Sexism in D&D and on ENWorld (now with SOLUTIONS!)

[Proserpine]

Not to completely disagree, but this isn't exactly about "female geeks" to the extent that "female geeks" means "women who already like D&D." Its about women who might like roleplaying if it weren't presented as a male power fantasy about hewing ogres in twain with your massive biceps or sneering at the muscular jock types while raining magical fire upon them with your massive intellect and/or innate specialness.

Its about all the girls out there reading Valdemar books who might give roleplaying games a chance if things were a little different both in terms of the sorts of games the publishers create, as well as the general culture of people who already play. At least that's what its about for me when I enter into these conversations.

That's certainly a more productive direction to take the conversation in. I agree, especially considering I was really reluctant to try D&D for the "male power fantasy..." stuff you mentioned.

 

[HardcoreDandDGirl]

Actually, there is: the Book of Erotic Fantasy, which, actually, I've used. Some useful bits in there. In addition, as long as there have been netbooks, there've been attempts to incorporate adult content into the game.

As long as everyone knows what to expect this is fine, I have been in groups that used the Book of Erotic Fantasy (S&M D&D), infact I played in a campaign world based on it (Can’t imagine how the game feel apart after the 7th or 8th session) for a small time. However in my current group I have one jerk player who might as well be 15 still, and a real 15 year old kid who already doesn’t know how to handle having a ‘girl’ in the room. So I would have to avoid that stuff

My daughter is already interested in d&d and while I'm delighted I'll be taking steps to protect her from the objectification.

How old of a daughter are we talking, there are many ways to have child friendly games. There is even another conversation about a young girl RPG lower on the page here…

 

[Dice4Hire]

Actually, there is: the Book of Erotic Fantasy, which, actually, I've used. Some useful bits in there. In addition, as long as there have been netbooks, there've been attempts to incorporate adult content into the game.

The original topic was more geared towards official WOTC products. 3pp or fans have published stuff I am sure WOTC would prefer never to have had associated with D&D.

 

[Doug McCrae]

the 1Ed chart doesn't state the gender of the prostitutes or pimps

There can't be any doubt about the gender of the wanton wench, aged madam and sly procuress. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, strumpet refers to a woman prostitute, though other dictionaries merely give prostitute as the definition. It gives the same meaning for trull, which most dictionaries define as female. According to Dictionary.com a trollop is always female, as is a doxy.

In the paragraph below the table Gary writes, "An expensive doxy will resemble a gentlewoman, a haughty courtesan a noblewoman, the other harlots might be mistaken for goodwives, and so forth." Which seems to indicate they are all women.

 

[Ariosto]

Shilsen might find a much readier target in, for instance, Witch Girls Adventures.

 

[Lanefan]

And, in a similar veing I just had a new player join my gaming group - she is an experienced gamer and the girlfriend of one of my other players. Her character is going to be a goliath barbarian... so, I figured, I would search eBay and buy a female goliath figure for her. No luck, there is no female goliath figure, though there are at least 3 male goliath figures.

Stupid question: the character she's bringing in to the game *is* female, right?

Player gender and character gender don't always follow suit.

Lan-"I'm male; the ratio of PCs I'm currently playing is female 2, male 0"-efan

 

[roguerouge]

You can't draw inferences about absolute numbers from data about percentages without information about the size of the population from which the percentages were taken.

I have no particular dog in this fight and know nothing about the demographics of World of Warcraft, but just sayin' 's all.

A greater proportion is what I meant.

 

[shilsen]

By the way, I should mention that I'm really glad that this conversation has been so civil thus far, especially since it's such a strongly polarizing topic. Thanks, everyone, whether we agree or not. I may be critiquing ENWorld in the opening post, but there's no denying that I really like this place as a forum for intelligent discussion about gaming.

The problem isn't the RPGs, its the RW up to which the RPGs hold the metaphorical mirror.

True, perhaps, but I think we can choose what we hold the mirror up to in our individual games, and hopefully improve the gaming community in that regard too.

The vast majority of gamers are male, so if things tend to be targeted to that audience, is it surprising? It shouldn't be.

I don't think I ever said it was surprising. I just think it's unfortunate that there's not more of an effort to expand that audience and to treat it in a more intelligent and egalitarian manner.

