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.

 

[Lanefan]

Since I do know this is off-topic, I will spoiler out of respect to the rest of the thread.

As will I...good idea!

Spoiler: Chaosmancer

You are a DM, you know how difficult it is to role-play with yourself, especially if you need to react to someone else, and then roleplay two responses. That is far too much of a burden to expect any player to consistently deal with. And having two different characters reacting to four different characters, everyone with their own doubling of the RP? I'm not saying it is an impossible task, but the majority of the time, one of those characters is going to be treated like familiars are. Forgotten about unless directly addressed.

Not sure what to say other than it's worked OK for us for ages. Some players prefer just having one at a time, others like two; a few can handle three or more but unless there's a) just one player or b) an unusual in-game situation e.g. a player has two characters in a party that just rescued a third PC of that same player, I cap it at two* each at a time.

* - one notable exception from earlier this campaign: a whole bunch of characters had gathered in the same town around the same in-game time and so I said "Hell, for the next adventure only you can each play as many as you like". Result: 5 players, 14 characters (including 2 adventuring NPCs) to start. Great gonzo fun as they went through the old module Ghost Tower of Inverness, which I'd never run or played before.

None of it is actionable metagame knowledge. The worse anyone ever attempts is to run off when another player is in trouble, but a simple "how do you know they are in trouble" usually stops them in their tracks.

That's just it: IME it doesn't stop them in their tracks at all, it just prompts them to come up with more and more ridiculous rationalizations.

I legitimately struggle to see what metagame knowledge they could gain and abuse by splitting into multiple groups. Unless I drop a specific clue that specifically points to another clue that a different group would have missed without that context... but why would I even do that? That requires some pretty bad DMing and planning on my part to even occur.

How so? I'd almost say that's good DMing - but only if you can keep player and character knowledge aligned and not have the non-clued players learn the clue before the other group tells it to them.

Why's that? Well, the other group that got the clue might simply forget to mention it (I've seen this oh so many a time), or the other group might put a different spin on it, intentionally or otherwise. Or the other group might want to keep that knowledge to themselves.

But, to confirm, you had 4 players, and everyone went in with a character. Again, that isn't the context of my games, because we don't all role-play two people simultaneously.

4 players running (have to look it up, it's been nine years) 8 PCs (two each) at the start. Character turnover during the adventure: two left early on for some time then returned, one of those two then got captured, the party picked up an adventuring NPC, two characters died, then another one died and the remnants of the party had to flee. What came home were four PCs and the adventuring NPC; the three dead were revived post-adventure and the captive was rescued as another adventure later.

So, in our version, you would have 4 party members, reduced to say 3 when one of them was captured. Then one player would have to sit out the entire session, or play a no-name nobody, as they go to rescue their own character.

Or have another character out there in the setting (or roll one up) and play that one for the rescue mission.

Which, from personal experience, is not fun. So, instead, we would have 3 characters mounting the rescue operation, then the 4th RPing from the prison of the Mindflayers, working towards their own release or gathering intel to give to the party once they are rescued.

Well, in this case any RP-ing from the prison of the mind-flayers was a non-started as the 'flayers had made her their psionically-dominated mind-slave within minutes of capture and she was happily telling them every shred of information she knew...fortunately for all, perhaps, the party (and other parties) were only just starting to dimly realize that a whole lot of seemingly-disconnected things in their collective adventuring past were in fact caused by mind flayers working behind the scenes, meaning she didn't really have all that much useful info to give them.

None of that group even game together anymore. Heck, I haven't even talked to those people in four years or longer. I'm glad you have a singular stable group and decades of logs and records, but that isn't a universal experience in the slightest.

The decades of logs and records IMO should be. I strongly encourage any DM to keep records and logs of every campaign you run; if nothing else - and apropos to another tangent in this thread - it's good historical data.

As for the singular stable group: there's a community of maybe 20 of us split into five or six games under four different DMs. Two of us use our homebrew system, a third uses (I think) some sort of mashup of our system and Dungeon World (and just how she pulls this off I will never know!), while the fourth tends to run whatever the new shiny system is at the time (just about to jump from 5e to PF2).

