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

[Dannyalcatraz]

Let me put it this way. If you are black, you do not get to choose if your ethnic heritage is considered important by other people.

At least, not in America.

(Black- actually multiracial, but called black in most states- Catholic dude.)

 

[roguerouge]

In our gaming group, everyone must come attired in an androgynous jumpsuit and address fellow players with the gender-neutral term "comrade". Characters may not use swords, spears or other oppressive phallocentric weapons. When making an attack, the sexist paleo-linguistic artifact-phrase "I thrust..." must be replaced with "I unfairly subjugate...".

All sexist pictures in our books have had beefcake pictures pasted over them. From a reactionaly-bourgeoise perspective that may sound like a form of "sexism" to you, but remember that the dynamics of superexploitative cultural products require a dyad of "oppressor-oppressed". Therefore it is impossible for beefcake art to actually be sexist. Rather, its existence reverses and overthrows the tyranny of exploitative "cheesecake" art. Fortunately no one at the table enjoys looking at the beefcake pictures, so it helps us keep our minds on the advancement of the revolution through proper gaming.

Dialectical materialism has allowed us to scientifically prove the superiority of our method. History is on our side, Larry Elmore... we will bury you!

Okay, now THAT'S funny. I'm pretty much on the comrade side myself (if not on this thread, then at Paizo's boards), and I find that to be well-crafted parody.

Good work. XP for you.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Same here. And I'm not just saying that because 5 ft 4 inch tall Indian men lget no love in fantasy art

But Bollywood totally has your back, dude.

Pop culture says you have a superpower for improvised dance numbers, and anyone who has seen "Enchanted" knows that is AWESOME.

Yeah true. However, girls ARE more sensitive about their appearance. I'm not sure if this is only due to the media, but it certainly plays a part.

I think that's a pretty interesting generalization, too, and like most generalizations, it fails HARD in a number of places.

For example, it doesn't hold water at all at young ages. They won't admit it, but teenage boys are massively preoccupied with their "look." The more they are, the more they refuse to admit it, even 30 years later. "I just wore whatever" is man-code for "I had a very specific and narrow set of things I felt comfortable wearing because of my weight/social group/parental rebellion issues, but they were sufficiently loose/grunge-ish/typical/etc that I could pretend I didn't care and people were kind/unobservant enough not to call me on it too often."

Seriously.... you want an angry, embarrassed young man? Accuse him of caring about his hair. You don't turn purple and start choking on your own tongue unless someone touched a nerve. I am an evil man, and I torture my second cousins with this regularly. I cannot wait until my nephews are old enough to be in the same boat.

For example, uncombed hair or rumpled shirts are not always examples of slovenliness. HOURS were spent achieving those presentations (a telltale sign i when they smell springtime fresh and just LOOK lived in). But boys will not admit that for two reasons. First, admitting effort kills the whole point of apparent lack of effort. Second, effort into appearance is "feminine" or "gay." And there is nothing more terrifying to most young American males than those labels.

Actually..... even old American males will go VERY far out of their way to appear antithetical to those labels. They will lie until they believe it in order to have plausible deniability.

IME, women are more concerned about aging, and therefore they do tend to overtake men on appearance sensitivity pretty early on. But there is no one on earth more concerned about how he looks than an immediately post-pubescent male.

I now open the floor for dozens of guys to insist they really, really didn't care.

In any case, I've also seen a lot more men than women obsess unto death over their miniature for a game. But that might just be the male propensity for being visually-oriented rocking head-on into geekly analness.... but it's still sensitivity about the appearance of their imaginary "self."

 

[shilsen]

Oh, I thought you said upthread you were transsexual/cross-gendered or some such.

Ack! I was just telling Proserpine a little while ago that I thought you were being facetious in your comment

I think culture vs. innate traits is relevant, so my take on this is influenced by that. As the lovely Jewel put it, "what we call human nature in actuality is human habit"! But yeah, that's just my opinion.

Hey - I thought I said that what people think is human nature is mostly just human habit! Though probably not as melodiously as Jewel (who rocketh greatly, BTW).

This brings us to one of the complications on the subject of artwork.

...

Basically, we run into the issue that what people view as sexy/sexist appropriate/inappropriate is not simple at all.

Agreed. I don't think any (or most) of us are trying to make the point that this is a simple issue. I certainly am not, and if I gave the impression that I was saying that my take on sexism is the only objective way to look at it, I didn't intend to. I do think, despite (and sometimes because of) the complexities of the subject, it's worthwhile to discuss and we can have intelligent discourse about it, even among people who have very divergent positions. Hence this thread.

