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

[Dannyalcatraz]

Name three female protagonists from fantasy written before 1970.

Even excluding mythology and legends, they're out there, but they're rare...and most of them were in short stories, not novels.

Thinking...Red Sonja appeared in comic form in 1973, inspired by the 1934 Robert E. Howard short story "The Shadow of the Vulture" in the form of the Red Sonya of Rogatino character.

C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry is out there as well, dating back to 1934's "Black God's Kiss."

The second book in Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy features Tenar, and was published in 1971.

The Chronicles of Narnia feature several young women in heroic roles, as do, as I recall, the Dragonriders of Pern books.

Despite this, you are far more likely to find a female protagonist in early sci-fi than early fantasy.

 

[Hussar]

Hussar, it's your choice to put such a value on the "RPG" term. Heck, you can insist on calling your preferred mode "wargames campaigns" (as D&D was originally billed) if you like.

However, calling people sexist because they distinguish games in which one plays the role of Oliver Twist from those in which one "plays the role" not even of Charles Dickens but instead (and in a purely functional sense) that of one of a committee of editors writing a story about Oliver Twist is ... just twisted!

It's at least as meaningful a distinction as what has arisen between RPGs and wargames, or any of myriad other taxonomies. As people recognize the emergence of a new form and begin to treat it on its own terms, they naturally tend so to refer to it! The notion that it is somewhere better to remain lost in the shadow of another school seems to me pretty rare in such cases.

Heh, I had to go to the bathroom and cogitate on this to get your point. This is why I asked before. But, I think I get what you're saying.

In your three examples, the first one is a "role playing game" because you are playing the part of Oliver. The second one is a "role playing game" because you are playing Dickens. The third, in your definition is not a "role playing game" because it does not satisfy your definition.

This is precisely my point. You ARE being exclusionary. You are basically saying that there is only one kind of role playing game and those other games, while they may be fine, are not really role playing games. Thus, in the Forgist sense (which I hate Forgisms cos I always use them wrong) Narativist games aren't really role playing games because the players have editorial control.

Me, I figure the umbrella of RPG is a much bigger umbrella and has no problems whatsoever including all kinds of games, including some Euro board games which are pretty damn close to an RPG. Meh, why not include them.

But you, you want to block them out. They're not playing the "true" RPG. This is exactly what I originally talked about. How some in the hobby want to close the doors against anything they personally don't like. That those who don't play the game in a specific, limited way, just aren't doing it right.

 

[S'mon]

I think you read 'cisgender' in one of Proserpine's posts. I found it on Wikipedia:

Cisgender - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[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!

Thanks,
Rich

Ah, right. Thanks.

 

[Spatula]

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?

None.

But you know, I do know a lot of out of waifs. I'm a skinny dude who's never been to a real gym myself. Not being ripped is not an impediment to male self-image, or in finding a mate; the social pressure to look a certain way just is not there in the same degree that it is on women. Men have different pressures to deal with.

I do know many, many women who have struggled with eating disorders at some point in their lives. And that's just the ones who have confided that information to me. Not everyone is ok discussing bouts of mental illness, so I'm sure there's a lot more instances of it in people that I know, that I am simply unaware of. I've never heard of anyone hiding their gym-going habits.

 

[S'mon]

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).

I remember that female players of mine who complained about perceived institutional sexism in my regular Gygaxian medievalesque campaign world, had no problem with sexism when I ran a short Conan campaign for them. In fact they relished playing butt-kicking barbarian women who rapidly acquired nubile young male companions.

 

[S'mon]

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?

Vampire-style 'storyteller' RPGs are just regular RPGs with a stronger emphasis on plot (which can become railroading), mood & feel, rather than exploration/challenge. If they differ from D&D it's in placing more emphasis on how your PC feels, rather than what they do. They're still 'I am a vampire', just like D&D's 'I am a Fighter'.