#4 is acceptable as a temporary measure, but should not be on hold for more than 15 or twenty minutes before the DM checks in. #2 should be the same as #4. If someone is scouting then either the scouting mission shouldn't take longer than about twenty minutes, or they need to be bouncing back to the rest of the group. If you are guarding the horses, then something interesting or notable has to take place there, or at the very least, I need to check in and give you an opportunity to do something with your time.

As long as you don't contrive something that wouldn't have happened had I/we not been there; as that's always obvious and IMO cheapens the whole thing.

#3 is unavoidable after a character death, but should be kept as short as possible. If I take longer than an hour to intro a new character to the party, then I've done something terribly wrong. Ideally, it should be within 5 minutes.

Sometimes a new character can be brought in nigh-immediately once it's ready to rock, other times in-game circumstances can make it take a while. I'll bend my no-metagaming stance for this one purpose only, but there's still limits: for the adventure my group just finished, for example, I told them up front to bring two characters each as there would be no viable means of introducing any replacements mid-adventure (they didn't know it at the time but the adventure was set at the north pole, and quite possibly they were the only people within 500 miles of the place).

5 minutes, however, is a pipe dream: even in the most stripped-down of systems it takes longer than that to roll one up.

#1 is a mixed bag, because you threw a lot of things in there like they are similar. Again, you have to remember that this isn't 1e we are talking about.

Yes it is, at least on my part.

Paralyzed for example is a condition that the player can save against every turn, and likely is taking place in combat. So, you aren't able to act, but you are able to save and participate that way.

We try to avoid death, I've talked about capture, and being unconscious but stable is actively a problem for us, because there is not a good way to keep the player engaged. We've gone to rolling death saves for the 20 at a minimum once stable.

That's just it: it's the player's choice at that point whether to remain engaged in the party's story or to zone out for a while or to re-write a character sheet or to paint a mini or to, if required, roll up a new character. My only ask is that they not interfere with ongoing play via non-game chatter or other distractions.

The key to all of this is the same principle. Life is busy. Meeting once a week for 4 hours is a heavy investment of time and attention. In person it is even more, as we have drive times and dinner to consider (none of us eat together currently, and in old groups where someone hosted, they would sometimes provide food). Asking someone to spend 25% of their time investment that night doing NOTHING except sitting there and staring at other people having fun is intolerable. Especially since, we struggle to even meet that often. My IRL group has had to miss two meetings, and so we have only met three times in the past two months. If you are losing a quarter of your MONTHLY play time, just for aesthetic reasons? There is no NEED for that, so why would I tolerate it?

IfI wasn't sitting at the DM's house doing nothing I'd be sitting at home probably also doing nothing. Far better to sit with friends and share a beer and a laugh even if my character's pushing up daisies and in my role of player I've little or nothing to do.

Nope, seen that in action. Made every game where we tried to act that way worse. Because we all knew they could be trusted, so it just kept them from playing the game until it was "reasonable" for them to be treated like an equal member of the group, which created sucky group dynamics.

I, as the DM, say that, because that is a terrible way to play that isn't fun for anyone long-term.

Which means you're telling people how they're allowed to play their characters. Nope. Non-starter. I'll play my character(s) as I bloody well like, thanks; and if that means there's maybe going to be some party infighting at some point then so be it (though if it gets to infighting either my character's made too many mistakes or I have).

Someone wants to come in as a spy, then do a heel turn and join the party? I could be convinced. But actively working to sabotage the group just for giggles? Nope. We don't have the time for that kind of anti-social behavior. It is hard enough to get the group working together on the best of days without adding that into the mix.

Before role-play comes table cohesion. Because playing at a table with people who are angry and frustrated with each other is a terrible expeirence. Even when everyone has such divergent goals that they rarely communicate, it is a horrid experience.