I did not read the whole thread but did look at the OP and the commentary on the first page and got an idea of where this was going (the same direction most threads on this subject tend to go) but a couple things stood out to me. I am not sure if any of my comments below were brought up but here is my take on a couple of call outs made by the OP with respect to marketing and the product itself.

...

Hah! I was just thinking a few hours ago that it would be interesting if someone from WotC popped in to comment in this thread, and I was specifically thinking about you since I've noticed you post often on ENWorld earlier.

For these reasons among others I just don't buy the OPs premise.

Thanks for the detailed information and the opinion, Scott. I may quibble about a couple of the things you mentioned, but I should also note that my premise in the original post has been both expanded and modified over the course of this discussion. I'd say now that I don't think D&D as currently produced by WotC is inherently sexist, but I do think it caters more to men in a way which can (not always, and sometimes much more subtly than at others) be exclusionary towards women. The sexism which I still see in the D&D community, I think, has more to do with some of the people who make it up and some of the (often unexamined) assumptions which result from the much-less-egalitarian history of the game.

I think you and I are never going to agree on the validity of gender-separate activities. I think that there's something virtuous about a game that deliberately markets to women in an industry that's so male-dominated (4/5 gamers are men, according to one market survey). I think it's a necessary intermediary step towards parity.

For what it's worth, I agree. I do, of course, think that some ways of doing it are much better than others, but then that's probably a given.

[Cisgender (IPA: /ˈsɪsdʒɛndə˞/) is an adjective used in the context of gender issues and counselling to refer to a class of gender identities formed by a match between an individual's gender identity and the behavior or role considered appropriate for one's sex.[1] Cisgender is a "newer term" that means "someone who is comfortable in the gender they were assigned at birth."[2] "Cisgender" is used to contrast "transgender" on the gender spectrum.]

My thanks to Proserpine as her post and your response prompted me to look this up...and I learned something!

Cool. I'm hoping that this thread at least gets people to think a little more about the subject (or subjects, since we're discussing many interrelated things here) of gender and sexism than might normally be the case. I only learned the term cisgender a few months ago myself, also from Proserpine. Who happens to be the girlfriend I mentioned in the original post. And is, in the interests of full disclosure, way too much of a hack-and-slasher and far too little interested in actually roleplaying

Is this a guess or a fact? Is this for 4e only? Sean K Reynolds posted to his web site WotC material pegging 3e's ratio at 4 men for every girl that plays.

Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0 -- Wizards of the Coast

That's a question I had too. I know the proportion of women playing D&D is substantially lower than men, but I wouldn't expect it to be as low as 1-5%, as Scott said.

 

[Scott_Rouse]

Is this a guess or a fact? Is this for 4e only? Sean K Reynolds posted to his web site WotC material pegging 3e's ratio at 4 men for every girl that plays.

Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0 -- Wizards of the Coast

It is market research, there is no fact. Every study or other piece of research I have seen that attempts to define the D&D audience pegs it at 95-99% male. Sometimes these studies pre-screen for demographics (like males age 12-45) and others are open (fill out this survey). In any case they all seem to come back a this ratio (sometimes for the obvious reason mentioned).

My gut tells me the real ratio is more like 80% males which is supported by the study linked (although that study may have some other underlying issues beyond being 10 years old).

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

It is market research, there is no fact. Every study or other piece of research I have seen that attempts to define the D&D audience pegs it at 95-99% male. Sometimes these studies pre-screen for demographics (like males age 12-45) and others are open (fill out this survey). In any case they all seem to come back a this ratio (sometimes for the obvious reason mentioned).

My gut tells me the real ratio is more like 80% males which is supported by the study linked (although that study may have some other underlying issues beyond being 10 years old).

The second part of the selection process probably introduced a HUGE self-selection bias. Not a surprise that would inflate maleness in the population in question.

 

[shilsen]

But Bollywood totally has your back, dude.

Pop culture says you have a superpower for improvised dance numbers, and anyone who has seen "Enchanted" knows that is AWESOME.

Don't forget the Quick Change ability to change costumes at the drop of a hat and the Teleport (Flaw: Only to scenic locations with music in background) power. My M&M group keeps joking that we'll run a Bollywood-themed campaign someday where every PC will have those abilities.

For example, it doesn't hold water at all at young ages. They won't admit it, but teenage boys are massively preoccupied with their "look." The more they are, the more they refuse to admit it, even 30 years later. "I just wore whatever" is man-code for "I had a very specific and narrow set of things I felt comfortable wearing because of my weight/social group/parental rebellion issues, but they were sufficiently loose/grunge-ish/typical/etc that I could pretend I didn't care and people were kind/unobservant enough not to call me on it too often."

