 5 to 6, and welcomed her as one of their own. The coaches have been great with her too. Either I prepared her with pep talks well, or she's gotten over her anti-boy tendencies. That's entirely possible. She has been making more and more boy friends along with her never-ending supply of girl friends. This girl just makes all the friends.

Another thing I noticed right away was the glimmer of pleasure in the eyes of all the moms when I introduced myself, saying, "I'm the mom of the only girl on the team." All these women, just like me, feeling the chains of oppression shatter. I could see it happening in their eyes, in their smiles. I was also pleased to hear how open they were about how more widely accepted girls playing football is now was as opposed to how it was then. Pleased, but also sad. My inner child from years gone by resurfaced to sob at me about how unjust the world was to her.

The hardest part in all this hasn't been fighting for my daughter's rights, or having to bludgeon someone for the first sexist remark made, as I had imagined, but instead reliving my own past where opportunities were prohibited me on account of my sex. (Not gender. We all know that's another matter entirely.) She and her little sister have asked me if I played football when I was a kid, and I've painfully had to tell them no. Even harder is explaining why. They don't understand.

"Well, when Mommy was a little girl, girls just weren't allowed to play football."

"Why?" I tell them all the time that boys and girls can do the same things, so why was it different for Mommy?

I want to tell them, "Because the world is a stupid place." That's the first thing that comes to mind. That and some pretty scathing opinions about world religions and their philosophies on gender roles which have shaped society to where we are today, but we'll not get into that right now.

Let's focus, instead, on the small victories. Like this one here:

Baby girl, you can do whatever you want to do. (Within reasonable legal limits of course.) I won't let anyone ever tell you, as they did me, time and time again, that girls can't.

People ask me if I'm going to let her play football again next year. I hate that question. Why wouldn't I let her? Because she might get hurt? Break a bone? Oh no! If I worried about my kids sustaining an injury, I'd never let them out of the house, and I'd make sure their environment was made solely of cushions. No sharp edges anywhere! No access to the kitchen! They are their own people. The only way for them to learn and grow is to experience life on their own terms, even if that means getting a little scrape every now and then. If she wants to play football again next year, she can. I'll fight tooth and nail anyone who tells me otherwise.

However, now that she's seen the cheer leaders in action she's expressed an interest in doing that next year instead. I like cheer leading even less than I do football, but... I'll support her in anything she wants to do, and try my damnedest to keep my opinions to myself. Or, at least, strictly ramble about them here on this blog which she won't discover until several years from now. By then she's likely to understand the real answers to the question Why? a lot better anyway.

Move Over, Boys. Girls Game Too. Get Over It.

I'd like to preface this article first by thanking my good friends Matt and Adam for not even knowing about, yet alone believing, the bullshit claim that "girls don't have enough imagination" to play role-playing games. Second, I'd like to thank my friend Stubby for not being a skeevy, perverted, desperate bastard when I met him and he became my first Dungeon Master.

Last night, before I went to bed, I quickly scanned my Facebook wall to see what I had missed while my husband and I watched a couple movies. One of my friends had posted an article that caught my eye, but I didn't really have the time to read. I saved it for this morning, and what I read disturbed me.

The article, #NOTALLROLEPLAYERS: A HISTORY OF RAPEY DUNGEON MASTERS, reinforces a distressing stereotype that I've been reading about with alarming frequency all over the Internet. That stereotype seems to suggest that all men are sex-crazed lunatics who can't keep their fantasies to themselves and that they feel ridiculously threatened when females venture into their games. So much so, in fact, that they feel perfectly entitled to sexually harass and physically threaten the lives of women both in the industry and in the playing field.

More and more articles are being written about this sort of thing, where women are starting to finally speak out about their bad experiences with gaming groups. I've heard about this shit occurring most frequently in video games, particularly MMORPGs and shooter games like Halo, where female gamers are continuously harassed by male gamers the moment they find out the person behind the avatar or controller is in fact a woman.

I've never encountered problems like this before, personally. I think it's because I've almost always played male characters. Or maybe I just got lucky and involved myself in groups where none of the guys were at all interested in me sexually. Of course, it could also be that I also made it abundantly clear I wasn't available, let alone interested in any case, and, as my male friends have never been shy about telling me, that I'm intimidating. This amuses the hell out of me, because I'm all of five feet tall and a hundred fifty pounds at most soaking wet.

My first experience with role-playing came in the form of this game "Battle Masters" that my friend Matt brought over one day when we were 14. We sprawled the giant mat out on the living room floor of my house and played this fantastic geekery for hours. I think the spark that jump-started our delve into RPG-land was the fact that we were both avidly reading Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle series at the time. To this day it is still my favorite series and holds a special place of honor up on my desk shelf.

Around this time is when I first started really heavily writing my own stories, too. My friends Matt, Adam, Amanda, and I passed around a spiral bound notebook between classes during our high school career, taking turns writing bits of a greater story together. This, I've said time and again, was my first experience with free-form role-playing, in a sense.

Not long after we started rolling out the mat to play "Battle Masters" on the weekends and after school, Matt came over one day next toting a selection of manuals he had found somewhere. These books started off pretty simply as the TSR 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monstrous Manual. I don't know whose they were originally, but I do know that I still have them in my possession.