I have to say, there are some bad gamers when it comes to sexism. I once meet a group that wanted to give ALL female characters a -2 str +2cha. Based on the fact that men are stronger but women are cuter (I you not, they said that to my face, and I am reasonable sure I could have taken half the table in a fair fight). This same group had rules for…well lets just say rolls for intimate moments. I laughed when I herd them and may have been a little insulting.

Just a little? Pity.

I do have a problem with guys that don’t ever grow out of the stupid “Girls don’t do that” mindset.

Amen.

But RPGs and minis games based on them can't use the RW as an excuse to exclude archetypes. I want my female berserkers- I love maenads!

Agreed. And I'd go further and say that the real world is not an excuse to exclude people.

I disagree. I don't think roleplaying games in their current form (and I refer to content not presentation) can ever appeal to women anything like as strongly as they appeal to men. They are way too combat heavy, way too system heavy and way too number heavy.

I'm not saying girls can't do math, or that female geeks don't exist or that women can't be interested in some number-oriented activity like Bingo or Bridge. But in ttrpgs numbers fly around like clouds of bats, many of them serving no purpose whatsoever. You have to f---ing love them to play in a way few women do.

Rpgs that do appeal to women more are mmorpgs and Murder Mystery.

Wow! That's just so reductionist and sexist that I don't have much to say on the subject, but it looks like some people have already done so above.

Another random thought is that in the original post, Shilsen, you seem to be implying that many in the USA are more "sexist" - that is, believe that women are inherently inferior to men - than many in most other countries. This is wildly incorrect. I may just be reading your post wrong, though.

Ah, that's not what I was implying. I was simply making the point that I was mostly focusing on the USA in talking about society here, and I think the there's a great deal of sexism in the USA (more than in some countries, less than in others). I should also note that there's a prevailing notion, I think, that sexism is dead or very limited in the US, and this leads to people often missing how extant it still is.

On the issue of sexist art:

For men, appearance is a much more important factor in sexual attraction than it is for women. Sure women like to look at George Clooney but the actor's appeal with the opposite sex is, imo, based on a wider variety of traits than looks alone.

So visual art is inherently sexist. By choosing to create a picture one has chosen a medium which appeals more to male sexual desire than to female.

And a second - Wow! That's a brilliant example of the kind of sexism which permeates our society. But HardcoreDandDGirl said everything that needs to be said about it, I think.

I wasn't being facetious. It annoys me. I'd like to include female NPCs and combatants in encounters, and to do so I have to use male miniatures. There's really no explanation for the disparity except sexism, of the so-subtle-we're-not-even-aware-we're-sexist variety.

Thanks for the clarifier. And I agree. It's that sort of subtle sexism which especially bugs me, since it's so hard to have a conversation about it, because the people evincing it often don't even see what they're doing/saying.

Sorry, but the most current evidence I've been able to find indicates that DnD has more women than World of Warcraft does: "According to one of Yee's 2005 studies, 84 percent of "World of Warcraft" players are male, and 16 percent are female. The average player's age is 28, and female players tend to be a few years older than male players."

The Daedalus Project: WoW Basic Demographics

Interesting. I wonder how accurate that is and whether the numbers are still the same now in 2009.

I used to think I wasn't sexist toward woman playing. It didn't matter to me what sex, race, etc they were. What did matter was they showered and could add fairly quickly. However I had that proven wrong about 3 years ago.

I was holding an RPGA convention and on the last day a very nice looking lady came to the the reg table and said she needed to register. My first thought was "I wonder who her boyfriend is" (yeah really, I'm sorry) Turns out she was there to play, had a mid-level character and wanted to get in on a couple games before heading home. I talked to her a little afterwards she was an exotic dancer and took her PC's with her when she traveled for jobs.

I honestly didn't realize that I thought like that till then, it was a bit of a shock.

Thanks for the story, Gog. I daresay there are a few people posting here on ENWorld who don't think they are sexist simply because they haven't had an experience like yours or been self-reflexive enough on the subject.

Not to completely disagree, but this isn't exactly about "female geeks" to the extent that "female geeks" means "women who already like D&D." Its about women who might like roleplaying if it weren't presented as a male power fantasy about hewing ogres in twain with your massive biceps or sneering at the muscular jock types while raining magical fire upon them with your massive intellect and/or innate specialness.

Its about all the girls out there reading Valdemar books who might give roleplaying games a chance if things were a little different both in terms of the sorts of games the publishers create, as well as the general culture of people who already play. At least that's what its about for me when I enter into these conversations.

