Part of the problem is that gaming is, for some people, literally a boy's club to retreat to in order to find a place to fit in. And they get accustomed to things being that way.
I'm not against boy's clubs as a general rule. People being what they are, its cool if they associate in gender segregated groups. Just look around the lunch room in a school, its how people are. But people also associate in gender integrated groups, and from my perspective I'd rather D&D was more of the latter than the former.
That's basically my take on it, though I'm probably less keen on gender segregated groups in general.
I'm less sympathetic to people who have internalized... have gender normative... have... crap. I'm trying to think of a way to say this without descending into incomprehensible humanities- speak.
I've been studying and teaching humanities at college level for decades now. I feel your pain!
People, particularly guys, and particularly guys in a traditionally male dominated context, start to assume that the things specifically included to appeal to males are somehow "normal" and therefore not actually specifically designed to appeal to males. This bugs me a bit. You'll get people who look at Barbie and recognize that it's designed to appeal to girls, and then look at a cartoon entitled something like Mega Robot Viking Ninja Explosion Turbo or whatever and cannot, no matter how hard they try, see that this might just be a wee bit aimed at boys as a market. I think these are the people who are more... "the problem" so to speak, because they don't adjust their behavior when the context changes from "boy's club" to a game with both men and women playing. They think that their jokes or comments or soft porn artwork are "normal" and not actually gender specific, and blame others, particularly women, for not liking the things and the behavior they do. If someone ever uses the word "feminazi," chances are you're talking to someone in this category. Ditto "oversensitive" with reference to women who dislike their behavior.
Obviously I'm engaging in a bit of generalization here... so please don't regale me with stories of this one girl you know named Suzie who thinks that wandering prostitute charts are totally awesome and wants to play a sex pot rape victim PC in a chainmail bikini unless you think that she's representative.
Too. Much. Agreement.
So how do I think that modern D&D is doing in this regard?
I think its mostly doing alright.
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I think D&D's doing a lot better in this regard than it's ever done. Could it do better? I think so.
Overall, I think that the biggest thing that needs to be done is no longer excising sexism so much as it is including things that appeal to girls and women. Its why I'd like D&D to take a little more influence from modern fantasy, which is much, much more mixed in terms of the genders to which it appeals.
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This is an area of heavy generalization...
Interesting idea. And, as you say, this is an area of heavy generalization, which is what makes it complicated.
Well now that's an interesting observation. The funny thing is CITY (the group's previous campaign setting) was intentionally sexist and racist, and yet the most powerful and influential NPC's encountered during the campaign were women.
I noticed that.
CITY was deliberately meant, in part, to be a parody of the less-than-savory aspects of the genre. Would you call CITY less sexist than the Port (the setting for the round-robin)?
I think the CITY setting itself would be equally sexist in that the strong and powerful women seemed to be completely anomalous to the majority of women in the world around them. Just like when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne and Renaissance England was still a heavily sexist place, because she was unique.
With the Port it seems John and I were just following the genre(s). Which would make it fairly sexist, then, I guess
.
Goes with the territory, I guess, but I like to mess with the territory.
Does the fact that it's largely about men --so far, at least-- necessarily mean it's also for men?
I think in theory it doesn't, but in practice it can come across that way.
I'll post some less personal responses later, assuming this thread doesn't go down in a blaze of politics.
Sure, and I hope not.
I think I want to make a point about the gender of particular narratives (that some skew male or female, not that's there anything wrong with that). To my mind, the exclusionary part of some game narratives is that they're fundamentally about solving problems with physical violence and looting, not their lack of strong female characters.
Good point, though most of the female players I've seen really enjoy the violence and the looting.
I think that aside from the art, you will be hard pressed to find anything sexist about the core rules of the recent editions.
Mechanically, I agree totally.
Campaign worlds have to present a society. Most of the societies in recorded human history have had strong gender roles. It is thus actively difficult to produce a game-society that is plausible, but has no trace of sexism.
