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.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

How old was he in 2005?

old enough to know better and old enough to be derided for his bigotry.

 

[Reef]

How old was he in 2005?

Is there some magical “get out of being called sexist free” card for being old?

It may be harder for old people to learn new tricks, but it’s not impossible. Lots of them have done so.

 

[TiQuinn]

How old was he in 2005?

You can certainly do that math yourself.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

George Carlin was born in 1937. Gloria Steinem was born in 1934. Susan Sontag in 1933. That time was rife with people who grew up to define the 60s.

I don’t have a dog in whatever debate is happening in a sense.

That said, comparing someone to a pioneer and visionary is not likely to yield a good comparison to Joe Everyman.

I would let the documents show what they show! And it’s your product! If you want people to know it’s not representative of your current thinking, say so. And they did!

the only gutless thing to do is to bury this and pretend none of it existed.

My goal as a fan is not to be an apologist for bad behavior! and secondly to not be a judgmental prick.

But sadly a lot of people will probably do both. Oh well.

I have known and loved people with views I disagree with; I love the accomplishments of Gygax but don’t want to propagate or excuse sexism.

People on both sides of this need to enter the paradox. I can like this thing about a person and not another. I can recognize this thing with out taking it out of all context…baby with the bath water and all that…

 

[Zardnaar]

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.

What we are saying is Gary's views weren't that controversial back then. It depends on ones social circles and opportunities. People don't really change that much once they hit a certain age.

Even with those comments Gary would be father of the year material where I grew up. He wasn't a raging drunk, wife beater, or molested his kids. Alot of stuff gets swept under the carpet and even now in 2024 around 45% of America disagree either you. I suspect that number would be a lot higher 50 years ago.

We can cherry pick counter example no one's claiming these people weren't around. I'll use a high profile one. Rupert Murdoch. He's old but his father had him later in life in his 40s. His father was a product of the 19th century. And was a reactionary then. He grew up in Australia. IDK how much experience you've had with Australians but the older ones are worse verbally than older Americans. One of the most powerful men in the world raised by a 19th century Australian reactionary.

The guy who came up with the idea of Fox news came up with it contemporary to Gary's comments in the 1970s. Due to the Vietnam War and the way the press covered the war.

Same time 1975 iirc people sat down in a cafe and thought reheating the 1920s economics was a good idea. Deregulation, free markets etc. They had been sidelined since 1932. Then 1973 happened with the oil shock.

So yes one can cherry pick examples but the counter push was being formulated at the time Garry was writing D&D. Look at the electoral maps 1972-1988.


What I'm saying when I mean product of its time is stuff like that. As I said even with those comments Garry would be father of the year material where i grew up. You're focusing on one side of the coin. The other side was there not even in the shadows and there a direct link to now. Roger Ailes is another name involved. Another monster.

Theres a reason there's so many of them. You'll notice it consuming other contemporary media of the day. Hell Revenge of the Nerds was made a decade after some of Gary's comments. I heard worse in the 80s as a child saw some crazy stuff in the 90s and that was just the stuff not swept under the carpet.

Yes there was some nice shiny paint but it was covering the crap underneath. You're looking at the shiny paint and admiring it. All it did was hide the festering pile of crap underneath and here we are now

 

[Chaosmancer]

The Chaoskampf is an ancient trope but it's not some sort of narrative of masculinity overcoming feminity. As I pointed out much earlier in the thread, the forces identified with Chaos are just as often masculine, if not more so, in other cultures where the Chaoskampf motif is present.

Tiamat was not a river goddess of life (likely here referring to the Sumerian goddess "Namma/Nammu") turned into an oceanic mother of monsters as some sort of Babylonian conspiracy against matriarchy. Tiamat is not Namma. Tiamat is a separate Akkadian/Babylonian deity. Although both Tiamat and Namma are primordial water deities associated with creation, there are also some key important differences between Tiamat and Namma.