These White Wolf 'Storyteller' RPGs have nothing to do with Forge-ist Narrativist games, which are arguably not RPGs because the 'players' are more like authors or directors creating a story from Premise.

 

[S'mon]

Human nature makes male brains and female brains different (on average, saying nothing about an individual).

It's important to keep both those points in mind - (1) that men and women are different on average and (2) some women are more like men, and some men are more like women, in various ways.

For some reason many people deny one of these, either claiming that women are inherently the same as men, or that women are inherently all different from men. For instance, women have about 1/10 the violent crime rate of men, which is very important information to know if you're walking a city street at night. At the same time, some women are more violent than some men.

 

[S'mon]

Re testosterone making you better at math, seems unlikely. In my school in Northern Ireland, I was in the top class for math, and it was 90% girls. So was the top class for English. Only in Physics & Chemistry was there anything like sex parity. Cultural factors may have been at work in the girls doing so much better at math than the boys. OTOH male and female brains certainly are somewhat different.

 

[Ariosto]

1. Do you advocate that D&D should continue to focus its inspiration on traditional fantasy (Tolkien, Moorcock, Lieber, etc)?

What does "etc" mean to you? How wide are the horizons of your "traditional fantasy"? I submit that the "focus of inspiration" in D&D originally, to the limited degree that such a focus is readily identifiable, was the Western reaches of the perennial Ocean of Story. Look at the list of monsters in Volume 2; the majority go back centuries, if not millennia. There are creatures (or at least interpretations thereof) such as the vampire and the walking mummy (and Dunsany's Gnoles) that are more modern, and "blobs" more modern still ... but most have roots in Mediterranean or European mythology and folklore. Do I think that D&D should be cut off from those roots? No! I would rather see continued the process of including more figures from the ancient and ageless stories of the world. Unfortunately, those are not anyone's "intellectual property" -- so I hardly expect Hasbro to have the interest in them that the hobbyists who created D&D had.

2. Do you believe that new fantasy has anything to add to the hobby? And, if so, what?

What it has been adding from the start: sources of inspiration. If memory serves, the appearance of the rust monster and several others was based on some little plastic toys from China; comic books and television shows, knicknacks, a shower curtain ... all sorts of things have been grists for the mills of imagination in adding bits to D&D.

3. Do you believe that D&D, as it was originally created, borrowed heavily from traditional fantasy sources (as well as others such as myth and whatnot)?

See #1 above.

4. I believe that by focusing the hobby on certain genre titles and writers, specifically traditional fantasy writers, it narrows D&D's appeal to women. Would you agree or disagree?

I believe that this trend -- which I have seen ever more prominently starting late in the 1E era (with Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms) -- lessens D&D's appeal to a wide variety of people. As to DL in particular, though, the effect I saw at first hand was brisk sales of the novels to females (and others!) not much interested in the game products. It may be that the trend in fact attracts more than it turns off. On principle, I hypothesize that WotC's rules-heavy approach probably has the opposite effect. From a commercial standpoint, at least from the perspective of such a large and diversified firm as Hasbro, it may be more profitable to maximize appeal to a focused demographic than to weaken that by strengthening a more diverse appeal. It does not seem to consider my cash (or that of others it has turned away) "green" enough. Fortunately, there are creative minds ready (whether for profit or for free) to supply what demand they can.

 

[S'mon]

Actually, stuff like this is really, REALLY hard to test impartially.

One of my best friends from college is now a doctoral candidate in psychology, and he's done a lot of work on "stereotype threat" (if I remember the term correctly) in male vs. female testing like this.

The basic observation is that, if you're measuring how well females do at a stereotypically male-dominated subject (as, mathematics), they will score measurably worse if they take the test in a room mixed with male subjects, or with a male proctor.

Like I said, really REALLY hard to measure.

That stereotype threat is real, does not mean that there are not underlying differences in group performance too, though. You can increase performance gaps by telling people that they're part of a poor-performing group right before they take the test. That is not the same as saying you can eliminate performance gaps by doing the reverse.