D&D Historian Benn Riggs On Gary Gygax & Sexism

The recent book The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977 talks about the early years of D&D. In the book, authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro talk about the way the game, and its writers, approached certain issues. Not surprisingly, this revelation received aggressive "pushback" on social media because, well, that sort of thing does--in fact, one designer who worked with Gygax at the time labelled it "slanderous".

D&D historian Ben Riggs--author of Slaying the Dragon--delved into the facts. Note that the below was posted on Twitter, in that format, not as an article.

D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to Preserving his Legacy.

The internet has been rending its clothes and gnashing its teeth over the introduction to an instant classic of TTRPG history, The Making of Original D&D 1970-1977. Published by Wizards of the Coast, it details the earliest days of D&D’s creation using amazing primary source materials.

Why then has the response been outrage from various corners of the internet? Well authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro mention that early D&D made light of slavery, disparaged women, and gave Hindu deities hit points. They also repeated Wizard’s disclaimer for legacy content which states:"These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."

In response to this, an army of grognards swarmed social media to bite their shields and bellow. Early D&D author Rob Kuntz described Peterson and Tondro’s work as “slanderous.” On his Castle Oldskull blog, Kent David Kelly called it “disparagement.” These critics are accusing Peterson and Tondro of dishonesty. Lying, not to put too fine a point on it.So, are they lying? Are they making stuff up about Gary Gygax and early D&D?

Well, let's look at a specific example of what Peterson and Tondro describe as “misogyny “ from 1975's Greyhawk. Greyhawk was the first supplement ever produced for D&D. Written by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz, the same Rob Kuntz who claimed slander above, it was a crucial text in the history of the game. For example, it debuted the thief character class. It also gave the game new dragons, among them the King of Lawful Dragons and the Queen of Chaotic Dragons. The male dragon is good, and female dragon is evil. (See Appendix 1 below for more.)

​

It is a repetition of the old trope that male power is inherently good, and female power is inherently evil. (Consider the connotations of the words witch and wizard, with witches being evil by definition, for another example.)

Now so-called defenders of Gygax and Kuntz will say that my reading of the above text makes me a fool who wouldn’t know dragon’s breath from a virtue signal. I am ruining D&D with my woke wokeness. Gygax and Kuntz were just building a fun game, and decades later, Peterson and Tondro come along to crap on their work by screeching about misogyny.

(I would also point out that as we are all white men of a certain age talking about misogyny, the worst we can expect is to be flamed online. Women often doing the same thing get rape or death threats.)

Critics of their work would say that Peterson and Tondro are reading politics into D&D. Except that when we return to the Greyhawk text, we see that it was actually Gygax and Kuntz who put “politics” into D&D.

The text itself comments on the fact that the lawful dragon is male, and the chaotic one is female. Gygax and Kuntz wrote: “Women’s lib may make whatever they wish from the foregoing.”

​

The intent is clear. The female is a realm of chaos and evil, so of course they made their chaotic evil dragon a queen.

Yes, Gygax and Kuntz are making a game, but it is a game whose co-creator explicitly wrote into the rules that feminine power—perhaps even female equality—is by nature evil. There is little room for any other interpretation.

The so-called defenders of Gygax may now say that he was a man of his time, he didn’t know better, or some such. If only someone had told him women were people too in 1975! Well, Gygax was criticized for this fact of D&D at the time. And he left us his response.

Writing in EUROPA, a European fanzine, Gygax said:“I have been accused of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gendered names, and so forth."

"I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’...and thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking’. Damn right I am sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the men’s locker room."

"They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.”

So just to summarize here, Gygax wrote misogyny into the D&D rules. When this was raised with him as an issue at the time, his response was to offer to put rules on rape and sex slavery into D&D.

The outrage online directed at Peterson and Tondro is not only entirely misplaced and disproportional, and perhaps even dishonest in certain cases...

Part 2: D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to Preserving his Legacy....it is also directly harming the legacies of Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz and the entire first generation of genius game designers our online army of outraged grognards purport to defend.

How? Let me show you.The D&D player base is getting more diverse in every measurable way, including age, gender, sexual orientation, and race. To cite a few statistics, 81% of D&D players are Millenials or Gen Z, and 39% are women. This diversity is incredible, and not because the diversity is some blessed goal unto itself. Rather, the increasing diversity of D&D proves the vigor of the TTRPG medium. Like Japanese rap music or Soviet science fiction, the transportation of a medium across cultures, nations, and genders proves that it is an important method for exploring the human condition. And while TTRPGs are a game, they are also clearly an important method for exploring the human condition. The fact the TTRPG fanbase is no longer solely middle-aged Midwestern cis men of middle European descent...

