D&D General “‘Scantily Clad and Well Proportioned’: Sexism and Gender Stereotyping in the Gaming Worlds of TSR and Dungeons & Dragons.”

[SkidAce]

That is how I tell his style apart as well lol

Fascinating, same here.

 

[the Jester]

I am not saying there weren’t other moral panics that led to censorship. But I don’t think you can use the greater evils that arise during moral panics (I.e. matters if life and death) to dismiss the lesser evils that arise during them (I.e. matters of free expression). The SP did ruin lives but it was a much bigger cultural phenomenon than focus on ideas of ritual sexual abuse. It also included widespread efforts to censor, including efforts to shut down D&D. I was in the midst of a very religious community when the satanic panic was unfolding and saw it first hand

I was there, too, in a highly conservative area where my teachers brought me the infamous "D&D teaches assassination, poisoning, witchcraft!!!" flyer to talk about it with me.

And I'm not dismissing the 'lesser evils' here- I am saying that they are just that: Lesser. The difference between "don't read that book"- which was usually unenforceable and a losing argument at law- and "go directly to jail" is massive. The removal of demons and devils from 2e was a much more personal tragedy to me than some people I don't know getting thrown in prison for things they didn't do, but I can still clearly see that, personal or not, it didn't matter a dingo's kidneys compared to the misery inflicted on those people.

 

[abirdcall]

It isn't even necessarily about the clothing either. It is about threat and vulnerability.

If the art is filled with strong angry men and vulnerable women it is going to be scary for women to enter that space.

If the women have confidence that is different (to clarify the problem with something like chainmail bikinis is that it is about vulnerability because the armour is either largely useless or will even direct blades inwards rather than deflect).

It didn't actually take me much time to find one in the 2024 PHB. The difference is that she is confident and powerful and the purpose is to show fey aesthetics.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Missing the point.

It isn't about whether the magazines are successful.

I wasn't making that argument

The point is that they are targeted at different audiences.

Yeah, I get that.

And it isn't about what it says on them either, magazines are mostly full of garbage. I posted it for the pictures.

I know it's not. I was making an aside comment

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I just don't blame the artist. I have a cousin who is in involved in fine arts and she tends to paint the female form

I think the majority of fine artists who paint humans do paint the female form more, in part because for many fine artists, the female form is more complex and interesting (this is not a universal opinion, note). Doesn't hurt that it tends to sell better too, and not just to men.

But there's a difference between preferring to depict the female form and, like, putting weird fetish-gear-style quasi-armour on most of the female characters you paint. Honestly, at some point, it's kind of less sexist/sexualized to go for actual nudity than some of bizarrely fetish-y outfits Caldwell put on women. Everyone is naked some of the time - countless people over countless ages have gone into battle naked or nearly so. Not everyone gets into deeply odd, totally impractical (even by fantasy standards), and really uncomfortable-looking outfits that are seemingly there solely for dudes to ogle and to be technically not nude so that guy at Dragon can buy it and slap it on the cover.

Again I'm not trying to ding Caldwell here but I find it kind of bizarre. And that leads me to:

Compare and contrast, say, with Caldwell's cover for Artifact of Evil, in which he depicts the female Cavalier Dierdre of Hardby, a character who wears regular plate mail in the narrative, as wearing basically metal lingerie, complete with a decorative circular plate at the bottom of the "V" in her "breastplate", visually implying a zipper pull.

Yeah this is precisely the sort of thing.

What I guess I'm kind of interested to know with Caldwell as this point is, was the constant like, fetish-y/ridiculous outfit thing a result of like, his artistic preferences, or was it something people were asking for from him? I'm not interested in assigning blame here, but like, what were the factors that lead someone who could draw a female warrior in golden armour who looked like she was in lingerie but also a female warrior in golden armour who looked like an ultra-badass and the armour was at like "normal D&D" levels of coverage and stylization, to choose the former vs the latter? (Sorry for the horrible sentence construction).

I guess we'll probably never know unless Caldwell himself talked about it somewhere.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I mean... sort of? They're both designed to appeal to a specific subset of people through a specific method.

Muscle and Fitness through a masculine power fantasy of having tons of muscles.

Good Housekeeping through a feminine romantic fantasy of a sweet guy being gentle and happy.