They need to learn to keep the anger and frustration in-character and act on it there; to separate the characters' emotions and feelings from those of the player. Your PC just sold mine down the river, framed me as the spy, and got me run out of the party and town? In character I swear endless violent revenge against you and all your kin (and maybe sometime later act on that oath) while at the table I tip my hat and say "well played", probably followed by "I'm impressed - how the hell did you pull that off?", not really expecting an answer.

But it doesn't end up mattering. In every game I've played where the players are treated like interchangeable pieces, where it is only the party that ends up mattering... there is no reason for US to go after the villain, except that is the plot and we agreed to go with the plot.

And that's fine. There's nothing at all wrong with "if you don't do it, someone else will", and in my game - particularly at low-mid level - that's almost assumed. The freedom this gives the players is that if an adventure hook or mission doesn't appeal to them they can often turn it down without too much fear of long-term consequences. Flip side: it also gives them an imperative to get on with it if they are interested in a mission, as others might be out to do it as well.

The NPCs don't interact with us as individuals, they react to the party, and it is like pulling teeth to get any traction with any sort of sub-plots or personal connections with NPCs, the setting is generic and could be anywhere, our missions come to us just because we directed to the correct area to get the missions, usually because the opening scene forced us into an area where we are now dealing with some threat. The larger world barely exists if it does at all, and we are completely cut off from it if it does exist.

That's adventuring for ya. Downtime is when all the connect-with-the-setting pieces happen - family matters, base-building, research, shopping, making contacts, etc. - and IME some players (like me) have much more interest in this stuff than do others.

Why are you assuming you will face him more than once? The party faced him at his introduction, and now they aren't going to see him again until the final fight. So, you've never had your nose bent by him, unlike everyone else in the party who has. They were given a motivation, which you now lack. Unless I change plans to have him show up continously and keep hitting them just so you can gain the motivation they have.

I was talking about getting personally mad at him during the battle in which we defeat him. Doesn't matter if we've even heard of him before then: right now he's whaling on our faces and I'm gettin' a bit steamed about it.

Boromir was possessed by the Ring and died. After that, how many of the fellowship died and stayed dead? And even Boromir's death mattered by the 3rd book. Meanwhile, sure, Gimli was just "the dwarf" who had no connection to anything... except his family member who had adventured with Bilbo all those years ago. And Legolas was no one... except that we knew that he was a wood elf and connected to the Elf King who was a major antagonist back when Bilbo got the ring, and his entire reason for being at the council was to speak of the escape of Gollum, the former holder of the Ring...

And clearly their backstories didn't matter.... except we did have that entire scene in Moria revolving around Gimli's backstory and connection to his family. Finding the journal detailing the end of his family in those mines. But Legolas didn't... except it was only because of him and where he came from that they were allowed into Lothlórien after the mines of Moria....

They were able to bring their backstories into play during the role-played part of the game...er, story. Great.

But they did so only in service to the greater game as and when required. They didn't try to make their backstories the focus of the game, which it seems is what some want.

No. Because many people point out that they can't get invested in a Song of Ice and Fire, because any character they care about dies, and most of them are terrible people not worth caring about to begin with. The luster is fading on that series, and a lot of people are becoming far more critical of its flaws than they are praising its virtues... which are mostly "but he is willing to kill anyone at any time no matter what that does to the plot!"

Gaome of Thrones is my model for what a great big sprawling D&D campaign should look like, only with more field adventures and maybe less politics and fewer mass battles. Things happening all over the place. Lots of different characters and parties meeting, parting, meeting again. Big stories and little ones, all interwoven. Side quests. Characters dying or retiring or otherwise leaving play. New characters emerging as the campaign goes along. And best of all: every single character has its own agenda that probably doesn't agree with that of anyone else, and is willing to do what's needed to fulfill that agenda.

Were the books/series an RPG, each player would have a stable of at least 5 characters in the setting and would cycle them in and out depending which region or group was in play at the time and-or who was still alive. (dibs on Bronn; he's very much like Lanefan, only not as loud)

 

[Vaalingrade]

So... can someone explain how the lack of a PhD magically alters the presence of the historical documents and events being presented?

