[Polyhedron] Are women interested in this type of fantasy?

[Silver Moon]

...let's have some tough women and ineffectual men for a change!)

I played that game! My wife (kriskrafts) was the DM. We visited her druid's home, which was a Matriarchy village run by her character's mother, with the subservient men living across the lake in another village. The macho male playing characters were treated like dirt and ignored. Hit them right in the ego...it was great fun. Here's the kicker, it was only a two-night module played almost 20 years ago, but is still one of the most memorable games in everyone's memories. Just the very mention of the Matriarch's name is enough to send shivers up everybody's spine.

 

[Tashtego]

Actually, 'romances' weren't necessarily always mushy tales. Originally, romances were adventure stories, probably what we'd call a fantasy story today. For example, the Arthurian mythos are also referred to as the Arthurian romances and a lot of H. Rider Haggard's books were called 'romances'. Love stories were involved, but the emphasis was mostly on the adventure. Dictionary.com records this definition of romance under the word:

1. A long medieval narrative in prose or verse that tells of the adventures and heroic exploits of chivalric heroes: an Arthurian romance.
2. A long fictitious tale of heroes and extraordinary or mysterious events, usually set in a distant time or place.
3. The class of literature constituted by such tales.

A lot of our D&D adventures could be classed as romances. I haven't seen the article in Polyhedron just yet, but when I heard it was about 'romance', that was my first impression, an adveture story along the lines of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Maybe someone got confused with the modern definition of romance when writing the article?

 

[randomling]

What research is this? I'd be interested in having a look at the paper(s), as this has been a hotly debated topic in cognitive science for a long time. I'm a linguistics student, so I have a little interest in how the brain works myself.

I'm not denying the existence of a human nature, or that there are a number of things that work differently for men and women, physically, mentally, and socially. But the vast majority of cognitive function is the same for both sexes: we reason in the same way, we acquire language in the same way, we do mathematics in the same way, we use symbols in the same way, etc, etc, etc.

But the thing is, it's very tricky (methodologically speaking) to differentiate innate behaviours from socially acquired behaviours. I don't doubt that there is a great deal of truth in what you're saying. I'm only questioning whether this is a totally inborn difference, a totally social difference, or a mixture of the two.

My instinct says that it's a mixture of the two. (I realize I'm backtracking here slightly.) I honestly think that social reality plays as big a part in these gender stereotypes as physiological factors (eg the brain) do.

IMHO again. But like I say, I'd be interested to know who said this and where.

 

[SemperJase]

Link? Cos I've done a lot of reading that suggests otherwise.

Well, I can quote, but not link. If you have access to EBSCOHOST you can find it online.

Newsweek; 6/16/2003, Vol. 141 Issue 24, p74, 2p, 1c

Do male and female brains differ in meaningful ways? As it turns out, they do. During fetal development, the two sexes encounter different levels of testosterone in the womb. Animal studies suggest that the hormone has lasting effects on the hypothalamus, a small brain structure that influences sexual and aggressive behavior throughout life. Likewise, human studies have turned up sex differences in a frontal-lobe region responsible for emotional reasoning. And researchers have found evidence that the corpus callosum, a massive bridge of fibers connecting the two halves of the brain, may be larger in women than in men. If so, the extra fibers may help integrate the language centers and emotional centers of women's brains, enabling them to verbalize feelings more readily than men.

 

[randomling]

Sure.... that may be the case. But in my experience newspapers/magazines don't often do a great job reporting scientific findings.

Olive, I'd be interested to hear what you've been reading on both sides of this debate. I'm currently reading The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, which is on the subject of human nature. I haven't reached any discussion of sex and gender differences yet though!

 

[Henry]

Speaking STRICTLY from a point of the polyhedron mini-game concept, I'd say that polyhedron is the perfect place for such a game, because regardless of male/female cognition and sociology, I don't believe such a game would have a large appeal to the majority of gamers.