Difficult, maybe, but not impossible, I think. I used the example of Eberron as one which presents a game-society (one which I think is actually more cohesive than the faux-medieval societies in many other settings) that is both plausible and has no trace of sexism.
I have, in the past, been told that the manner of eradicating gender roles can show as much or more sexism (by way of "pandering", among other things) than depicting a realistic moderately sexist culture in the game. Rock and a hard place, there.
Agreed. One of my examples of a near-perfect way to do it (though not in gaming) is in
Battlestar Galactica, where rather than pandering to certain gender stereotypes there are characters of every possible kind and nature. And some of them are women and some are men, and their nature doesn't map intrinsically onto their gender, but is merely inflected by it.
As for EN World - saying there's too much sexism here is rather like saying there's too much sexism in the world. We have no control over the upbringing and beliefs of individual posters. Sexism is here because it is in the general population. You won't fix sexism here, except by fixing it in the general population.
Agreed. But you have to start somewhere, so I might as well start here. After all, I spend more time here than in the general population
I have a major logic failure here. You see, in order to "cater to women", we must have a profile of what women like that is not in the game. That's a stereotype, and inherently sexist.
Really?
Do you think that D&D as it exists today caters to men?
As Cadfan's question (I think) and Proserpine later noted, I'm not suggesting that D&D cater specifically to women, for precisely the reason you mention. I think it should just cater
equally to women as to men.
I think any meaningful discussion of the issue would violate ENW's 'no politics' provision.
I do think WotC has been determinedly, even aggressively, anti-sexist in its presentation of D&D.
I think they've done a much better job than they did before, but there are a number of things (small or large, depending on perspective) where there's a fair bit of gender bias. The artwork, the miniatures, etc.
...there was no inherent sexism IN THE RULES.
The artwork, otoh, is a different kettle of fish.
Yup. As noted above, the artwork is one of the things I had in mind when posting this thread.
Good god, I wish this thread had a humor tag.
And yeah, D&D is inherently sexist, at least a little bit. You ever see fantasy pictures of "normal" women? They're either horridly ugly (and therefore probably a monster in disguise, or Ugly For A Reason) or, at the very least, thin and big-breasted. Meanwhile, males have a much bigger range.
It's the same kind of sexism found in most video games and other popular media. Sex sells, and since you're selling mainly to men, you're going to objectify women at least a wee bit.
And that's the kind of presumption that I don't buy. I think it's possible to sell to men without objectifying women. And I'd much rather that D&D just sold to everyone, male or female.
This, of course, does NOT mean that the people who play and enjoy D&D are sexist themselves. We're wayyyy too diverse a group to pigeonhole like that.
I wasn't saying that the individual people who play and enjoy D&D are all sexist. I know there's way too much variety among people who game to make any such comment. But I do think a lot of people who aren't inherently sexist themselves can allow an atmosphere of sexism to exist without realizing or commenting on it.
I can offer a sort of personal observation about all this, in an analogical fashion.
When I first starting dating my wife, who is black (I am not), she would notice people "looking at us funny a lot."
...
Funny you should mention that, since I'm in an interracial relationship (my girlfriend's white and I'm Indian) too.
Anywho, this is not to say there is no such thing as racism or sexism or whatever the "ism du jour" might be, it's just that it usually isn't the bugbear it appears to be on first blush, and truth be told, you get to know most people, and they're pretty fair. That is they may have motives for their beliefs, even ones I sometimes think wrong, but they may have motives that to them are based on solid principles or based on valid personal experience.
Maybe, but while I can understand why people are sexist or racist or anything of the kind, that doesn't mean I have to think it's a good thing.
As for the game, I suspect it's much like it is in real life.
You get the world you set out to make.
Or the one you'll tolerate anyway.
Right. And this is in part a conversation, I think, about what those of us posting are willing to tolerate. Obviously, our standards differ a lot here.
Marketing
and
product
design
cater
to
a
target
audience.
And when marketing and target design change, so does the target audience. Or vice versa. And I figure D&D targeted at an audience of men and women is a good thing.