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

So... can someone explain how the lack of a PhD magically alters the presence of the historical documents and events being presented?

Because they were tainted by the ignorance of the uneducated masses! Probably doctored too! Lord knows a real academic would never falsify the truth....wait a minute....

 

[Zardnaar]

So... can someone explain how the lack of a PhD magically alters the presence of the historical documents and events being presented?

Depends on context of how they present them or the context of the Times.

This is history 101 at university. Or classics.

The books a mass market history of D&D. I'm guessing they're not comparing it to other contemporary media of the time or pointing out the 1970s were different or a biography on Gary's background.




.

 

[Vaalingrade]

the context of the Times.

Nope. Sorry. We're beyond blaming 'the Times'. Our time has plenty of crappy sentiments too and people can't use that shield to defend that, so the 70's can't be a fig leaf here.

Time to address the actual documents..

 

[Zardnaar]

Nope. Sorry. We're beyond blaming 'the Times'. Our time has plenty of crappy sentiments too and people can't use that shield to defend that, so the 70's can't be a fig leaf here.

Time to address the actual documents..

Times very relevant. I'm not saying you have to agree with Gary's writings. He's a bit of a dick based on other stuff we know.
But.

1. You coukd publish that comment in a 1975 in a commercial product.

2. Random harlots table was in a commercial product until 1990. And it was the biggest selling edition for 30 years.

That's the difference between now and then not finding a contemporary account of someone complaining about it between 1975 to 1990.

You coukd nake a product like that now it's not illegal. It will create a huge poo storm abd maybe sell a few hundred copies vs 1.5 million. That's the actual historical context.

Another example Gary was a poster here and posted similar comments in 2005. I haven't read them for a while but I don't recall any moderator action against him for posting it.

I'm not defending his views I am pointing out it's extremely disingenuous to argue the difference in scale between the pushback in 1975 and 2024 woukd be different. The why is simply the difference in social views 50 years apart.

I'm not saying his views are right or wrong but what you can put in a mass market product is very different. If you're arguing from a morality PoV I would agree. But I'm not just to be clear.

150 years ago it was somewhat acceptable to invade someone else's stuff in a land grab. That would never happen these days in the 2020's not at all. Hell do it right they'll put "The Great" before your name.

 

[Bedrockgames]

While I somewhat agree with the sentiment here, it's also a fairly short step away from outright elitism.

For me, if a researcher a) uses the "appropriate amount of rigor and methodology" and b) presents the findings without bias, that ought to be enough in itself regardless of the researcher's prior credentials; never mind that not every field (as per @Steampunkette 's example upthread) even has a peer-review system in place.

Definitely not trying to be elitist (I am generally very wary of elitism). The point isn't to prevent people who aren't part of a history department from writing history, it is merely observing there is often an enormous difference, and the peer review process is a big part of that difference. Heck I have read books by historians who I like how normally write in the academic peer review system, who suddenly made a book from a non-university publisher, where it is still good but you can see a real difference because it isn't as vetted and they are able to be looser with their claims. To me this is more like, we don't call everyone who writes a book on science a scientist, there are some baseline educational credential and work expectations. And we draw distinctions between books that were put out by reliable presses and ones that are put out by popular presses. On peer review, true not every profession requires it, but it is a standard feature of publishing history books and papers. Like I said I myself have a history degree, but I wouldn't call myself a historian because I don't have a masters or PhD and I didn't do research in the peer review system (and normally I am railing here against excluding peoples opinions because they don't have masters degrees, but I do think it is okay to have a basic standards when we are going to refer to people with a title that confers 'expert' upon them.