But BRIEFLY broaching the subject of protector vs. nurturer, I have to say that my own experience has been that women are every bit as protective as men can be, and in some ways more so. The women I know can fight and have fought for their loved ones, and have even risked death by throwing themselves into the path of danger when a loved one was threatened. (I still chide my wife for almost getting hit by a car while protecting our dog from the street last February. )

By the same token I've known men who acted as mom for their littel daughters when mom either left town, or passed away unexpectedly, reading up on "feminine hygeine," teaching their daughters the facts of life, etc. When they had to do it, they did it.

So I've not seen any evidence to suggest that the roles of protective vs. nurturing are skewed one way or another biologically, unless I've been witness to an awful lot of exceptions in my life.

 

[randomling]

Henry: yeah, while saving hapless young men from fates worse than death sounds quite diverting, and I'll be interested to look at the mini-game when I get hold of Dungeon/Poly this month, I probably wouldn't go out of my way to play it!

Sorry for veering so far off topic. (I'm a feminist linguist with an interest in cognitive science, so this is a button-pusher for me.) Won't do it again!

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Wow, there is so much to this issue beyond the whole nature vs. nurture thing.

I'm coming at it from a more or less literary/rhetorical perspective and I have to say that any disscussion of fantasy is going to occur on a level way beyond that of human nature.

Why for instance do we associate such a negative response with men being rescued in this genre?

Richard the Lionhearted had to be rescued from imprisonment in Germany, I'm certain women found him just as sexy as they did before and vice versa.

Do you think that the wives and girlfriends, potential and actual, of people like the Iranian hostages of the 1990s looked down on the men who were captured?

What of the many many adventure stories in which men are rescued by sympathetic women?

I mean the very undisputable image of masculine heterosexual attractivenss, the one the only Sean Connery James Bond, relied on Pussy Galore not only for his rescue but to turn the entire Gold Finger operation on its ear!

A... woman... named... Pussy... Galore!

If you want something really classical, who do you think was more powerful, Jason or Medea? Would Theseus have gotten anywhere without the princess showing him to get through the maze and off the island?

Men and Women have to rely on each other for succor, that's the nature of the species. And in time of crisis there is no gender distinction there are only distinctions of bravery, morality, and opportunity.

Now the fact that there are a lot of women who would look down on a man they would have to rescue illustrates a different dynamic, though certainly not an unrelated one, dealing with current ideas about sexual suitability. Not that they can't be recurrent, but it would be foolish to deny that there is a special tension about the dynamic between masculine and femine agency in contemporary America.

And in line with that, I certainly don't think an issue suggesting that women could play that role has anything to do with political correctness or trying to muck around with human nature. This was an article about an RPG, a situation designed to play around with and take advantage of the human capacity for free and sustained imaginative play. If you can spend hours playing a game in which throwing a ring into a volcano undoes a tyrant, then you can certainly entertain the idea of a woman rescuing a man and liking it with equal validity.

 

[SemperJase]

Good points Henry. I noticed your example of your wife's protection was in relation to the dog. I also concede that women will naturally put themselves in danger to protect their children.

I'm still not convinced that a woman will respect a man she must protect.

 

[s/LaSH]

To move slightly closer to topic, I heartily approve of female star-swashbucklers (or whatever you call the protagonist of these tales). In fact, many moons ago I started writing a series of short stories consciously designed with no meritous features whatsoever except being fun, in which the main character was a woman who flies around the solar system looking for a home but finding only evil to combat. The first one was called Arcturus and the Martian Pyramid, in which she fights ogres, dinosaurs and Martian bread (long story) in a quest to overthrow a dictator (with a goatee). She's helping the rightful ruler's son, who is a big tough guy himself but he's just outclassed. I don't think anybody needs rescuing, per se, but Arcturus (our heroine) is definitely in charge.

So the idea's already in my head. I just have to bring it to the world...

PS: In German, the word for novel is Romane. 'Romance' seems to have evolved the other way in our language...