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

[Cadfan]

I would venture a guess that the majority of the described sexism in regards to campaign settings and the gender counts has more to do with laziness and failure to leave the comfort zone than any kind of subconscious misogynistic tendencies on the parts of the writers.

Some would say that laziness and failure to leave the comfort zone are the roots of a great deal of the world's sexism, racism, and other -isms. Not outright disliking people because of this or that characteristic, but just failing to remember that they're even around.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I know I was! I am also uncaring today. I do find the people who do care offensive. I don't tell *you* to get a hair cut, now do I? And don't even get me started on the folks who will do things like reach for your neck to straighten your collar. One day some old lady is going to do that and get a hip broken for their trouble.

And based on how upset you're getting about it "Uncaring about my look" WAS (and possibly still is) your look and therefore part of your identity (just like helping young men clean up right is part of the identity of some old ladies).

That's the funny part, actually. Guys will go to extreme lengths to prove they don't care. They will punch you in the face for alleging that they care. That is clear demonstration of the fact that they care quite a lot about your perception of their appearance. Specifically that they need to be perceived as opposite to the feminine norm.

The feminine norm is appearing to care. You have professed here that you will break an old lady's hip to avoid appearing like you care about your appearance. Therefore, you are willing to do extreme things (or at least make hyperbolic statements about your intent) to prove you are not showing a feminine characteristic.

And we're back to implicit sexism. I love me a case study that comes naturally out of the conversation.

Incidentally, I suffer from the same image issue. Most of my wardrobe that wasn't selected by my wife or her family screams "I don't care!" I have developed it to the point where it really is effortless to project the appearance of effortlessness, and I generally don't like to think about my clothes beyond making sure the colors match. Unless I'm in a tux. You put me in a tuxedo and I turn into a total "girl." I will primp. I will obsess about the line and how well polished the shoes are.

For some odd reason, I actually look really good in the right cut of a tuxedo and some suits. And it goes totally to my head making me an insufferable git.

That's a faulty basis of comparison because males experience appearance oversensitivity in different ways than females. Dudes aren't supposed to be waifs, they're supposed to be strong and athletic so they don't stop eating - they become obsessed with working out. How many dudes have you met that spend 3-4 hrs a day working out when its not related to their jobs?

Bingo.

a) Male body image is different, leading to different reactions and different pathologies

b) Male mental pathology is grossly under-reported, IMO.

I have known several men go to the gym pathologically. Doing something healthy for unhealthy reasons is usually given a pass in our society, however.

However, as Dannyalcatraz has pointed out, the traditionally feminine body issue problems have also begun to crop up among boys, too. Waifish boys are, in fact, in vogue in some circles, plus the masculine/feminine behavior lines are slowly being blurred. This is generally a good thing, leastways when it leads to boys with body image issues actually getting treatment instead of carrying it into adulthood and getting it labeled as normal male behavior.

 

[RefinedBean]

In a world with magic and multiple intelligent species, gender would work differently. For real.

You know this how?

I'm not even disagreeing with you, and I'm not trying to be pedantic. You seem more learned in feminism, both modern and historical, than I'll ever be.

But I think Oni's point could be expanded upon: a setting with inherent sexism as part of its foundation isn't necessarily a bad thing, if implemented thoughtfully. Now if that was part of the main D&D setting, which props up a large part of the industry, that's where things do get a bit nasty.

 

[Mallus]

Some would say that laziness and failure to leave the comfort zone are the roots of a great deal of the world's sexism, racism, and other -isms. Not outright disliking people because of this or that characteristic, but just failing to remember that they're even around.

Well said.

 

[Oni]

In a world with magic and multiple intelligent species, gender would work differently. For real. And that's something a lot of people don't seem to consider. This, more than anything, bugs me. Why would an entire world be sexist when there are multiple intelligent species and magic? That changes the dynamic a lot, and retaining sexism (especially since it's always "benign" sexism against womem) has more to do with a long tradition of sexism and exclusion in real life.

And personally, when I play a game, I don't want to deal with it. While I think I'm a special snowflake and that everyone should cater to me, I'm not so adament about inclusion because it'd benefit only me. Firstly, sexism - especially "historic"-esque, or "genre"-based sexism - is uncreative and doesn't make much sense, and secondly, getting rid of the boys' club feel is a positive step in the right direction (especially since bigotry can be explored in more palatable ways). As I mentioned earlier, bad gender representation makes material feel and seem very dated.

Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. Largely that is up to the creator of a given world. One cannot simply say it wouldn't work that way because there is no basis to make that statement. We have only human nature to fall back on in such situations as a guide to reactions to impossible fictional events. I think though you are too quick to dismiss the possibility. Gender roles to have a fundamental starting point in the basics of biology. This seed of difference is what leads to sexism. Sexism however, at least in my eyes, is about maintaining the status quo, that is to say it is about men maintaining dominance over women. The desire to be in control, to have the superior status in society will not simply disappear because the environment is different, or you've added people with pointy ears. Without some sort of universal enlightenment I find it highly dubious that sexism and any number of other 'isms would not exist in some form or another. The how and the why, or even the why not should be decided by the needs of the work, rather than just saying nuh-uh because it doesn't fit some particular social agenda.

 

[Hussar]

I haven't read the whole thread yet, but this hit me as I finished page three and I wanted to get it out.

Gaming is a male dominated hobby. That's factually true. So, it can't really avoid being sexist - when 4/5ths of your audience is male, you're going to cater to that audience. That's not so much sexism as just business.

However, trying to claim that there is no gender bias in the fans is not true IMO. Think about it for a second. When did the demographics of gaming change? When the Storyteller system came out. Vampire did far more to make the hobby accessable to women than D&D ever did.

Yet, even today, we have posters, multiple posters, telling all and sundry that storyteller, or narative to use the Forgism, games, "aren't really roleplaying". They're not "true" roleplaying games. They should be called something else, since, after all, anyone who plays these games aren't actually engaging in role playing.

I've seen posts exactly like that multiple times just in the past few weeks, never mind in the dark ages of the early hobby times.

So, how can that not be considered sexist and exclusionary? When male gamers publicly argue that the games that female gamers often prefer aren't "real" rpg's and don't really belong, how can that not be considered sexist?

 

[ajanders]

I'll assume you're being facetious here. And nobody, not even me, would suggest that a campaign should be all Luna all the time. That way lies madness.

Why should that be facetious?
What's the difference between four female wizards/warlocks/ bards/spellswords and the front cover of "Magical Witch-Girls"?
They all have magical powers, they're all female, and at first level they're supposed to be "young and finding their place in the world".

If Witch-Girls is non-sexist and valid game for redressing sexual imbalance, is not a Witch-Girls D&D game also non-sexist and possibly valid for redress?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Some would say that laziness and failure to leave the comfort zone are the roots of a great deal of the world's sexism, racism, and other -isms. Not outright disliking people because of this or that characteristic, but just failing to remember that they're even around.

Others would say that's the ultimate example of nonprejudice: You forget or ignore that people even HAVE differences, unless you make a special effort. To be color-blind or gender-blind is largely encouraged in the "progressive" nations today.

Both extremes of the continuum are problematic. Heck, the whole continuum is problematic, and fantasy in general gets into it because archetypes are just stereotypes and fantasy is all about archetypes. The archetype of the greedy dwarf IS the charictature of a middle-ages Jewish stereotype, to varying degrees, because, well, multiculturalism and tolerance are fairly new concepts in the world, and are certainly antithetical to the kind of tribal/feudal mythic mindset in which Fantasy sits happily.

I think D&D needs to steer away from it on its face, but this is part of why I don't like the "decency clause" in the d20 Liscence or the GSL. Imaginative, honest fantasy will play with the ideas of gender and race and religion in various ways, not all of them flattering. The Hindu gods in Deities and Demigods and gnomes with big noses and Vistani in Ravenloft and basic cheesecake art and more...stuff like that flirts with offensive, despite the opportunities that playing with those archetypes and ideas allows.

In general, WotC has been double-plus good for D&D like this. Of course, the math and spatial ability that D&D requires is linked to testosterone, so the more D&D focuses on minis combat, the less D&D is able to stradle that gender line of players (yes, some women have lots of testosterone, but I'm talking overall trends).

 

[Hussar]

Ok, phew, finally finished the thread.

Now, I don't actually believe that the core books in 3e or 4e are all that terribly sexist. I think that the Rouse has nicely pointed out all the points that need to be pointed to, so, I'm not going to belabor the point.

However, I do think the community does have some issues. Looking at Ariosto's post:

/snip

The 1E urban encounters table includes harlots for the same reason as beggars and brigands; drunks and demons; gentlemen and goodwives; laborers and lycanthropes; and so on. Like the whole of AD&D, it was a reflection of Gygax's Greyhawk campaign -- which in turn reflected, through a personal lens, the genre of sword-and-sorcery and planetary romances. The city depicted is one not too strange to a reader of Leigh Brackett, Robert E. Howard or (perhaps above all) Fritz Leiber, whose Lankhmar bore some resemblance to the Los Angeles he knew.


/snip

The suggestion in this day and age that a historical fiction need be bowdlerized for the sake of feminine sensibilities would, I think, be obviously patronizing -- and obviously ignorant of the contents of "romance novels".