...the fact that non-binary blerds and Indigenous trans women and fat Polish-American geeks like me and people from every bed of the human vegetable garden ...

find meaning in a game created by two white guys from the Midwest is proof that Gygax and Arneson were geniuses who heaved human civilization forward, even if only by a few feet.

So, as a community, how do we deal with the ugly prejudices of our hobby’s co-creator who also baked them into the game we love? We could pretend there is no problem at all, and say that anyone who mentions the problem is a liar. There is no misogyny to see. There is no **** and there is no stink, and anyone who says there is naughty word on your sneakers is lying and is just trying to embarrass you.

I wonder how that will go? Will all these new D&D fans decide that maybe D&D isn’t for them? They know the stink of misogyny, just like they know **** when they smell it. To say it isn’t there is an insult to their intelligence. If they left the hobby over this, it would leave our community smaller, poorer, and suggest that the great work of Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz, and the other early luminaries on D&D was perhaps not so great after all…

We could take the route of Disney and Song of the South. Wizards could remove all the PDFs of early D&D from DriveThruRPG. They could refuse to ever reprint this material again. Hide it. Bury it. Erase it all with copyright law and lawyers. Yet no matter how deeply you bury the past, it always tends to come back up to the surface again. Heck, there are whole podcast series about that. And what will all these new D&D fans think when they realize that a corporation tried to hide its own mistakes from them?

Again, maybe they decide D&D isn’t the game for them. Or maybe when someone tells you there is **** on your shoe, you say thanks, clean it off, and move on.

We honor the old books, but when they tell a reader they are a lesser human being, we should acknowledge that is not the D&D of 2024. Something like...

“Hey reader, we see you in all your wondrous multiplicity of possibility, and if we were publishing this today, it wouldn’t contain messages and themes telling some of you that you are less than others. So we just want to warn you. That stuff’s in there.”

Y’know, something like that legacy content warning they put on all those old PDFs on DriveThruRPG. And when we see something bigoted in old D&D, we talk about it. It lets the new, broad, and deep tribe of D&D know that we do not want bigotry in D&D today. Talking about it welcomes the entire human family into the hobby.To do anything less is to damn D&D to darkness. It hobbles its growth, gates its community, denies the world the joy of the game, and denies its creators their due. D&D’s creators were visionary game designers. They were also people, and people are kinda ****** up. So a necessary step in making D&D the sort of cultural pillar that it deserves to be is to name its bigotries and prejudices when you see them. Failure to do so hurts the game by shrinking our community and therefore shrinking the legacy of its creators.

Appendix 1: Yeah, I know Chaos isn’t the same as Evil in OD&D.

But I would also point out as nerdily as possible that on pg. 9 of Book 1 of OD&D, under “Character Alignment, Including Various Monsters and Creatures,” Evil High Priests are included under the “Chaos” heading, along with the undead. So I would put to you that Gygax did see a relationship between Evil and Chaos at the time.

Ben Riggs​

Look, folks, we know how a conversation like this goes on the internet. Because, internet. Read the rules you agreed to before replying. The banhammer will be used on those who don't do what they agreed to.

 

[Steampunkette]

In the context you were using in the post I replied to, I think it really does matter.

That wasn’t the point you seemed to be making when I responded.

Yes. Gary was a sexist. That comment proves it beyond all reasonable doubt.

The contention I had wasn’t that.

The contention was that he was a product of his time because sexism was pervasive and common in that era, right?

That people who WEREN'T sexist are somehow not a product of their era is the following idea that goes with that. That they were progressives and counter-cultural.

Because if Gygax is "Normal" for the time then surely those people who called him out must be "Progressive" for the time. Right?

The logic doesn't automatically follow, though. It presumes, by default, that the normal response to being called a bigot is to go "Yes. I am a bigot." rather than "I'm not a bigot, I just understand (XYZ)". Which while still a bigoted thing to say, deflects criticism in theory (and often practice).

But when we look at people who hold bigoted beliefs around us, today, MOST try to deflect. SOME accept the criticism. Fewer still double down.

Gygax doubled down.

I'm saying that like Howard and Lovecraft and Lanasa and Rowling, Gygax was an exceptional bigot.

The people who called him out -may- have been progressives. Or they may have been mainstream levels of sexist and just thought his takes on were "Too Far". We'll never know for sure.