Namma is associated with rivers and underground aquifers: i.e., freshwater. Tiamat is associated with saltwater, oceans, and chaos. Tiamat's name name derives from the Proto-Semitic word for "ocean." Namma does not usually have a spouse. If so, it's An (the heaven). Tiamat has a spouse: Apsû (freshwater). Tiamat has an antagonistic relationship with the gods and creation, whereas Namma does not. Namma creates humanity so the gods can have manual labor workforce. Tiamat does not create humanity. She's not really involved. Instead, humanity comes from the spilt blood of her son/consort Kingu.

But more importantly, Namma had cults, temples, and shrines, including ones that persisted into the Neo-Assyrian periods under the reign of Esarhaddon (681–669 BC). Tiamat did not. As best as we can tell, Tiamat never did. Is that sign of erasure of a Tiamat/Namma cult? I don't think that it is. I think it's a sign that Namma and Tiamat were considered separate entities, even if there was some conceptual overlap and mutual influence. The former was worshipped. The latter never was. Remember my earlier point? Tiamat does not get written with a divine determinative. Namma gets written with the divine determinative (i.e., dingir), and her name still gets written with one after the Enuma Elish.

I think that the biggest challenge to this thesis is the timeline, the archaeology, and the literature. Tiamat does come later than Namma, as the Akkadians naturally come later than the Sumerians. The Sumerians have a strong influence on the Akkadians/Babylonians and their culture, and the Akkadians/Babylonians will have a strong influence on the Sumerians and their culture. Namma likely has an influence on Tiamat, just as Tiamat likely has an influence on Namma. This is much the same as a different gods from different pantheons having influence on each other around the Mediterranean during Antiquity.

Though best as I can tell, Tiamat is mentioned in some incanations before this time, she's basically just in the Babylonian Epic of the Enuma Elish (lit. "in those days...") and festival rituals associated with it. However, the Babylonian epic of the Enuma Elish - which is where the bulk of our knowledge of Tiamat comes from - does not enter the literary picture until the 4th Babylonian Dyntasty, which begins in 1155 BCE. The story likely has a much older predecessor tale. However, if that were the case, then we are likely not looking at Marduk killing Tiamat. Instead, it likely would have been Enlil, the Sumerian god of the skies and wind. Enlil was the king of the gods in the Sumerian pantheon. The Babylonian god Marduk is not made into the king of the gods until surprise, surprise the time of the 4th Babylonian Dynasty (c. 1155 - 1022 BCE). And before Marduk, there were a number of other more important Babylonian gods (e.g., Shamash). But Marduk replacing Enlil as king of the gods and sky is not a sign of Namma erasure. It's more just a simple matter of the local god of the city connected to the ruling dynasty getting elevated, which was fairly common practice.

But also if you are following along, remember that Namma still has active shrines and places of worship well past this point in time. We know of one during the reign of Esarhaddon (7th c. BCE) during the Neo-Assyrian Empire. But one thing that would be quite strange if Namma was turned into Tiamat has to do with Marduk's primary temple of Esagila in Babylon. In Esagila were shrines named "kius-Namma," which are the "footsteps of Namma." Again, I think that we are looking at a separate figure.

Okay, but from the other post there seems to be at least some level of disagreement in academia. Personally, I'm not an expert on ancient sumerian myth and archeology. I'm going off what I heard years ago in college.

More importantly, even if you disprove the idea that Tiamat and Namma were syncretized beings... that does nothing for hundreds if not thousands of other examples in myth and story of powerful female figures equaling destruction, chaos, and evil. The great crime of Lilith in early versions of Genesis was not bowing to Adam's superiority as a man, Ishtar from Gilgamesh was a terribly wrathful goddess who caused mass destruction because Gilgamesh wouldn't marry her, citing her many dead and destroyed husbands, ect ect all the way to the modern day tropes like Femme Fatales, Evil Queens (It was highly notable with Frozen that Elsa was a Queen, and not evil, even as her Queendom marked the start of her being seen as the villainous monster) and Black Widows. So, the larger point that the "powerful women equal evil women" is an OLD OLD trope is still true, even if you remove Tiamat from the equation.

