Sexism in D&D and on ENWorld (now with SOLUTIONS!)

[Ariosto]

If anyone can make sense of Hussar's out-of-context quote and quip, please help me out.

It's not that I cannot be insulted, just that I can't make head or tail of the accusation!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm guessing that this last bit:

I don't know about you, but I would much rather have Dejah Thoris or Thuvia -- or the Red Lensman, or any one of countless competent females of "pulp fiction" -- at my six than one of today's hothouse flowers preoccupied with sex and frail as a clothes-hanger.

...may have been read as an indictment of women as being overly "frilly" in general.

While girlie-girls exist- my church's music minister married one a couple of years ago- they are but a subset of the female gender...as I'm sure you're aware.

 

[Timeboxer]

I threw the above together in just 15 minutes of thinking about the subject, so pardon me if they’re not the best thought-out or creative solutions. But I hope they’re at least a decent starting point for thinking about the subject and how it can be dealt with in interesting ways.

Hey shilsen -- just as a caveat, I don't necessarily agree with your premises, but mostly because I don't really run into sexism on a regular basis. This is probably due largely to where I currently live.

But, there is one area where I am willing to admit that sexism runs rampant, which is language. I'm not really talking about pronoun use here -- I'm talking about the following sentence:

"The kobolds went berserk and killed his neighbor's wife!"

It takes awhile to figure out why this is sexist, unfortunately, because it feels like a completely natural sentence construction. I'd ask you to add "watch your language" to your list of solutions, but to be honest, even recognizing that you're saying something with a hidden sexist viewpoint is very difficult. But I thought I'd throw that in.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

But, there is one area where I am willing to admit that sexism runs rampant, which is language. I'm not really talking about pronoun use here -- I'm talking about the following sentence:

"The kobolds went berserk and killed his neighbor's wife!"

It takes awhile to figure out why this is sexist, unfortunately, because it feels like a completely natural sentence construction.

I'm calling shenanigans, here.

That is completely natural sentence construction, and is no more nor no less sexist than:

"The kobolds went berserk and killed his neighbor's husband!"

...or "his neighbor's uncle," "cousin," "aunt" or any such similar verbiage.

Those who argue otherwise are reading too much into the possessive proceeding "wife".

 

[Ariosto]

Thanks, Dannyalcatraz. I was actually observing that Sturgeon's Laws are perennial. I was one of several people responding to Hussar's use of chauvinistic stereotypes (as substitute for real knowledge) to attack an individual and his work.

That is the problem with "isms" -- they depend upon ignorance, for they fall apart in engagement with the diversity among real people and the complexity of real phenomena.

 

[Timeboxer]

That is completely natural sentence construction, and is no more nor no less sexist than:

"The kobolds went berserk and killed his neighbor's husband!"

Via Google, "neighbor's wife" gets 175,000 hits. "Neighbor's husband" gets 7,630 hits. Actual numbers don't matter; it's a question of magnitude: if "neighbor's husband" were a more natural sentence construction, you'd expect it not to be as uncommon by comparison.

Ask yourself: Why "neighbor's wife" rather than "neighbor"?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Via Google, "neighbor's wife" gets 175,000 hits. "Neighbor's husband" gets 7,630 hits. Actual numbers don't matter; it's a question of magnitude: if "neighbor's husband" were a more natural sentence construction, you'd expect it not to be as uncommon by comparison.

Ask yourself: Why "neighbor's wife" rather than "neighbor"?

Lob me a softball, why don't you?

It is a natural sentence construction. I can think of a few reasons within my daily life when I'd use it. Mostly, they boil down to familiarity. I hang out with a lot of married guys, but I seldom encounter their wives. This is for a variety of reasons- some have disparate schedules, some (due to the nature of their work) live separately from their spouses. In general, I'm more familiar with their husbands...some of those women I don't even know by name. One guy's wife I haven't even met, and I've known the guy for 10 years.

