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.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

In science fiction, the numbers of women writing under female names are smaller, but you still had people like Diane Duane and Diane Carey (writing Star Trek novels). Some of the successful female fantasy writers, like Anne McCaffrey, also wrote science fiction under their own names. And Andre Norton, despite using a male pen name, didn't make her identity particularly secret. I remember reading editions of her YA books from 70s/80s, checking the “About the Author” section, and seeing female pronouns used for her. At the time, I just assumed that “Andre” could be a unisex name.

Don't want to get into this, other than to say....

Ursula K. Le Guin.

That is all.

 

[Chaosmancer]

How old was he in 2005?

Why would that possibly matter? DO we have exceptions that people over a certain age can say terrible things and we will forgive them, because it is a matter of age, not personality, that determines these things?

 

[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

Reading his responses, even to a biologist. Yeah, Grandpa Gary was a dyed in the wool Boomer. To use a term/trope the Yutes prefer.

 

[jayoungr]

Except he published this crap. That’s what I don’t think folks are quite grokking.

And I think what folks are not quite grokking is that there wasn't any particular reason not to publish these statements back in those days, because those ideas weren't as "out there" in relation to the median societal view as they are now.

Well, I did state that fantasy fiction was allowing more women (e.g. le Guin) to use their full names without issue.

Okay, but you also claimed the majority of female fantasy writers were forced/encouraged to change or disguise their names, and I just don't see any evidence for that.

Likewise, my point was that the 70's was the turning point for a lot of this....

Fantasy as a genre didn't really take off until the 1960s, and several of the female writers I named got their start during that decade. So women writing under female names have been a prominent part of the fantasy writing roster pretty much since the beginning. I can well believe that in science fiction, there were more barriers in place.

But the reality was pretty clear: if you were breaking in to the field, and wanted to boost sales, it was often better to obscure that you were a woman to avoid a stigmatism from the general readership.

To be clear, are we talking about fantasy here? Because if so, I'm going to need more evidence that women writing under female names faced serious obstacles. The way I remember it (and I'm about your age), fantasy was one of the genres with the most female representation among published authors, second only to mysteries. (Again, I can believe it was different for sci-fi, which I read less of.)

 

[Chaosmancer]

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

I hate to be the one to do it, but the internet demands it be done. Godwin's law is immutable. "And Hitler was a vegetarian who hated the suffering of animals."

I am very glad that Gygax was not a wife beater, a child molestor, a war criminal, a violent serial killer, a raging drunk, or anything else you could bring up in the classic "but other people were worse!" Turns out, funny thing, other people setting the bar lower doesn't excuse bad behavior. Andrew Tate is a horrible man for his views, I believed that before he was arrested as a sex trafficker. I believe that in spite of the fact that he is not a terrorist who has killed hundreds of people. I believe that in spite of the fact that he might have been raised in a very bad household that instilled him with very bad beliefs.

Do I believe Gary Gygax was a terrible man? Little bit. Do I think he was irredeemable human garbage? No, he just was a sexist and a biological determinist which is kind of icky. Do I need to attack him for his views? No, he's dead. Do I need to forgive him, because people were different back then? No, I don't forgive people for doing terrible things just because they grew up in terrible times. As you have said in this post, we still have abusers, killers and bigots in our time. It was always a choice. And bringing up every other crime in the world committed by every other man from 1930 until 2024... doesn't change that Gygax was a sexist, and a bit icky. Nor does it change the fact that he made an amazing game that I love, inspired many people, made me laugh, or might have been a half-way decent husband and father at times in his life. People are complicated, but we can recognize the bad without needing to excuse it.

 

[Charlaquin]

And I think he sounds "really sexist" by today's standards, but he wasn't that much of an outlier in the mid-1970s. It was a lot more socially acceptable at the time for people who held those ideas to express them--even though yes, there would also be people who would push back against them. Nowadays, there would be more social pressure not to be open about those thoughts even if you hold them (and we all know there are people who do).

And one of the ways that greater social pressure gets applied today is by pointing to things in the past that we don’t want to be socially acceptable any more and saying “it’s bad that this didn’t used to get much pushback. Let’s not do that any more, and push back more against people who do.”

 

[jayoungr]

And one of the ways that greater social pressure gets applied to day is by pointing to things in the past that we don’t want to be socially acceptable any more and saying “it’s bad that this didn’t used to get much pushback. Let’s not do that any more, and push back more against people who do.”

Sure. But most of that has happened in the time since the 1970s. We've got decades of accumulated social pressure now that simply didn't exist then. It's not a judgment, just a fact.

To be crystal-clear, I find his comments on women ruining wargaming to be beyond the pale. But for better or worse, it was the kind of thing you could say openly in 1975. Even in 1985, you could get away with it, especially if you were older, although the tide was definitely turning by then. (I'm more lenient on the one about Tiamat because it's more ambiguous, and because Tiamat is awesome.)

 

[Umbran]

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.

For quite a while, I have taken a slightly different approach on this. To wit:

You cannot expect a person to be better than their time, in general. We can celebrate the ones who are. But, to be significantly better than average is, by definition, a rare trait. If it isn't, then the average moves, and you have a new average that most people won't be better than.

So, if we are to consider it a sin to fail to be better than their times, then... pretty much everyone is a sinner.

And it is unclear to me what the value is in that exercise. If you want to be able to sweep 90% of humanity into a box labelled "Complete Trash", this does the job. You can dust your hands off and know you work is complete, I guess.

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'.

As above - on average, humanity will only ever be as good as its time, by definition. Which is why I question how valuable it is to quibble over it.

The real question, to my mind, is this:

We have this information about a man. He was who he was. So, what are you going to do about it? What value for the future can be gained from it?

I see little evidence that slapping his memory about with the Trout of Righteousness is going to make the future better. We have learned that, broadly speaking, punishment for a transgression doesn't generally act as a deterrent, or stop others from transgressing. Castigating Gygax for his sexism isn't going to make future people less sexist.

 

[CleverNickName]

.

And I think what folks are not quite grokking is that there wasn't any particular reason not to publish these statements back in those days, because those ideas weren't as "out there" in relation to the median societal view as they are now.

I don't buy it. Plenty of people his age wrote stuff "back in those days," and still knew better than to publish those statements. Gary didn't. Gary doubled down.

 

[dbolack]

Correction: it's an American tradition.

I was speaking more to WotC's near-annual Red Decembers, but yes. It is a common American tradition as well.