Good point. Thinking outside the boundaries (many of them quite arbitrary) which have been established in gaming and esp. D&D can't be a bad thing, in my estimation.

My daughter is already interested in d&d and while I'm delighted I'll be taking steps to protect her from the objectification.

Sounds like you're on the way already. Awareness is half the battle won, in my estimation.

That's an important shift in what role-playing is/has become/could be. RPGs meant, for a long time, fantasy wargaming. I personally think of myself as a fantasy wargamer. But there are other worlds of role-playing out there that have nothing to do with mortal conflict or simulation.

True. I tend to mostly be a fantasy wargamer too, but I'm aware there are other options, and I'm also aware that I can mould the games I play to reflect what I think they can/should be.

 

[roguerouge]

As long as everyone knows what to expect this is fine, I have been in groups that used the Book of Erotic Fantasy (S&M D&D), infact I played in a campaign world based on it (Can’t imagine how the game feel apart after the 7th or 8th session) for a small time. However in my current group I have one jerk player who might as well be 15 still, and a real 15 year old kid who already doesn’t know how to handle having a ‘girl’ in the room. So I would have to avoid that stuff

Well, yes, good DMs tailor their stories to the capabilities of their players. And the basics of magical birth control, fertility, and abortion were what were specifically used. The speculative stuff on various races' fertility and sexual practices were interesting at times, but weren't used explicitly.

For example, the Paizo take on goblins having short food supply and neglectful child-raising habits were interesting, but combining it with the fecundity described in BoEF made for a clearer picture of the reasons why goblins raided so frequently beyond the alignment line in the MM. Both those sources helped me "get" goblins.

 

[shilsen]

People often bristle at the term sexism. I think in many cases, when someone hears that term, perhaps even aimed at their behavior, they are hearing stuff like bigotry, oppression, and so forth. I think it is very difficult for some people to understand that sexism can refer to gender-based centrism. Precisely because men hold the (generally, mostly) dominant position in society, and because masculine values are considered to be simply values, and because gaming is demographically skewed toward males, there are a lot of male gamers who are generally incapable of understanding how their lack of mental flexibility makes it hard to see sexism. It is not because a person necessarily is acting from malice or to be patronizing, or because they are ignorant. It is because they are male, and our society socializes men and women differently, and they have not yet made the jouryney in the other gender's moccasins. If they are white, and most are, they have the double whammy of having perhaps never been in the less privileged class, so not only do they lack the experience of being a woman, they lack the experience of dealing with dominant privilege altogether. And they don't know that they lack this experience. Being culturally sensitive is just not that common.

And the someone will turn around and say, "I am white and male and I am not androcentric." And I will tell them they are wrong. Then they will say I am accusing them. And I will say, "No, I am stating what is most likely the truth. Because I am sexist and racist. And you are sexist and racist. Everyone is. The world could not function, not even for an hour, without stereotypes. And all of us get through the day a little easier because we lean on our prejudices, which reduces the anxiety we feel about this big, confusing, diverse, and threatening world. So I know, if every truly culturally sensitive person I know is willing to admit that they themselves struggle with their own issues, that you, my friend, have issues of your own."

Being sensitive is not about sainthood, or doing or saying the right thing. You really, truly cannot go through life without offending someone because people are not predictable in that way. It will happen. The point is to be flexible. You have to look at your own issues. And you have to empathize with the other person, not just to give them your concern, but actually try to understand them. There are tons of people in this world who will care for you, but to be known is something rare and wonderful.

While I hesitate to generalize, my general assumption is the less you perceive prejudice, the more likely you are swimming in it. If you think ENworld and the rest of the online RPG community is dandy as it is, you have identified with the privileged culture. If you think "neutrality" and "civil" behavior protect people's feelings, you have not been oppressed.

It's a rare week when I don't see some comment on ENWorld that does not deserve to be held up to the light of day. Just because I know there is nothing to be gained by breaking the rules, or derailing a thread, or detracting from the focus of the site, or arguing with a stranger on the 'Net does not mean I am satisfied. I just accept it.

If you don't walk through life with that sadness, you are privileged and blessed.

Seconded, thirded, and fourthed. You just explained a lot of the preconceptions I'm working with, far more succinctly and articulately than I could. Thank you.

P.S. Experience points sent your way.