/snip

On the other hand, I have but a little patience for those who (in any of a number of areas) embark on crusades to make D&D officially something else. There are plenty of somethings else from which to choose, and there is as much room for more as there is real demand for something different.

Sorry snipped for length.

This approach has been brought up time and time again on these forums. That there is a "proper" inspirational source for D&D, and that source is traditional fantasy. Tolkien, Howard, Lieber, etc.

But, look at traditional fantasy. Can you possibly get more sexist? Name three female protagonists from fantasy written before 1970. There are a couple, but, they are pretty few and far between. Far and away more are the Conan's and the Fafrd's and the Bilbo's. Heck, they actually had to ADD a female character to the LotR movie because, other than Galadrial, I can't think of a single female character that has more than a paragraph.

Again, how can this not be considered sexist? If the game is based on this sort of fantasy, and cannot be "made something else", then we are stuck basing the game on incredibly misogynistic (never mind the racism in these books) part of the genre. Time and time again, I've read on these boards that we have to guard the game against allowing any newer fantasy in, because it's "just not good enough".

While I know the purpose of that attitude is not to exclude women, that is one of the effects. If you insist that the only sources we draw on are works written by dead authors, then the game can't not be incredibly sexist in its base.

 

[shilsen]

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

Actually (and for many around me, sadly), yes. I always sucked when it came/comes to caring about issues of appearance

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.

I disagree with a lot of your assumptions. For one, I don't think the vast majority of campaign settings (published or otherwise) have any real integrity to them. Especially faux-medieval ones, which look incredibly incoherent to me since they attempt to retain the trappings of medievalism while not incorporating elements which were essential to the creation of medieval Europe (since such settings are invariably European in nature) and failing to account for how D&D elements such as multiple intelligent races and the presence of magic would change them. And you're assuming that I am a proponent of all campaign worlds having perfect egalitarianism. I'm not. But a world can be drastically non-egalitarian without being sexist in a way which maps the real world. But invariably, these worlds do repeat real world sexism. I've never seen a campaign setting which is sexist and matriarchal, for example. You can have settings which have integrity and creativity and are not sterilized without revisiting the same old tired tropes of real world sexism. Eberron is a case in point.

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?

See my comment above about egalitarianism. A world where the sexes are treated equally can still treat characters differently based on race, species, nationality, age, whether they use magic, etc. There are a million different ways to have conflict and differentiation between individuals without having to reuse real-world sexism. And many of those would be much more creative and smarter, in my estimation, than trying to recreate (intentionally or otherwise) real-world sexism in a world which is patently not the real world.

That's not something shil's advocating. He's talking about the unintentional expression of sexist attitudes.

For example, shilsen is currently running a setting I co-wrote. I can certainly speak authoritatively about the 'integrity' of that particular work. I was more than a little surprised to hear that the vast majority of interesting NPC's in the setting were men. It shouldn't surprise me, it's what my friend John and I wrote.

That's a kind of inadvertent, but very real sexism. Our unstated default assumption was that the authority figures and men of action, should be, in fact, men. It wasn't intentional. I wasn't trying for a certain level of historicity, I wasn't trying to make a point.

And I ended up making a one. One I don't particularly like.

I've written more egalitarian settings in the past. Heck, my last one, which was partly a parody of swords and sorcery conventions, complete with deliberate sexism and racism had stronger female NPC's. What gets my goat is that in the setting where I didn't think about gender roles, in automatically made the world about guys (in a manner of speaking).

It's not quite that plain... but it's plain enough to get me thinking.

Thanks. That was just really classy, in my estimation, since I think it's usually a lot harder to decipher inadvertent sexism when one does it oneself. I think if more people used the sort of objectivity and self-awareness you did there, we'd all have a much easier time with this subject.

If you read it as I did, the implication that the creative exploration of certain topics is fit only to hidden away from the light of day, and something that shouldn't be allowed to be published as a campaign setting.

That's an implication I wasn't making. I was making the statement that much of D&D, unthinkingly and (more or less) subtly reinforces real world sexism. If it explored real world sexism in a smart and creative way, I'd be all for it. But I don't see it happening.

Regarding any creative work though it is the creator's responsibility to be mindful of what they are creating, to exercise control over the creative process. You can tell when thought has been put into to something rather than just doing what comes easiest and most natural, falling back into the comfort zone. I would venture a guess that the majority of the described sexism in regards to campaign settings and the gender counts has more to do with laziness and failure to leave the comfort zone than any kind of subconscious misogynistic tendencies on the parts of the writers.

As Cadfan and Mallus noted, laziness and a failure to leave the comfort zone can and very often lead to sexism (and other -isms, of course). It's precisely the laziness and failure to leave the comfort zone which I'm critiquing.