But there's a LOT of transphobes who will throw their children out on the street after heaping abuse on them, and still cry out "This isn't what we wanted!" when a 14 year old trans kid gets dismembered and thrown into a lake. Or stabbed to death by her peers. Or beaten bloody when they try to use the bathroom. THAT level of transphobia is "Too Far" and they're not transphobic, they're just concerned parents.

But we -can- know for sure that he doubled down. That he went "Yes. I am a bigot." and went from there. And that points to an exceptional bigot.

 

[jayoungr]

Point #1, Gygax was born in 1938. His views on a lot of things were probably well formed before the various social upheavals of the 1960s came along and disrupted a lot of previous norms.

Point #2, there is no one single attitude of the 1970s. A lot of debates were going on throughout the decade. The sort of things Gygax said weren't universally considered beyond the pale, but they were also not going to go unchallenged.

I do disagree that his views were particularly rare or extreme for the time. They were, let's say, within the bounds of normal discourse in those days. The center has shifted enough since then that this is no longer the case.

 

[Steampunkette]

To try and achieve some brevity:

The assumption being made with "Product of their time" is that they were the default level of bad and everyone was that bad -except- for the handful of people who weren't Products of their time. That there's a special minority of good people in a bad place.

But it ignores that there are people like Lanasa. Who are -exceptionally- bad for the time they exist in. Like, don't get me wrong. PLENTY of Lanasa's peers are homophobes and transphobes. Gen X isn't uniquely incapable of being racist or sexist, either. A lot of the younger bigots in politics, right now, are Gen X. It's just a matter of time after all.

But that doesn't mean Lanasa doesn't stand out as an -egregious- jerk that other Gen Xers call out, even if they're not progressive Gen Xers.

 

[FrogReaver]

The contention was that he was a product of his time because sexism was pervasive and common in that era, right?

Good so far.

That people who WEREN'T sexist are somehow not a product of their era is the following idea that goes with that. That they were progressives and counter-cultural.

This is where I see the logic failing.

We are either talking about the pervasiveness of sexism of his time or something else.

If we are talking about the pervasiveness of sexism in his time then having only a small group speaking out about his sexism reinforces that point rather diminishes it.

Because if Gygax is "Normal" for the time then surely those people who called him out must be "Progressive" for the time. Right?

sounds reasonable.

The logic doesn't automatically follow, though. It presumes, by default, that the normal response to being called a bigot is to go "Yes. I am a bigot." rather than "I'm not a bigot, I just understand (XYZ)". Which while still a bigoted thing to say, deflects criticism in theory (and often practice).

IMO. In a time of pervasive socially accepted bigotry, many wore it as a badge of honor. (Even if in some corners it wasn’t socially acceptable).

But when we look at people who hold bigoted beliefs around us, today, MOST try to deflect. SOME accept the criticism. Fewer still double down.

Open bigotry isn’t socially acceptable today. I think that explains the difference.

Gygax doubled down.

Yes. Doubling down was really bad. Like I said, his doubling down comment is persuasive regarding his views.

I'm saying that like Howard and Lovecraft and Lanasa and Rowling, Gygax was an exceptional bigot.

For his time, I’m not sure he was. Says more about how bigoted people in his time were than about anything else IMO.

The people who called him out -may- have been progressives. Or they may have been mainstream levels of sexist and just thought his takes on were "Too Far". We'll never know for sure.

I’ll even agree here. Both are certainly within the realm of possibility.

But we -can- know for sure that he doubled down. That he went "Yes. I am a bigot." and went from there. And that points to an exceptional bigot.

I think there’s a few too many logical leaps to get to him conclusively being an exceptional bigot for his time. He was exceptionally bigoted/sexist but exceptional for his time is a much stronger claim… Id need quite a bit more evidence for that.

 

[FrogReaver]

Point #1, Gygax was born in 1938. His views on a lot of things were probably well formed before the various social upheavals of the 1960s came along and disrupted a lot of previous norms.

Point #2, there is no one single attitude of the 1970s. A lot of debates were going on throughout the decade. The sort of things Gygax said weren't universally considered beyond the pale, but they were also not going to go unchallenged.

I do disagree that his views were particularly rare or extreme for the time. They were, let's say, within the bounds of normal discourse in those days. The center has shifted enough since then that this is no longer the case.

You said it more eloquently than I. Thanks.

 

[Reef]

But isn’t whether or not Gygax was a product of his time irrelevant to the matter at hand? Whether or not he was extra sexist, or just normal sexist for the 70’s, he was sexist by current standards. Is that in question? Considering he self-described as sexist back then?

So, considering he was sexist by current standards, how is it a bad thing that they put a disclaimer before publishing his historical works (for a modern audience)?

