From - Tue Jan 19 07:06:41 1999
From: Ragnar Fyri <ragnar.fyri@daf.no>
To: Josef Chessor <fuzzylogic@mudservices.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 08:37:03 +0100
Subject: Re: Hello?

'Twas the night before 18-Jan-99, and all through the net,
 not a creature was stirring, except for Josef, who whispered ominously:

>C'mon people, let's talk about something... anything... everything...

Anything?

Okay, remember you asked fur it...

SEX!

Okay, stop blushing! I'm not talking about adult activities, but the
character property  displayed in the middle of a typical WhoSpecies list.
I could have said gender, but that would have sounded less interesting. <g>

Anyway, at first glance the MU*s appear to be less male dominated than the
rest of the net. Sure, there are neuters and hermaphrodites who obviously
don't share that particular characteristic with their players (not to
mention twinks who can't resist the urge to answer the question about sex
with "yes please" or "not yet"), but surely anyone claiming to be male or
female must be so in RL as well?

Well, actually... A character's sex/gender is just a couple of settings in
the database record that makes up your character, and is as easy to change
as the colour of your shirt - in fact it's easier as sex/gender are separate
properties, while the colour of your shirt is probably imbedded in your
description somewhere!
And people not only *can* play with these settings - they *do*. Quite a lot
in fact. The "game" seems particularly popular among male players - in about
eight months on the mucks (and slightly longer on the net in generral) I
have only met one male character referring to his player as "she" and "her"
but several of the "opposite" kind that I'm either sure about because they
told me or suspect rather strongly for various reasons. [Just to mention
one, there are "female" characters who look more like a man would want a
woman to look like, than a woman would want herself to look like ....]

I have heard someone claim that as much as 70% of the "females" on FurryMuck
are male IRL, and while that number probably isn't exact, the phenomenon is
at least common and well known enough to make jokes about. (Like the FM
Drinking Game, where one of the conditions for taking a drink is when a
"female" turns out to be male IRL.) Personally I've stopped jumping to
conclusions - when I meet an alleged female on a muck, I take a look at her
desc, check her pinfo for URLs and keep her under observation fur a while.

I've got some more observations to make, but want to see if I'm getting any
reactions to this first and what you may have to say about it. But just to
round this off and give you a little more to think about: Yes, I'm "one of
them". If you've checked my furry site (See below) you will know that one of
my characters is a female squirrel called Waydya. She's one of those who are
pretty open about it btw - her pinfo ends like this:
(quote)
More about Waydya, her player and his other characters can be found on
the web at
 
http://members.tripod.com/~Skribenten/furry
 
(Yes, I said "his". Disappointed? <g>)
(unquote)

[If you do check out that site you will find that Waydya's gender is a dead
link. There's supposed to be a little article about the phenomenon there
but it looks like I need to think a bit more about the subject - and maybe
discuss it with someone to get some different views...]

-- 
We'll be right back after these messages.



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