And if you ask anyone who hangs out with a lot of "marrieds" you'd probably find a similar phenomenon. "Bob's wife" may just reflect how familiar one guy is with another's spouse, simply because they don't travel in similar social orbits.

The reasons why you get more hits for "wife" rather than "husband" in an online search on that phrase include:

1) That phrase is found in the English translation of one of the 10 commandments. That is going to net you lots of hits, both in the form of discussion of the passage itself, and writers making allusions to it.

2) "Thy Neighbor's Wife" is famous book written by Gay Talese that was also made into a movie- the title is an allusion to the Biblical passage noted above. The nearest equivalent for "husband" is a single episode of the Dick Van Dyke show. Which do you think will get more discussion and thus more hits- a single episode from a famous TV show, or a famous novel AND the movie made from it.

3) There are several porn sites that play off of the aforementioned Biblical passage- I presume in order to be more "naughty"- and we all know how much of an impact that industry has on the proliferation of sites on the Web.

If I bothered to spend real time on this, I could probably get the numbers down to about equal on those searches.

 

[kolikeos]

"The kobolds went berserk and killed his neighbor's wife!"

At first I thought to myself:

That is completely natural sentence construction

And kept on reading...

and is no more nor no less sexist than:

"The kobolds went berserk and killed his neighbor's husband!"

At which point I realized (to my horror) that "neighbor's wife" sounds much more natural than "neighbor's husband"! And assuming that wife and husband live together, that sentence should have ended with "neighbor" rather than "neighbor's wife"!
That just goes to show me how deeply sexism is rooted in our society. Even when I actively try to avoid assumptions about a role's sex (the neighbor is obviously male right? Since the default is male right?), I may still say things that suggest that I do make such assumptions, and no one, including me, will notice.
Watching one’s language is much harder than I thought. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Others might think "if no one notices then nobody is offended, if nobody is offended then what does it matter?"
For me it's not about avoiding offending people, my objection to sexism is much more likely to offend than actual sexist behavior (since most see it as the norm); it's about avoiding such discriminating behavior as much as possible in the hope that others might catch on.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

At which point I realized (to my horror) that "neighbor's wife" sounds much more natural than "neighbor's husband"!

To your ears, perhaps...but not to everyone's.

And assuming that wife and husband live together, that sentence should have ended with "neighbor" rather than "neighbor's wife"!

If you're really that close to your neighbors, shouldn't it have ended with "Bob" or "Carol?"

Besides, if you say:

"The kobolds went berserk and killed his neighbor!"

The follow-up question will be (depending upon family size)-

"Which one? The father, the mother, the son or the daughter? Or do you mean the bachelor on the other side?"

The sentence construction with "neighbor's wife" actually imparts additional information into the conversation, alleviating (to some extent) the need for follow-up questions.

Here is a fear I have:

We spend too much time and energy going on about the minor (but admittedly extant) problem of "linguistic sexism," editing languages like the Ministries in Orwell's 1984 (by which we hope to eradicate the capability of even forming sexist thoughts, I presume), and we'll get distracted from tackling the harder and more destructive issues of sexism in our respective cultures, like wage gaps.

Too much of the former, and even the word "sexism" will lose its ability to enrage- and thus motivate- much like my fellow black Americans' cries of "racism" over minor issues has led to fatigue and even a "Boy who cried wolf" type situation when we still have to deal with major racial issues.

 

[Krensky]

This is the problem with a lot of the academic efforts on addressing sexism or racism or whatever -ism.

Rather then addressing the legal, cultural, and societal issues and that lead to both de jure and de facto sexism, it spends it's time twiddling around with 'discriminatory language' or 'biased representation' or 'political correctness' and pisses off a lot of people who would otherwise be disposed to their arguments and concerns.

Language, while massively important to how human consciousness and society, is not the source of the problem. The source of the problem are economic, cultural, legal, and socital pressures and problems. Linguistic bias is so far down on the list of causes that fretting over it is like worring if you left your cell phone charger plugged in and it's effects on your power bill while running your air conditioning system at max.