“Hey, here’s some historical documents. They contains some sexist stuff that we don’t endorse, but also didn’t want to whitewash. Just a warning.”

How is this an attack?

I mean, when I put on a movie, and it tells me that it contains Strong Language, Violence, or Nudity, I don’t assume they are trying to shame the creators for making it, or me for watching it.

 

[FrogReaver]

To try and achieve some brevity:

The assumption being made with "Product of their time" is that they were the default level of bad and everyone was that bad -except- for the handful of people who weren't Products of their time. That there's a special minority of good people in a bad place.

Sounds like a fine summary.

But it ignores that there are people like Lanasa. Who are -exceptionally- bad for the time they exist in. Like, don't get me wrong. PLENTY of Lanasa's peers are homophobes and transphobes. Gen X isn't uniquely incapable of being racist or sexist, either. A lot of the younger bigots in politics, right now, are Gen X. It's just a matter of time after all.

I agree that there can be exceptionally sexist/bigoted people for their time. The discussion for me is around whether specifically gygax was one. I don’t see the evidence for that.

But that doesn't mean Lanasa doesn't stand out as an -egregious- jerk that other Gen Xers call out, even if they're not progressive Gen Xers.

Right. I think I get your train of thought now. Something like, if gygax was an exceptional bigot of his time then him being called out wasn’t really by smaller groups, but rather large segments of society. I agree that’s a potential possibility. Do we have any evidence one way or another?

 

[TiQuinn]

I think there’s a distinction in being called out by a small minority as opposed to being called out by an overwhelming majority.

What defines a majority in this case? Lovecraft was considered racist by many of his peers but he was a virtual unknown to the majority of the public, and the number of forums to actually express one’s views on an author or artist or celebrity are much, much more prevalent now then they were in the majority of the 20th century.

 

[Steampunkette]

Good so far.

This is where I see the logic failing.

We are either talking about the pervasiveness of sexism of his time or something else.

If we are talking about the pervasiveness of sexism in his time then having only a small group speaking out about his sexism reinforces that point rather diminishes it.

sounds reasonable.

IMO. In a time of pervasive socially accepted bigotry, many wore it as a badge of honor.

Open bigotry isn’t socially acceptable today. I think that explains the difference.

Yes. Doubling down was really bad. Like I said, his doubling down comment is persuasive regarding his views.

For his time, I’m not sure he was. Says more about how bigoted people in his time were than about anything else IMO.

I’ll even agree here. Both are certainly within the realm of possibility.

I think there’s a few too many logical leaps to get to him conclusively being an exceptional bigot for his time. He was exceptionally bigoted/sexist but exceptional for his time is a much stronger claim… Id need quite a bit more evidence for that.

Feminism was mainstream enough in 1972 that the Equal Rights Amendment was kicked out to the individual states for ratification. There was enough movement that both houses of Congress approved of an amendment to the Constitution in order to protect equal rights for women which would have made marital rape illegal, pay differences illegal, and so forth on a Constitutional level such that no individual state could infringe on the rights of women. (All laws that had to be passed separately when the amendment stalled in -certain- states and only hit 37 state ratification when it needed 38)

Enough people across the US had to put forth enough politicians to fill seats in the House of Representatives to get a fillibuster-proof majority who backed the ERA. AND enough seats in Congress to pass a Constitutional Amendment about it. (67/100, though for the record it had a whopping 84/100 votes)

We think of the 1970s as a time where sexism was rampant to a ridiculous degree 'cause we think we're beyond sexism for the most part, now.

But proudly wearing the badge of being a Sexist was not a mainstream position at the time. It was a minority position. MOST of the US supported women's liberation to the point of electing representatives to FINALLY pass Congress.

But there were still enough sexists, and enough sexism, to stop it from getting ratified until 2020 when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it. And there's enough sexists and sexism in modern congress to stop it from getting finalized.

So. Y'know. Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

 

[FrogReaver]

But isn’t whether or not Gygax was a product of his time irrelevant to the matter at hand? Whether or not he was extra sexist, or just normal sexist for the 70’s, he was sexist by current standards. Is that in question? Considering he self-described as sexist back then?

I think there are multiple matters at hand. For that specific one I agree that it’s irrelevant. But I don’t think that’s it’s universally irrelevant.

So, considering he was sexist by current standards, how is it a bad thing that they put a disclaimer before publishing his historical works (for a modern audience)?

Its not.

“Hey, here’s some historical documents. They contains some sexist stuff that we don’t endorse, but also didn’t want to whitewash. Just a warning.”

How is this an attack?

I don’t think that is.