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Because it's true, and because it provides context. Not justification. Context.

I do it because I find it easy to organize my thoughts that way. But since it annoys you, I'll try to keep it to a minimum here. You make a lot of points about how popular the (as it was called at the time) women's liberation movement was in the 1970s. I don't deny that it was popular, that it...

No, I'm just saying that I think people are not taking the context into account when judging his words and that his statements probably sound more extreme to us today because of that. I think you can't underestimate the difference between a pre- and post-internet world. People had to get hard...

I mean if he'd been born in, say, 1988 rather than 1938. His views (both his opinions and his perspective on what one can and can't say) would have been formed in a very different environment. And I've gotta go game, so I'm bowing out, at least for now.

Compared to a tweet or something today, I'd say yes. There just wasn't that same sense of talking to the world where anybody could find it. Even these discussions here probably reach a bigger audience, or at least, we all know they could do so if someone were to find them and link to them. Two...

Sort of. They are one thing among many. I think you misunderstand my argument. I have never said that he couldn't help writing sexist material or that no one else in his time would have written anything better. At most, I'm saying that the lack of social consequences meant that he took less...

Sure, I get that. And good luck with it, because those ideas are far from dead. The number of YouTubers who will come out and say things like "Women are ruining [franchise X] because they want to talk about their feelings all the time" makes me feel like we're not so far from the 1970s...

But the social consequences for doing so were not the same as they would be today. Which is my point. I don't deny that lots of people thought differently from Gygax in the 1970s. Like I said, it was a decade of disagreement. You had all shades of opinion battling it out. They were still in the...

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...

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. Okay, but you also claimed the majority of female...

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...

First, exactly what era are you talking about? Second, I think you need to separate science fiction and fantasy. Fantasy has always been full of female authors writing successfully under female names at least since the 1960s, which is when the genre really started to take off. In addition to...

Well, of course. No generation is a monolith. But there are trends. By and large, people who came of age before the 1960s were (are) more likely to be kinda sexist by today's standards than those who grew up during and after that era.

Point #1, Gygax was born in 1938. His views on a lot of things were probably well formed before the various social upheavals of the 1960s came along and disrupted a lot of previous norms. Point #2, there is no one single attitude of the 1970s. A lot of debates were going on throughout the...

I'm still inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt in this specific case because we know nothing about the context. It could be referencing some then-recent incident or discussion that we have no way of recovering. It's still not a shining statement of support for equality, but it may not...

Speaking also as a woman and a dungeon master, I actually feel like the "women's lib" line is pretty mild and the article is going out of its way to put the most negative possible spin on it. They assume it's saying "We made our evil dragon a goddess because we think women with power are...

We rarely play tabaxi, but when we do, they're based on small cats, so I voted 3. However, they're not always based on housecats. I ran a game a few months ago with twin tabaxi rogues based on manuls (Pallas' cats). They're loosely inspired by the twins in How to Train Your Dragon.

Oooh, I didn't know a DM's version was coming! I hope he'll post about it here.