Choice And Enforcement

Most of my life, I want to spend in my home. I want to wear dresses and aprons and prepare food and clean. I want, most of all to mother. I want to feel my children in my arms, to love them and hold them and watch them grow. I want to be pretty, dressed up and I want to sparkle. I want a wedding where I get a beautiful dress and there are flowers about and all eyes are on how beautiful I am for a moment. I want to settle down and live my life without the sort of job that requires I leave my house. I want to leave the work up to Halley.

But I don't think all women should have to do that. Being born with a vagina doesn't mean you're required to want those things. You can want a childless life with a fulfilling job, and wear only pants and never so much as touch a stove and that's okay. I like that feminism is about choice. Even though I want to stay at home and raise children, I want to have the option to get a job and get paid the same amount as any man, and more importantly, I don't want what choices I am making consciously to be forced upon every other person with female reproductive organs.

Sorry if this post seems bizarre and obvious, but it seems like women who happen to choose a life that would be okay according to gender stereotypes rarely go out of their way to dispel the myth that they agree with them.

Where to Start?

I love harvest moon games. The first one I got was A wonderful life, for the game-cube, and I've expanded my collection since then, to have played at least until marriage in quite a few of them. Now, these are cutesy games. There's no fighting and no violence. It's a peaceful, maintenance type game where you take care of a farm. You buy animals, water crops, build friendships, and, mostly in some of the newer games, you can fish and mine to add to your farming or ranching income. So, this game isn't for everyone, but I love simplistic relationship building, and watching things slowly upgrade after in-game years worth of work. (Just to be clear, nothing I say below is to demonize Natsume, Nintendo, or anyone else involved in the creation, nor is it a dislike of the game overall. I like this game, and gender and sexuality issues aside, if you're the type to like nonviolent cutesy stuff, you should totally try out these games.)


But recently, I've been upset by the utter lack of possibility for any same sex relationships and cross-dressing. The specific to gender clothing makes me even more upset because in the instruction manual for animal parade, under the section explaining differences in playing as a boy or a girl, in an attempt to be funny, there is a statement that the main differences are clothing followed by "(duh...)" This bothers me actually a lot more than the lack of ability for clothing thought to be specific of one gender. The fact that it is considered such an obvious thing that it would be unthinkable to cross-dress makes me feel like crying. And the same sex marriage, because I like being a girl. I like it a lot. But I also don't like to marry the guys on these games. No, I'm not sexually attracted to harvest moon characters, but I just plain like the feminine ones better. They're cuter, I like them more, and most importantly, I don't see why it shouldn't be a possibility to build romantic relationships with same sex characters. So what am I to do? Well, my compromise is to play choosing a guy, and suspend my gender identity for a little bit. It's not that hard. But that's not what I want to do.


So what am I to do about it? I could write the company. It's been done. Apparently, our american gaming rating system would take the rating up to T or maybe even M if they were in a bad mood. So, there goes half of their fan base. So, what? Do I talk to the ratings company? I bet they do nothing if I do. Besides, they'll say they just try to reflect the ideals of parents. It's this, this little stuff right here, that makes me so upset about discrimination. 


Yes, it makes my blood boil to hear about kids bullied to death over their sexual orientation. But those are the sorts of things that are (ever so slowly) disappearing, and being condemned by mainstream media and parents. It's the things like childhood exposure to gay love (not sex, or anything sexual, mind you, hand holding and the statement of love's existence) not being okay, or the idea of a guy wearing a dress being laughably insane that make me want to curl up and cry.


It's because I don't know where to start with this. What do you do to change an entertainment form based on cultural support based on an entertainment form? It's so circular that I feel helpless to stop it. But, I guess I'm not the only one who wants these things to change. And cultural acceptance in general seems to be the way to go. So, I guess for now, I'll make you love me and put a friendly face on homosexuality, and try to help gender-queer, inter-sex, and transgender movements do the same. And that, along with identifying as a male long enough to play harvest moon, will have to do for now.