Hah! Nice point.

I now open the floor for dozens of guys to insist they really, really didn't care.

You called ? If it helps, Proserpine can vouch for the fact that I fundamentally don't give a damn and she regularly has to bug me to change when I reach into the closet and pick up the first shirt and pant I find, blissfully uncaring of the stains on them.

But, more seriously, I don't think this has anything to do with me being male. It has to do with me being, well, me.

In any case, I've also seen a lot more men than women obsess unto death over their miniature for a game. But that might just be the male propensity for being visually-oriented rocking head-on into geekly analness.... but it's still sensitivity about the appearance of their imaginary "self."

I think I've seen more men do the above than women, but then again I've played with more men than women, so I personally wouldn't call it a trend. But it is amusing

 

[NewJeffCT]

I don't buy the idea that D&D is inherently sexist. Fantasy as a whole has certain tropes that are sexist (EG damsel in distress saved by strapping barbarian) but we go a long way to portray heroic female characters as strong, independent, intelligent, without always pandering to the strong = butch stereotype. The D&D art style in both 3rd and 4th edition has made great strides to move beyond many of the old sexist tropes of fantasy while still maintaining femininity and masculinity where appropriate. Text is written in mixed gender pronouns (his shield or her sword) or gender neutral (their armor). NPCs are a mix of male and female characters as are their depictions in artwork. For example in the yet to be released Eberron Player's Guide on my desk there are 52 pieces of art featuring at least one humanoid. Of those 52 pieces of art, 26 feature at least one female character sometimes in a mixed group and sometimes alone. one note about this book is that it has a number of pieces of warforged art (warforged don't have a gender) depictions so the art is likely greater closer to 50/50. It is my gut that if you did this tally among all 4e books you'd see similar ratios in character depection.

For these reasons among others I just don't buy the OPs premise.

I think the OP, and others, have agreed that the rules themselves are not particularly sexist.

However, a few of us have made the point that there are far more male D&D miniatures available than female, and those are also WotC products. One poster made the point that there were about 30 different giant figures made, and only like 3 were female (I won't scroll back through 200 posts to find the exact numbers). I had mentioned that I had a new (female) player joining my gaming group that had decided she wanted to play a goliath barbarian. Yes, she wanted to play a female character. So, I went out to search eBay, and other online places, for a female goliath figure as I like accuracy. There are none, though there are three male goliath figures. Goliaths were featured in the 3.5E book "Races of Stone" and the 4E PHB2, so are not that new of a race.

I then started looking at other manufacturers for human female barbarian minis, hoping to find something in the 35-40mm scale range, so the miniature would be appropriately "goliath" sized. However, most of the Confrontation female figures that are tall enough were more like metal bikini clad supermodels than an athletic/strong & tall woman... so, I ended up settling on this one because its supposed to be taller than the normal Reaper figure: CoolMiniOrNot Store > Alejandra

I will say, however, that the D&D miniatures that are female are generally pretty well done in terms of being appropriately armed and armored (sorry, an experienced warrior isn't going to leave her midriff bare and unarmored... do female soldiers in combat situations like Iraq or Afghanistan cut holes into their body armor to expose their stomachs, or have them specially designed that way?)

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

You called ? If it helps, Proserpine can vouch for the fact that I fundamentally don't give a damn and she regularly has to bug me to change when I reach into the closet and pick up the first shirt and pant I find, blissfully uncaring of the stains on them.

But, were you actually as uncaring at age 12? Past tense was relevant there

I care MUCH less than I did then, as well, but the appearance of not caring has been nearly static throughout my life.

 

[Oni]

One of the many reasons why Eberron sticks out positively to me as a setting is (as noted in the thread above) because it explicitly eschews sexism. While I think a particular group or homebrew setting can choose to involve sexism in their games (presumably with everyone involved on board about it), I absolutely believe that the core rules and settings of D&D should be egalitarian.

This caught my eye in the original post and at the risk of putting my foot in it I wanted to say something.

I have a serious problem with the sterilization of creative endeavors for the promotion of social values over the integrity of the work. If the world is egalitarian great let it be so, but if it's not don't force it to be so. Now I understand that this might be kind of an extreme stance to take with regard to campaign settings, it's a game right? But how interesting is fantasy world after fantasy world were everyone's equal and no one treats you different because of the way you look, unless of course you happen to be green. Besides where does this kind of things stop?