I agree, when they originally gave the ability to do other racial dances besides your own I always wondered why they didn't just let us have the male and female variant as well. Its one of those things I hope they eventually add, especially since you can already have a female character do a male dance by equipping a polymorph, choosing the dance, then unequipping the polymorph mid dance.

Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os5rgu02bLQ

Arunei wrote: »

I don't understand why there are male and female only Adornments too. Let males wear the one female-locked tiara or whatever it was, let females use beards and stuff (fake beards DO exist, and there are also women who have natural beards for one reason or another).

Absolutely!

Arunei wrote: »

The dances being locked to male and female is the worst offender though. It makes absolutely zero sense, because there is literally no physical limitation that would prohibit either gender from doing the other's dance. What in the heck prevents a male Argonian from doing the female Argonian dance when it's just trotting back and forth while waving and turning around? And the male Redguard dance is more saucy than the female one imo.

Dance is a weirdly gendered thing also in the real world. In Western cultures, you often have this lead/follow thing in pair dances, with a male dancer having to be the lead and a female dancer having to be the follower (and I can remember that there was huge drama in those circles even just a few years ago if someone dared to to it differently, which I always found extremely silly - how is it anyone's business if a couple wants the female dancer to lead or if two men or two women want to pair dance together?!); and in former times, or even in tribal societies today, or even non-tribal but more traditional ones, there are often distinctions between how men are supposed to dance and how women are supposed to dance.

I think ZOS might have had something like that in mind, considering ESO takes place in a non-modern world (though we can debate whether it would be like this in this fictional world where men and women are mostly seen as equal and gender roles/stereotyping generally doesn't seem to be a big thing, also when it comes to professions, laws, etc, for example). So if they did it to define Tamriel's cultures and build some more cultural flavor/lore, as someone who loves to learn about these different cultures and their traditions, I can hardly object to that (even if I personally don't like the idea of gendered dances at all - if this is how Tamriel's cultures are, well, then I need to accept that; I can't say I want to learn about these foreign cultures, but at the same time criticize it if some depiction isn't to my personal taste).

But: Even if we'd see such gendered tendencies in dance depicted in game, by npcs, I'd say it should remain the player's choice how their character is supposed to dance. As you said, there's no reason a person would not physically be able to dance another culture's or gender's dance style. In the end it should be an individual choice, and I'd hope to see all dances becoming available through emotes for every player character (they could make it /argoniandance1 and 2, or m and f).

We have indeed been asking for this for years. Would love to see it happen one day, along with equal access to titles and costumes.

I currently use the polymorph workaround for dances, which I believe the devs have deliberately left in the game rather than “fixed”. The message sent by that, rather than a true fix, is that it’s fine if gender expression (outside of imposed arbitrary “norms”) in this game has to rely on a workaround. That’s counter to the essential idea of an RPG, which as a genre is founded on the principle of being who we want to be. If that’s a fantasy, well, TES is exactly the right genre for that.

I used to use Empieror on my main character. Then it was taken away, because apparently giving people the choice to use Empieress somehow necessitated stripping the ability to use Empieror to do it. Giving some players a choice they didn’t have at the expense of taking away a choice from others turns self-expression into a zero-sum game. That’s anathema to an RPG.

For those who like dimorphic titles and polymorphs and costumes, like the Baker, there is no problem having multiple options available. More player choice is actually ideal. But that requires providing those multiple options as a choice. Forcing “men” to wear pants and “women” to wear dresses was generations outdated as a concept when ZOS decided to work it into an RPG in the 2010s. (There’s a fantastic video by Viva La Dirt League on imposed “male”/“female” versions of the same armor — the first from nearly ten years ago, with a follow-up from 2022.)

To be fair, these stick out as extremely unfortunate choices from a company that does have successful examples of unlocked cosmetics and NPC representation, including transgender and non-binary characters. But which dance or title or Baker variant would be chosen for Cres or Tanlorin or Fa-Nuit-Hen? If the answer is singular, it is a box. And people absolutely should be able to use established boxes for themselves if that’s what they want to choose for themselves and their characters. But boxes are not one size (or two size) fits all, and the only way out of turning that box into an external imposition is to give people actual choice, which is in the end the heart of an RPG.