On the topic of armor types in models, paintings, miniatures, etc: NEEDS MOAR JACK CHAINS.

View attachment 387950

Look at how staggeringly practical such a small amount of armor is! Sure it doesn't protect you from thrusts terribly well, but you have a weapon to parry. But big horizontal slashes on any side of the body are more likely to find metal than flesh!

Toss on a simple Breastplate to protect your torso and some arming gloves and you might not be wearing full plate but you'll be -well- protected!

And they were comparatively cheap, too!

On a related note, this is one of the reasons why Jim Holloway is one of my top 5 D&D artists. He kept it real when everyone else was doing gonzo in the 80s. And most of his work, at least one of the PCs was in a bad place, which fit actual game play 100%

 

[payn]

On a related note, this is one of the reasons why Jim Holloway is one of my top 5 D&D artists. He kept it real when everyone else was doing gonzo in the 80s. And most of his work, at least one of the PCs was in a bad place, which fit actual game play 100%
View attachment 387956

I always really liked the "scene" pieces as opposed to folks action posing out of nowhere that got popular at some point.

 

[Mannahnin]

It is Caldwell. You can always tell his paintings by how he paints gems. They are all the same, and a unique style of his. While I love Caldwell's art (my favorite D&D art is his cover of DL1), he is well known for wanting to paint scantily clad women. I think it was either Larry Elmore or Jeff Easley who told me a couple years ago that Clyde would volunteer to take the art assignments that had a women in a precarious scenario just to paint them.

What I guess I'm kind of interested to know with Caldwell as this point is, was the constant like, fetish-y/ridiculous outfit thing a result of like, his artistic preferences, or was it something people were asking for from him? I'm not interested in assigning blame here, but like, what were the factors that lead someone who could draw a female warrior in golden armour who looked like she was in lingerie but also a female warrior in golden armour who looked like an ultra-badass and the armour was at like "normal D&D" levels of coverage and stylization, to choose the former vs the latter? (Sorry for the horrible sentence construction).

I guess we'll probably never know unless Caldwell himself talked about it somewhere.

I'm going to hazard a guess that it was editorial direction. FRA didn't come out until 1990, in the more family-friendly 2E era.

Back in the 1E days his depictions of women were very consistent. Mostly in gossamer robes with plunging necklines (see A Princess in Peril, The House on Gryphon Hill, Dragon Spell, White Magic). Even if they were wearing plate mail it was skin-tight and clung to their curves like spandex, like the cover of Dragon 76, The Thing from the Pit or this one:

Or, in the notorious case of Laurana as a prisoner of the Dragonarmies on the cover of Dragons of Triumph, he found a way to make clear that she wasn't wearing underwear despite wearing a breastplate on top.

 

[payn]

I'm going to hazard a guess that it was editorial direction. FRA didn't come out until 1990, in the more family-friendly 2E era.

Back in the 1E days his depictions of women were very consistent. Even if they were wearing platemail it was skin-tight and clung to their curves like spandex.

Or, in the notorious case of Laurana as a prisoner of the Dragonarmies on the cover of Dragons of Triumph, he found a way to make clear that she wasn't wearing underwear despite wearing a breastplate on top.

View attachment 387959

Such a weird piece. Waist up it looks great, waist down and im like, "where da pants?"

 

[Clint_L]

That's a big part of it, yeah. A ton of female characters in fantasy fiction, whether PC or NPC, are motivated by being sexually assaulted. Red Sonja is a great example. Where their whole schtick is "No other man will have me but that I choose it" or the ever popular "Only someone who defeats me in combat will have me"

Orc raiders were often stealing women to assault and impregnate to create half-orcs. Even the Army of Darkness had skeletons kidnapping women with their chests exposed, presumably not to bone with since no one in the army -had- that bone...

It's a pervasive trope. And that's not even getting to your party hanging around in a tavern and the fighter making an offhand comment about swatting the barmaid's backside or rolling to check if there are any hot chicks there "'Cause I wanna doooo them!"


Just a ton of subtle and overt sexism that becomes the background radiation of a ton of D&D games.

I'm not doubting that this has happened, but I never encountered it. So it still depends on the group. Our games, even as teenagers, were pretty PG.