Girls Can Play Magic Too
When I was ten years old, two male cousins came over to my house bringing a deck of cards with them. “What’s that?” I asked. “Magic the Gathering,” my cousin mumbled as he started shuffling them. I picked up a card and stared at it, confused and fascinated by the drawings, text, and strange symbols written all over the card. “Can you teach me how to play?” I asked. My cousin laughed. “You wouldn’t understand. This isn’t a game for girls.” They then proceeded to play a complicated-looking game between themselves, completely ignoring me for the better part of an hour.
I can’t blame my cousins for thinking that I wouldn’t be able to understand the rudiments of Magic because of my gender. While they had their GI Joes and Power Ranger action figures, I grew up playing with Barbie dolls and Polly Pockets. The very spirit of Magic involves violence and I, in my colorful sundresses and skirts, was a complete stranger to that.
It never occurred to me then that the gender-appropriate clothes and toys that were encouraged to use as children promoted male and female stereotypes and alienated the two genders from each other. In the all-female grade school I went to, I grew exposed to dolls and jackstones, which my classmates and I would pull out of our bags during recess. I learned through our games of house-house and dress-up that girls have to be feminine and sophisticated—qualities that can be achieved through the application of make-up and by bedecking ourselves with accessories. Since these games did not involve complicated strategies on how to kill each other, we learned to socialize amiably and diplomatically. In the pretty, embroidered dresses that we wore to our each other’s birthday parties, we acted calm, ladylike, and careful during the games so we wouldn’t dirty our charming, little outfits. Little did we know that through these games, we were already preparing ourselves for our future roles as housewives and mothers.
Boys, on the other hand, thrived on aggressive, complicated games of war—either among themselves or among their plastic action figures—and competitive sports, such as basketball. They rarely played indoors and looked so tough on the streets with their toy guns and swords. When they played, they made as much noise as the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, and they didn’t care if their sandos were sweat-stained and their knees were dirty with dust and soil.
On summer afternoons, I would abandon my dolls and don a t-shirt and a pair of shorts before running out to the streets where my playmates were waiting. These were the only times when we girls joined the boys in games of habulan, patintero, and baril-barilan. It annoyed me very much that the boys could easily outrun me, or that they were better at aiming water guns than I was, or that when they pushed me it hurt but when I hit them back, they just laughed. The triumphant looks the boys from the enemy team would give me every time they won infuriated me even more. For the first time, I learned what it was like to feel inferior to someone. Any idiot can play house-house, but aiming a toy gun at a playmate and avoiding a rain of imaginary bullets need far more complicated skills than poking at leaves in a plastic cooking set.
At one point it occurred to me that it would look funny if one of my male playmates joined us in a game of house-house, and that me lugging Superman action figures around wouldn’t look right to my male playmates either. Sure, there’s nothing immoral about both images, but the gender-appropriate toys tell us that dolls are for girls and action figures are for boys. And what I didn’t know then was that the underlying message of such toys is that is girls will always do safe, domestic tasks while the boys go out into the world and have all sorts of adventures.
Eight years later, I breached the barrier of what girls can or can’t do and learned how to play Magic the Gathering. As I absorbed the basics of the game, I realized that Magic was not as difficult as it seemed. In less than a week, I became one of the few female Magickeros in campus. And although I’m far from being a proficient player, I emerge as the victor of a game every now and then. It never fails to amuse me that once in a while, in the middle of a game, I’d see a male passerby give me a surprised look that says he didn’t know that girls play Magic too. I wonder how my cousins would react if I showed up at their house with my own deck of cards.
