It's good to know that I never asked you joandsarah who I was talking to..sorry for the mix-up..what a relief that I never had to crawl under a rock when talking to you

Just call me Jo, it's down in my siggy below. Plus it's really easy to spell and remember.

I am a female as well, my name is actually Mariana although I usually go by "Mari". I had never thought about it before but it seems like nobody ever got my gender wrong before online? I guess I am quite obvious.

I'm curious now. Are we ever talking to Sarah?

@lauratje86 : Oh Laura don't abandon your Simmies! They'll be missing you! Back at the end of August you were thinking of playing the pre-mades in a historic setting. Did anything come of that? (Just hoping I can help re-kindle your interest.)

Back on the main topic (or at least near it), what took me by surprise at first was that so many Simmers are female. After all The Sims is a computer game, and my admittedly stereotypical picture of computer gamers was that they were male, and comparatively young. I remember hearing (probably on BBC radio) that more females were getting interested in computer games. They mentioned the game Pacman. (This wasn't yesterday!) But somehow it never occurred to me that The Sims was a game that could attract female players. I think I now correctly know the sex of most frequent posters here, but in my early days when I was downloading a lot of male clothing (I just couldn't imagine my boys wearing Maxis underwear!), it came as quite a surprise to me to slowly realise that many of the creators of that clothing were female. It's only recently that I learned that CatOfEvilGenius is female. (I downloaded, and installed, all her Oxford shirts for teenage boys, but only about two boys actually wear them.) The one that does come as a complete surprise to me in this current thread is SingleClawDesigns. Somehow I had you down as female and Australian! I usually look up profiles to check, so I guess I must have you mixed up with someone else. I also make the mistake of assuming people look like their avatars, so to me Jo you'll always be a lovely fluffy white kitten!

.....So I'm actually a Bulbasaur????

Yes you are! A nice friendly green one.

But I had to check your profile, 'coz I'm not very good at telling the sex of Bulbasaurs.

Pft - that's not old here.

Sarah actually has her own account here now. She plays sims 3.



That's what I was thinking.

It's true. I am the Grammar Nazi Cat!

I play RPGs and I automatically tend to presume that people are their character's sex. Of course, unlike me a lot of people have no trouble playing a char of the opposite sex, but even when I know someone's real gender differs from that of their char I still keep having to forcibly remind myself that there's a difference. XD

Thank you Andrew, I am happy to be thought of as a fluffy cat since I do love cats and have owned 3 fluffy ones.

I always play as a female character. I thought about playing Dragon Age as a male but... nah.

Male here. Can't say I've ever been mistaken for female.

You wouldn't happen to be the poster of this "Not Always Learning" story, would you?

I wouldn't be too sure about that last part; one of my neighbors is a man named Fran.

No I would not be. Never seen that before

*reads it*

I am a llama. A sexless, undead, overcooked one, even.

No, really, I have birthed three sprogs, so I am apparently female in the physical sex sense. Name is Katrina. I call myself female in the gender sense, but in all honesty, gender is just social conditioning that some people passionately cling to for some (to me) bizarre reason, mostly -- so it seems to me, at least -- as a reason to side-eye people who don't feel compelled to bow to social conditioning. My sexuality is kinda fluid, I guess. I like sex, and I'm attracted to people, specifically to their brains (smart is hot) and their talents and their personalities but not really to their sex organs, and while the people I'm usually physically attracted to usually have penises, there are some people who don't have a penis who do it for me, too. So...You figure that out. I don't really like labels, as you might be able to tell, and I don't understand why people go to great lengths to stick a bunch of them on themselves. All that said, I'm told that my 'tude is "male" because I'm dominant, assertive, argumentative, and not particularly empathetic and in touch with my or anyone else's feewings. (Frankly, this says all kinds of really crappy things about that aforementioned social conditioning, IMO, if that's what men are "supposed" to be.) In terms of appearance, I have excessively long hair (It's at about the bottom of my butt, currently) that I don't really do anything with aside from things like putting it in braids to keep it out of my face. (Basically, I hate getting haircuts -- such a boring waste of time -- so I just let it grow and occasionally lop off a foot or so of it and donate it to organizations that make wigs for cancer patients. Essentially, I'm a hair farm.) I mostly wear comfortable clothes but also like black tie events as an excuse to wear gowns. I also like really long, loose, casual skirts because they are, IMO, much comfier than pants/jeans, so that's what I wear a lot of. Oh, and I love nail polish with an unholy passion but don't generally wear makeup unless I'm going out, feeling artsy, and decide to use my face as a canvas for artistic expression. (Honestly, my husband wears more makeup than I do. He can't live without his eyeliner. )

I'm another who tends to assume that Simmers are female unless they say otherwise because it's been my experience that the majority of Simmers lack penises and also identify as female (whatever that means), but I refer to everyone as they/them if I don't know for sure. I don't understand why people are touchy about the subject (which probably goes hand-in-hand with my lack of understanding the whole self-labeling thing), but I figure there's no reason to go around intentionally offending people, right?