But I think Oni's point could be expanded upon: a setting with inherent sexism as part of its foundation isn't necessarily a bad thing, if implemented thoughtfully. Now if that was part of the main D&D setting, which props up a large part of the industry, that's where things do get a bit nasty.

I agree about the implementing thoughtfully, which is not what I see happening. And I agree that sexism as a default in the main D&D setting(s) is a problem, hence this thread.

Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. Largely that is up to the creator of a given world. One cannot simply say it wouldn't work that way because there is no basis to make that statement. We have only human nature to fall back on in such situations as a guide to reactions to impossible fictional events. I think though you are too quick to dismiss the possibility. Gender roles to have a fundamental starting point in the basics of biology.

And your last sentence is why I agree with Proserpine that I fundamentally cannot see sexism which maps so close to real-world sexism as a default (which is how it's usually presented) in D&D worlds. Biology is drastically different than our world in a D&D world, if simply because men and women can be exactly as strong, fast, durable, intelligent, wise and charismatic as each other. The strongest PC in the world can just as easily be a man as a woman. And then there's the existence of magic, which makes physical strength and biology much less important when it comes to influence on society. And then there's the fact that a myriad different species, with different biologies, inhabit these worlds. And yet somehow when sexism exists in these worlds, it is almost always patriarchal sexism, in the same way that it exists in much of our world. To me, that's no more logical than someone arguing that chimpanzees in a zoo should have a patriarchal society simply because the USA does.

This seed of difference is what leads to sexism. Sexism however, at least in my eyes, is about maintaining the status quo, that is to say it is about men maintaining dominance over women. The desire to be in control, to have the superior status in society will not simply disappear because the environment is different, or you've added people with pointy ears. Without some sort of universal enlightenment I find it highly dubious that sexism and any number of other 'isms would not exist in some form or another. The how and the why, or even the why not should be decided by the needs of the work, rather than just saying nuh-uh because it doesn't fit some particular social agenda.

Unfortunately, the needs of the work, most of the time, seems to me to be to use the easiest and most common denominator - i.e. the sexism which people are used to in our world - rather than actually thinking deeply about how issues of difference and power might be mediated in a world very different from ours. I think all sorts of interesting things can be done with sexism and racism and other forms of inequality in D&D campaign settings. This is a form of speculative fiction after all, and one of the coolest things about speculative fiction, for me, is the exploration of how the human condition would change if certain things which are true to our world were different in the fictional one. But when that exploration always ends with patriarchal sexism, I call shenanigans.

Why should that be facetious?
What's the difference between four female wizards/warlocks/ bards/spellswords and the front cover of "Magical Witch-Girls"?
They all have magical powers, they're all female, and at first level they're supposed to be "young and finding their place in the world".

If Witch-Girls is non-sexist and valid game for redressing sexual imbalance, is not a Witch-Girls D&D game also non-sexist and possibly valid for redress?

The fact that one is in D&D and the other isn't, is a salient difference to me. As some people have noted above, D&D has a particular position in gaming which other systems don't have. With D&D being in many ways the default system in gaming (and yes, there are some problems with that fact too), I think it should strive to be more welcoming to players of different genders, races, etc. The fact that it (and gaming in general) isn't is the reason why games like Witch-Girls can be helpful. And right from the start of this thread, I've been advocating settings which are more egalitatarian (or at least explore sexism intelligently), not ones which focus on excluding any gender.

Others would say that's the ultimate example of nonprejudice: You forget or ignore that people even HAVE differences, unless you make a special effort. To be color-blind or gender-blind is largely encouraged in the "progressive" nations today.

Except that a lot of supposed color-blindness or gender-blindness is simply a recapitulation of the positions of color and gender in the status quo.

Of course, the math and spatial ability that D&D requires is linked to testosterone, so the more D&D focuses on minis combat, the less D&D is able to stradle that gender line of players (yes, some women have lots of testosterone, but I'm talking overall trends).

Testosterone makes you better at math and spatial ability? That's the first time I've heard that claim!

Ok, phew, finally finished the thread.

You are a very patient and dedicated person!

Now, I don't actually believe that the core books in 3e or 4e are all that terribly sexist. I think that the Rouse has nicely pointed out all the points that need to be pointed to, so, I'm not going to belabor the point.

Agreed. I don't think the core rules are sexist at all, actually, and work quite well to avoid them. The artwork, the miniatures line, the campaign settings, and the modules, however, I think can and do sometimes express sexist ideas. Usually unintentionally, I believe, and simply by assuming that masculinity is the norm, but the lack of intentionality doesn't make it any the better.