 

[payn]

S

He made the women's lib crack in that paragraph, yes, but that doesn't mean that he created Tiamat* with that sexism in mind. Perhaps he received complaints about Tiamat*and was upset about those comments when he wrote that. That doesn't excuse what he wrote, but it still isn't certain that he created Tiamat* with sexism in mind. Maybe he was irritated by something else when he picked Tiamat* to be the focus of his comment. Or perhaps he was being deliberately sexist when he created her. We can't be certain about why he did what he did, because there are many plausible reasons for her creation, only some of which are sexist.

If you buy a hunting rifle and eventually shoot your neighbor with it, that doesn't mean that you bought it for that purpose. You might have, but you also might have purchased it for hunting and just used it for that purpose later because you were mad at your neighbor.

*Yes I know she didn't have that name then.

So its ok to shoot a neighbor if you didn't originally intend to?

 

[Steampunkette]

Times very relevant. I'm not saying you have to agree with Gary's writings. He's a bit of a dick based on other stuff we know.
But.

1. You coukd publish that comment in a 1975 in a commercial product.

You could publish that comment in a modern commercial product and sell it to a massive userbase of "Chads" and "Alphas" and so forth. Or sell it to the TTRPG community and get some backlash while a bunch of people buy the books, anyway, with excuses about how the social system is better or how they want to support "The Industry" or whatever.

Gygax was selling to a niche of a niche. The "Alpha Bro Sexists" are no different except that their niche might be larger than wargaming was in 1975. Certainly has more mainstream appeal.

2. Random harlots table was in a commercial product until 1990. And it was the biggest selling edition for 30 years.

Misleadingly phrased... It was pretty much the only edition sold for 30 years, so it sold more than any other edition since no other edition was sold for more than a decade and were all derivations -of- that edition.

That's the difference between now and then not finding a contemporary account of someone complaining about it between 1975 to 1990.

People complained. People sent what could be construed as death threats over stuff in the 1970s and 80s materials. It just didn't change anything.

I even linked a published picture of a fictional lynching in effigy of several TSR employees.

You coukd nake a product like that now it's not illegal. It will create a huge poo storm abd maybe sell a few hundred copies vs 1.5 million. That's the actual historical context.

"The Art of Manliness" is a modern podcast in which a misogynist rants. 15 million unique page hits. 160k daily subscribers. It's only been around since 2009. Dude has advertisers. Butcher Box, Ka'Chava, Saxx, Squarespace, Stitcher, and ZipRecruiter are all sponsors. TSR never had Sponsors. People who paid Gygax to advertise their product in association with D&D.

That's the actual modern context.

Another example Gary was a poster here and posted similar comments in 2005. I haven't read them for a while but I don't recall any moderator action against him for posting it.

You are correct. Even into 2005 he could say sexist BS on this very board and not get called out by moderators or fans. Because the sexism is still in the room with us, today. It didn't vanish in 1975.

"The Context" is damning.

I'm not defending his views I am pointing out it's extremely disingenuous to argue the difference in scale between the pushback in 1975 and 2024 woukd be different. The why is simply the difference in social views 50 years apart.

Yeah, surely some of the biggest companies in the world wouldn't tolerate misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, fatphobia, and worse.

Lemme just check Twitter out real quick... oh. Maybe Facebo-Oh no.

Like I get the urge to draw lines of separation but it's really not that different. ZipRecruiter actually sponsors misogynistic rants because there's enough listeners to get more purchases weighed against any social outcry or backlash against them.

I'm not saying his views are right or wrong but what you can put in a mass market product is very different. If you're arguing from a morality PoV I would agree. But I'm not just to be clear.

"Mass Market" is where you're kinda in the wrong, here. D&D was not a product sold to every housewife in America. It was a niche of roleplayers who were part of the wargaming community which itself was a slice of nerd-dom.

It didn't get mass marketed 'til 5e. And even then mostly because of Critical Role's explosive social influence.

150 years ago it was somewhat acceptable to invade someone else's stuff in a land grab. That would never happen these days in the 2020's not at all. Hell do it right they'll put "The Great" before your name.

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[Steampunkette]

There are multiple podcasts of people just sitting around spewing misogyny and earning enough cash to live in McMansions in Los Angeles.