I spent hours reading over the material in those books, figuring it out. Matt and Adam were both as eager to play as I was, and they were both unanimously in favor of me, a girl, taking on the role of Dungeon Master. I know. Terribly unheard of, right? Girls can't possibly have "enough imagination" to play D&D let alone enjoy it, let alone be Dungeon Master.

My collection has grown significantly since then, and is nowhere near complete.

Since that time, I have played in several various tabletop adventures. Though D&D remains my top favorite, and I'm a vintage elitist snob who prefers TSR's 2nd Edition to anything Wizards of the Coast has pumped out since it bought the rights, I have also played in a few World of Darkness games such as Mage and Vampire. One of my past boyfriends was really into WoD, so I got a taste for that. I think none of his guy friends ever hit on me because I was his, though he never put me through the sexual fantasy ringer I've been hearing about in articles like the one I read this morning.

The fact that there are so many women and girls who experience sexual harassment online and off in their games really distresses me. Some of the best stories I've ever had to tell have come from my tabletop experiences. Stubby and I once talked about turning his campaign world into a novel, or book series, featuring his DM PC Dusk, our friend Matt's Nera the drow, and my gangly Gammaliel the Great, Master Illusionist! He's still my favorite ever played character in a game.

I also consistently tell people the story of my elven cleric, Hisael the Paladin Slayer. That adventure was probably the only one experience I had that made me uncomfortable, and it was mostly to do with the fact that the DM and 90% of all the other (male, every last one of them) players kept forgetting that my character was male and not female. The one stereotype that has always troubled me with these games is the limited imagination among the male population that seem to think a person should only play characters that match their real life gender, "so as not to confuse the DM."

The only guy present who did not keep thinking my character was female was the only guy present who was playing a female character himself. In retrospect, I realize he was playing a big-breasted stereotypical man-dependent, helpless mage, but... At least he acknowledged and remembered that just because I, the player, had boobs and a vagina did not necessarily mean that my character did as well.

Very rarely do I play female characters. Mostly because I've always been kind of male-minded. I don't like make-up or playing dress-up or the color pink. I like steak. I think the only truly female trait I have is my loathing for sports, but... My husband doesn't like sports either. That's just one of the many reasons why I married him. I am insanely happy to be with a man who doesn't have "The Game" playing in the background all the time on the television. In fact, right now I'm hearing Star Trek: the Next Generation. Awww yeeeah.

The point of all my rambling this morning is that... Some day I hope to share my love of RPGs with my daughters. I have big dreams of getting back together with Stubby and Matt and teaching our kids to play D&D, to run watered down campaigns and stimulate their imaginations. I've had giant foam polyhedral dice on Lilah's Amazon wishlist since even before she was born! And frankly I'm really disappointed that nobody has bought them for her as a birthday present yet.

I fear for my daughters' futures, though. I fear that they are going to suffer the same indignities many other female gamers are still stupidly facing today. I fear their only experiences with gaming are going to be limited to a small, cloistered, pre-arranged group consisting of my friends' kids, and that they won't be able to talk about their joy of role-playing (if they have it) with the larger community for fear of ridicule and scorn, and, worse, sexual harassment.

Amelia first discovers the manuals at 8 months.

Long before all this gender-stereotyping bullshit came to my attention, I was strongly defensive of role-playing, one of my favorite hobbies of all time. In high school, the negative fallacies I was most aware of were the ones claiming D&D was devil worship. I wrote a fiercely defensive essay on the matter, the only paper I ever wrote in which I got an F, because I had started off insulting everybody in the first paragraph. I still have that paper. I save it like a trophy. My grammar and spelling was perfect, but my tone was so aggressive that my teacher gave me an F and stern blue-pen talking to in the margins.

To all the ignorant people out there who spit claims of Dungeons & Dragons being devil worship, I have a few things I would like to say. It is time that your misinformed closed minds be opened up to all the facts. Evangelists and related religious fanatics, just hold your breath. Hear what someone experienced in the field has to say.

There is more to that essay than that. I wrote it in response to a bunch of idiotic propaganda I remember going around at the time, when the Internet was still new. I wish I could find the same video I'm remembering right now, but essentially it claimed D&D was a gateway drug to actual devil worship. As a non-believer and child of limitless imagination, I think you can probably guess how offensive I found that as a teenager. It ranked right up there with the absurd assumption my step-mother made from point A to point R (for ridiculous) that just because I wrote an X-rated note to my boyfriend (which his mother found) that somehow that meant I was planning to elope and get pregnant and drop out of school. I was insulted, to say the least.

I feel all my male geek friends should feel insulted, too, that there still exist skeevy assholes the likes of which are described in the article I linked to in the beginning of my post here. Sleazy, gross bastards who can't take no for an answer and give other male gamers, who are not at all as insecure as the stereotype, a bad name. It's sad, and not quite as funny as I'd like to say, that most of my online role-playing/writing friends are female. Even the ones who write/portray male characters, as I do, are mostly run by women.  I think because even I am uncomfortable playing/writing with men. At least... heterosexual men. My gay friends have never given me cause to feel uncomfortable, and that's sad.

I hope for a brighter future. One in which my daughters can take part in these games and past-times that I have so enjoyed most of my adult life without fear of harassment, without being made to feel uncomfortable. I hope, beyond hope, that they'll be able to log on to the next greatest installment of Halo for the Xbox Gabillionty without some dickwad telling them to "get in the kitchen" and "make me a sandwich."