#y’all need to stop acting like all men are disgusting because it seriously hurts some people | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

astoldbysteph · 3 years

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We’ve all seen them. I’d like to say that they lurk in the shows, waiting to see which innocent character they’ll discriminate all in guise of ‘creative freedom’. But the thing is, these character don’t hide in the shadows, they’re out in the open, being lauded by people that care more about ships than protecting the people around them and ensuring everyone is comfortable, enabling harmful portrayals that I really believe should be a thing of the past.

In this tungle hell post, I’ll talk to you about sexist characters, and why we need to stop allowing them in your groups.

This post is specially dedicated to the admins such as the people that ran @elisabethisland, to the people that write sexist, assholish male characters, and those who happily write against them and have enabled them for years.

So, what is a sexist a character? At least from my experience, most of them have been cis, usually straight, men portrayed as big shots with jobs that give them massive amounts of power, although there is also a classist trend of playing roughnecks that don’t know any better and thus they treat women like objects. Things only get worse when people use faceclaims of color to play them, but that’s something for another day.

These characters are also usually portrayed as playboys, which is all fine and dandy since they’re hyper cool big shots that can do whatever they want, and while there is nothing wrong with portraying serial daters as long as you do it with respect, the problem with these dudes is that they use their status as a playboy to interact with a lot of female characters they end up demeaning.

That is something that needs to stop.

The rpc heavily shifts towards romantic ships, especially m/f pairs formed by cishet people so people tend to give writers who write misogynistic men since people that write cis dudes they can ship with are a very small minority. And, ugh, ignoring the problem behind people’s obsession with male chasing and playing their cishet girlies against every cis dude they encounter (because male chasing has a layer of transphobia that also should be called out), there is absolutely NOTHING that justifies writing men that are downright misogynistic and bigoted.

NO, you are NOT more mature than the rest of us because you think you’re shit shit since your character refers to women as sluts, whores, and whatever other names you can think of while treating them like they’re below him.

NO, portraying a man as a woman hating raging asshole is not something to be proud of, nor is it something to boast about, especially when you play him against characters that are subjected to be mistreated by him.

NO , telling you that you should not play men that are sexist and don’t respect women is not infringing your creative freedom. You are not writing 50 shades of grey fanfiction for yourself only, you are ROLEPLAYING. You are writing all while collaborating with someone that does not deserve to be exposed to male chauvinist that get off on mistreating women, especially since the majority of roleplayers are women and believe me, we see enough of that sexist shit on the daily so some of us would like to not also have to deal with the same short dick smegma smelling assholes we avoid irl on our dashes.

NO , you don’t have to make your male character an abuser or a bigot just because you are playing a villain. You can play an antagonistic character without incurring in flat out writing about them discriminating others and then putting it on the dash for everyone to see. Put a little more effort into your characterization and just don’t choose the easy way, because nowadays the easy way is just the way of the people that have no respect for others.

NO , just because you add trigger warning to your characters your actions are suddenly okay. I mention this because there is a very poignant example on what elisabethisland’s players did when people noticed that they had a group of men that were being downright disgusting towards the girls they were writing against, and admins happily approved of this behavior and even participated in it.

Before they deleted everything and erased all evidence, those gross players literally tagged their stuff with things like sexism and misogyny, only to follow up the triggers with tags were they expressed their annoyance over the people that “complained” and forced them to start tagging their shit.

And the sad thing is, they’re not the only people doing this. They weren’t the first to be doing this, and they sadly won’t be the last. But maybe we can try to change that?

If you play male characters, I urge you to think hard about their development, use this chance to play them as good men. Even if they’re not overly happy or have a lot of issues and even trauma, that doesn’t mean that they must act like total assholes that put down women as a hobby. There are so many ways to give your characters depth without making them horrible people. Please stop exposing people to horrid dudes that are one second away from hurting women. Stop normalizing these sort of portrayals or let’s take advantage of the fact that we re literally in control of what we are writing so if we want, we can use our writing for good.

And this goes to women writing them... Really guys, really? There is no excuse to continue perpetuating this sort of stereotypes and continue putting this kind of men out there. If we could (sort of) put a stop to people playin full blown racists, maybe y’all can rethink your actions and stop playing these assholes? LOVE YOURSELVES!

If you write against male characters, value yourself and your characters more and refuse to enable writers putting out disgusting portrayals of misogynistic men, especially if you’re thinking of doing it or have done it just to have a ship.

I personally believe that ships shouldn’t be the most important thing in roleplay, but I am not your boss so I can’t stop you from only wanting to roleplay your self inserts against male fcs you find attractive. BUT, what I can do is to implore you to at least think about changing your ways.

Listen, we’ve already established that you’re only here to play self inserts against hot dudes. Okay, cool. That means you have all the power so seriously, why in the world would you want to play a portrayal of yourself to interact with a raging, abusive asshole?

Come on guys, let’s not traumatize or retraumatize ourselves and at least try to encourage people to play the men we’d like to see and not the men that have hurt us for centuries.

#rpc #rpt #rph #steph helps #sexism tw #misogyny tw #wntta

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