Male here! I know i'm probably in a minority, but I don't really think about it too much.

Female, love the Sims in all forms (except Console) and think if you like Sims then we can be friends no matter what your gender, race, nationality, religious affiliation, political bend or whatever. If there are guys who play Sims (my 20 something nephews do) then cool. My son is gamer but not a Simmer. It's all good. We play Wii U every day. It's how we bond.

Let's share a cookie and get back to talking about how we are alike, not different! Yes, I made them. I'm a baker.

Be my mom too, HCAC. Those cookies look delicious. :lovestruc

Sure would love to be...I just have one kid. Plenty of cookies to go around.

Wait, you're an Aussie...so we'll get you a plate of biscuits.

Oh, but Icad, you do understand about labels! It's just that the ones you care about aren't related to gender or sexual identity.

Think about it. You are a vegan. Not lacto-ovo vegetarian, not pescatarian, not red-meat-avoidant-but-poultry's okay, but vegan. If somebody tries to slip you potatoes mashed in chicken stock, or tells you that you shouldn't be a vegan, or that there's no such thing as a vegan, that your eating choices are unhealthy, that you're a fad dieter, that one egg won't hurt you, that you can just pick the pepperoni off, you get angry, and rightly so. You're a vegan for good reasons and that identity has a significant health impact on you, and you need people to get it right or leave you alone.

Some gender and sexual identities are important to establish for physical health reasons, some for psychological health reasons. And though all generalizations are false, we need to make them in order to have conversations and keep ourselves oriented in the world. Don't picture the labels as being on boxes; they're on shelves, and people are sorting themselves by what is most important to them, the categories all blend into each other at the edges (which is the nature of categories), and sometimes people change, or a new label arises which allows people to find a more comfortable spot on the shelf.

The people for whom labels are most important are those who live in a society which forces them to choose categories in which they are not comfortable, and even insists that the feature which is most central to their sense of themselves does not need a label because it is not a real thing. Look at bisexuals. That would seem to be an easy and obvious category, right? But no - if you examine media portrayals, people are labeled "straight" or "gay" depending on the current relationship. A familiar example is Willow Rosenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Early in the show she has a crush on Xander, and later is in an excellent, very high chemistry relationship with Oz, the werewolf musician, but Oz decides he's too dangerous and goes away. She then meets and falls in love with Tara, and suddenly she's "gay now." Screw that. She's bi. "Gay now" erases and devalues the relationship with Oz. (Yeah, this one bugs me a lot. I love Oz. He and Willow were high double-bolters, you can't watch those episodes and not see it.) Over and over and over, gay and straight people get labels, but blur those lines and suddenly "oh we don't need labels." Just say bisexual! It's not a hard concept or a dirty word. Biographies of H.P. Lovecraft that wrangle with the question "was he gay?" are equally irritating. Dude, the guy very clearly IDs as asexual, read the damn letters. He'd have used the word if he had it.

When it comes to gender identity, labels are often of crucial importance. If I say I'm female, that not only has a host of automatic associations; it also prompts doctors to ask the right important questions and puts me in the right line I need to be in to stay safe and meet my needs. If I say I'm male, that's a different set of dcotor's questions, a different line, a different set of needs. But what if I'm male but look female (a transman), female but look male (transwoman), have features common to both (intersex)? These labels indicate different sets of needs than "male" or "female."

If it feels like lying to check a box, in a world and a situation that depends heavily on checking boxes to function (as ours does!), then you need a new box to check, a new label to stick on the shelf. And the more often people try to force you to choose between two wrong choices, tell you you've chosen wrong based on some criterion which you know from experience has no importance to you, or tear your label off the shelf and push you into a new place on it with people you don't feel you're like at all, association with whom may even be dangerous to you (like a transwoman in a male restroom), the harder you cling to that label.

And if you feel like a category of one - that is incredibly lonely. The relief that people feel on learning that they're not the only one of something is incalculable. Think how happy some people are to find this newsgroup and learn that they are not the last lonely Sims 2 player in the world! Think how much greater the joy must be to discover that you are not the only genderfluid person! You can't find the people who will give you this sense of belonging if you don't have the labels to get to the right place on the shelf.

Watch it - you'll get @SimSample round at your door.

Hahaha, I was thinking the same thing. I don't think she's done with your taleggio yet though.

It's been awhile since I last made homemade cookies, and that picture made my stomach grumble.

If you're wondering, I used to make coconut chocolate chip cookies a lot, and my dad usually finished them up before I could. XD

I'm already half way there- cookies here I come!

Thank heavens - I've got my spare bedroom back. AND MY CHEESE!