I’m a Boy. Does Playing Female Characters in Video Games Make Me Gay?

I’m a man “in real life,” however I’ve at all times performed feminine characters in video video games. More and extra folks say this implies I’m both secretly homosexual/trans or a complete creep. Am I allowed to only desire it? —Gender Player

Dear Player,

It appears like you have got lots of people in your life, Player, who suppose they know you higher than your self. I received’t faux to have perception into your deepest self, however I can supply some methods of excited about your selection:

1. Fantasy and fiction supply an escape hatch out of your ordinary viewpoint and allow you to discover views completely different from your personal. Choosing a droid as your avatar doesn’t imply you’re a robotic deep down. Reading a novel that portrays the world by means of the eyes of a feminine narrator doesn’t imply you’re secretly a girl (or a “creep”). The pioneers of the web hoped that digital areas would liberate us from our extraordinary lives, permitting us to experiment with assumed identities behind the veil of anonymity. That’s actually not the utopia we ended up with (as an alternative, we’re typically sorted into inflexible containers by prediction engines and focused adverts). But video video games nonetheless maintain the promise of the masquerade ball, a spot the place you’ll be able to don a fancy dress, obtain a brand new pores and skin, and faux for a short time to be another person.
2. Play-acting and role-playing, after all, can generally reveal deeper longings, particularly these the acutely aware thoughts has refused to entertain. If you are feeling an amazing sense of euphoria whereas enjoying a feminine character or end up fantasizing about being the avatar in actual life, then perhaps your mates are proper and there’s one thing deeper happening.
3. Gender itself, it’s typically stated, is a “script,” a form of efficiency that’s socially strengthened to make folks all throughout the gender spectrum conform to the usual binary. Choosing a feminine character would possibly merely be an acknowledgment of components of your self that you simply’ve felt compelled to repress in extraordinary life—not an indication that you simply’re residing within the unsuitable physique, essentially, simply proof that your mode of gender expression has grow to be too slender. An “avatar,” in its unique sense, refers back to the a number of types/genders {that a} deity can take. The characters you select could be an acknowledgment of your personal plurality, an try to incarnate simply one of many multitudes inside you.

I’m a vegetarian, however I’d eat lab-grown meat. Does that make me a hypocrite? —Chicken Little

Seeing as you’re not grossed out by the concept of meat grown “in a peach tree dish,” as Marjorie Taylor Greene put it, I assume your vegetarianism is ethically or religiously motivated. Hence the worry of hypocrisy—however I don’t suppose that’s the proper phrase, precisely, for what you’re feeling. A hypocrite is somebody who claims ethical requirements that their conduct flatly contradicts, and lab meat, if we’re to imagine the hype, guarantees to be each humane and sustainable. Like many technological options that remodel a vice right into a impartial selection (clear power, NA beer), it cancels out the ethical calculus and relieves us of the obligation to make sacrifices for a greater world, or a greater self. You can have your glad cows and eat them, too.

The hypocrisy you worry is extra refined and insidious. Maybe the concept of consuming lab meat strikes you as a nasty discount, like permitting your self to bathe verbal abuse on a chatbot. The technical indisputable fact that it’s “not harming anyone” shouldn’t cease you from feeling queasy about your motives and the suggestion of delinquent wishes that had been in all probability higher off repressed. As I’m positive , Chicken, it’s attainable to push the Frankenmeat thought experiment into darker territory. Would you eat lab-grown human flesh? Would you eat meat grown from your personal cells, or from these of a child?

If you’re involved with solely the sensible penalties of your actions, then positive, you’re not betraying any of your values. What you are betraying is a sure concept of your self. I think about you turned a vegetarian not since you really believed your particular person actions would change the world, however since you favored the concept of being the form of one who was keen to do troublesome issues and make sacrifices for greater beliefs. Perhaps abstention made the gauntlet of senseless shopper selections really feel a tad extra significant. Maybe it made you extra keen to do different laborious issues for the sake of ethical consistency. If you focus solely on the outcomes of your actions, you’ll find yourself always trying to find moral loopholes that come on the value of your soul. Virtue, even when arbitrary and pointless, has rewards of its personal.

Now that AI can faux just about something, I simply assume every part I see or learn on a display is faux till confirmed actual. Is that cheap or cynical? —Doubting Thomas

I believe you’re proper to doubt, Thomas. Your namesake, the apostle, refused to imagine within the miracle of resurrection till he noticed proof along with his personal eyes. But what sort of laborious proof, if any, can persuade us of something within the Year of Our Lord 2024? Photos lie, machines hallucinate. The social sciences can’t replicate their most basic experiments. Data evaluation, at a sure scale, will be exploited to show principally something. It’s simple to really feel like one thing has been misplaced, that our religion in consensus actuality—or any form of actuality—is on the decline.