 

[Vaalingrade]

What we are saying is Gary's views weren't that controversial back then.

And what you are saying is proven incorrect in the first post in this thread because he said all the stupid crap he did in Eurpoa as a response to the controversy he stirred up with the stupid crap he said in the text of the game.

 

[DarkCrisis]

He didn’t simply chalk it up to being a product of his time. By his own admission, he was a biological determinist, suggesting he actively considered this stance rather than it being something he grew up with. Consider that as late as 2005, he was posting stuff like the following on Dragonsfoot:

There were never many female gamers in our group. My daughter Elise was one of two original play-testers for the first draft of
what became the D&D game, and both of her younger sisters played... and lost interest in a few months as she did. In our campaign group that cycled through in a couple of years (74-75) something in the neighborhood of 100 or so different players, there were perhaps three females.

As a biological determinist, I am positive that most females do not play RPGs because of a difference in brain function. They can play as well as males, but they do not achieve the same sense of satisfaction from playing. In short there is no special game that will attract females--other that LARPing, which is more csocialization and theatrics and gaming--and it is a waste of time and effort to attempt such a thing.

This calls to mind when Lionel made pastel colored trains and train cars to appeal to females. The effort bombed, the sets were recalled and re-dine as standard models, and those pastel ones that survived are rare collectors items. - Col_Pladoh (aka Gary Gygax)

Link: Q&A With Gary Gygax, Part III - Page 3 - Dragonsfoot

Man, that is an old man who refuses to change his ways. Very sad.

 

[Vaalingrade]

George Carlin was born in 1937. Gloria Steinem was born in 1934. Susan Sontag in 1933. That time was rife with people who grew up to define the 60s.

People as only products of their time is only a thing to justify the most awful parts of the time. It's a dodge. An attempt to reorient the discussion from personal actions to the nebulous concept of society 'at the time' that cannot be assailed because it's the past and thus cannot be altered.

Citing 'the product of their time' is an abdication of responsibility both in that time and today as anyone behaving badly now is also 'a product of their time'.

In 50 years, JK Rowling will be 'a product of her time', not the legions of people who opposed what she was saying.

 

[TiQuinn]

There’s also this wonderful account from Lee Gold on DM David Hartlage’s blog:

After Lee finished writing Land of the Rising Sun for Fantasy Games Unlimited, she met publisher Scott Bizar at a local convention to sign the contract. She recalls discussing the game’s credits.

“Do you want to say this game is written by yourself and your husband Barry?” Bizar asked.

“No,” I said. “Barry didn’t write any bit of it. He did the indexing, and I gave him full credit for that. I wrote all of the game. Just say the game is by Lee Gold.”

“Most female writers say they wrote a game with their husbands,” said Bizar.

“I don’t care what other people do,” I said. “Just say the game is by Lee Gold.” And so Land of the Rising Sun came out as written by Lee Gold.

Her one personal encounter with Gary Gygax revealed a similar bias. Early on, Lee sent copies of A&E to TSR. After a couple of months, she received a phone call, which she recounts.

“This is Gary Gygax,” said the voice, “and I’d like to speak to Lee Gold.”

“I’m Lee Gold,” I said. “I gather you got the copies of A&E I sent you.”

“You’re a woman!” he said.

“That’s right,” I said, and I told him how much we all loved playing D&D and how grateful we were to him for writing it.

“You’re a woman,” he said. “I wrote some bad things about women wargamers once.”

“You don’t need to feel embarrassed,” I said. “I haven’t read them.”

“You’re a woman,” he said.

We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, so I told him goodbye and hung up.

Despite her design credits, Alarums & Excursions rates as Lee Gold’s most stunning achievement. Since 1975, she has sent the APA monthly with only two lapses: one during her stay in Japan and a second scheduled for health reasons. Today though, many subscribers take their copies through email.

Link:

Meet the Woman Who by 1976 Was the Most Important Gamer in Roleplaying After Gary

In 1976, after Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, the most important person in roleplaying games was a Los Angeles woman named Lee Gold. She still contributes to the hobby and still runs…

dmdavid.com