D&D General Gamer Stats From White Dwarf in the 80s

I guess my own situation regarding the people I gamed with is likely to differ from most here.

As I said right at the start of the thread, I went to a private school (all boys - twin school over the road was girls only). I knew 1 person within walking distance of my home who played RPGs, he also went to the same school - the school was an hour journey each morning - 40 mins of that by train. There were about 5-6 of us (of 100 boys) in my school year who gamed, plus a couple in the years above and below whom I caught the train with.

I met up with the fellow geeks in my school year to play RPGs about 4-5 times a year (as our homes were scatttered all over the city) - none of us had ANY female friends - we had sisters, they just ignored us, or made fun of us. My most frequent gaming was done during school lunchtimes or on the train on the way to and from school, this was the only time I ever came into contact with girls for about 5 years - we were always in a group, so were they, and it was here that we were derided frequently. We were shy, all we did was retreat into the corners of the train carriages to try to play undisturbed.

There were no gaming clubs, no gaming in FLGS, no local group meeting at weekends - just mostly those snatched moments at lunchtimes and during train journeys.

So it was never an option to create 'a safe and inviting space', or be 'supportive', when all we encountered was derision!

I started gaming in the 80s, GURPS and 2nd edition AD&D were the first lines I started buying with my own money, and the demographic information in White Dwarf matches my own anecdotal observations from Texas. I didn't observe a significant number of women interested in RPGs until after Vampire came out in 1991.

I'm not sure it was sexism that kept women out of role playing games in the 70s and 80s. And please note I'm not going to argue sexism didn't exist or that girls and women didn't experience it. But I wonder if sexism isn't more acute among gamers today than it was nearly thirty years ago. As a lifelong Star Wars fan I can't recall anyone complaining that Princess Leia or Padme were Mary Sues like some do with Rey. When Sarah Connor was transformed from a meek victim in need of being saved to a badass survivalist nobody complained James Cameron was trying to appeal to SJWs or some other such nonsense.

We're used to a narrative where things improve over time. I honestly wonder if some things are worse today than they were thirty years ago. Or maybe it's just easier to observe how bad it is today than it was back then.

Well, to be fair, that's because Leia doesn't actually do anything in 3 movies. She shoots a blaster a couple of time? She doesn't fly a ship. She doesn't rescue anyone, other than at the breakout in the detention scene where she shoots the wall. It would be pretty hard to argue Leia as a Mary Sue character when she's pretty much 100% dependent on the male characters around her nearly all the time. :/

The reason you see all the reactions these days is we actually have female characters that are not dependent on any male characters and there's a rather toxic subset of the fandom that can't bear to see that. It's only in horror movies that female characters are allowed to be active.

Hussar said:

The reason you see all the reactions these days is we actually have female characters that are not dependent on any male characters and there's a rather toxic subset of the fandom that can't bear to see that. It's only in horror movies that female characters are allowed to be active.

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Mary Poppins is giving you side eye...

Actually, I think hostility towards women has got worse since the 80s. Women RPGers where so rare in the 80s that most boys never got to see one. These days, certain men feel threatened by the presence of women.

One thing I will point out is that AD&D 1e had it codified in the rules that female PCs could not be as strong as male PCs. The PHB has something like a whole two women depicted in it.

Though there were protesting voices even back then, that sort of thing would never ever be printed today.

MGibster said:

I'm not sure it was sexism that kept women out of role playing games in the 70s and 80s. And please note I'm not going to argue sexism didn't exist or that girls and women didn't experience it. But I wonder if sexism isn't more acute among gamers today than it was nearly thirty years ago.

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So....In the 80s, it was the rules and aesthetics that pushed women away, and not the actual gamers (through virtue of no women around for them to harrass). Now that the rules and aesthetics no longer push women away, the gamers are making up slack? I would posit that gamers have always had those issues, but since there were no women around to harass, that's why you didn't see it. I highly doubt gamers got more sexist than we were in the 80s. All the evidence seems to counter that (pop culture behavior, etc).

Why don't more boys do knitting? I've never seen any hostility exibited by female knitters towards males, and yet there are no males in my wife's knitting group.

Paul Farquhar said:

Why don't more boys do knitting? I've never seen any hostility exibited by female knitters towards males, and yet there are no males in my wife's knitting group.

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You are fundamentally misunderstanding the point.

Sacrosanct said:

Mary Poppins is giving you side eye...

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And Ellen Ripley is suiting up...