If a story has a long and winding plot, lots of dialogue, lots of love, is about a gay relationship, yet doesn’t show much (if any) wild, animal-like sex, chances are high that it was written by a girl.

It’s embarrassing to realize that my gender is that obvious. There goes my fantasy of being mistaken for a boy.

Why should I want to be mistaken for a boy, I wonder? Guys looking exclusively for guys would ultimately blow me off, so why pretend? Do I just stubbornly want the respect and attention that the m/m world reserves for boys? Some of them are squeamish about the very idea of girls, and perhaps I want to foil them. In fact, I have played with men (jointly with M) who only played with boys, but who consented to (and enjoyed) playing with me because I was un-girly. My MO was always: I am a tomboyish girl who dresses as a boy and avoids all sexual reference during tgi play. I never went in for the “N-n-no Daddy, not my p-panties!” scenario. Marky, in fact, was scathing about that type of thing. Even to this day, I hate the word “panties” and never use it unless it’s sheathed in ironic quotation marks.

But why should I want to be mistaken for a boy? Would it make me feel more respected? More seen? More taken seriously? Or is it that I imagine that I’m drawn to men who think they prefer m/m? When I met M (are all these initials getting confusing?) through email, he was writing fully m/m stories, and in fact asked if I was m or f. I ruefully admitted f, saying “I hope you don’t hate me.” He was fine with me being a girl; it didn’t seem to make a difference to him. That said, he was firmly ensconced in the m/m world. He had once played with a female, bottoming to Miss Singleton (a.k.a. Miss Martindale of Aristasia, before she got famous and eschewed boys).  That scene, plus one we did together with Debbie Ann, were the only times he played with any girl besides me. I don’t think he corresponded much with girls, if at all. All his online friends and chat-buddies were male, into m/m tgi and sex. I found this hot and not really threatening. And, despite all his m/m interest (and to a lesser extent activity), he was massively attracted to me, wanted me to deal with marky, and very much wanted to take care of cdm. In his mind, there were guys and there was me; guys were friends, but I was what he lived for.

Do I want to pass as a boy online because I imagine in some crazy part of my brain that it will lead me back to him? Do I imagine that I’ll find another husband in that world? Clearly, I need a knock upside the head. And at any rate, by Wilvalkir’s rule, my writing just screams GIRL GIRL GIRL to anyone who reads it, earning the scorn of men worldwide.