Sexism in your campaign settings

[Drifter Bob]

The witch-burnings were almost entirely of Christians, not pagans or people who thought of themselves as other than Christian, in much of Europe. There was no super-secret pagan underground. As with most religious supercessionism, people just grafted their former practices onto the new ones and thought nothing of it. That didn't make them secretly pagan, anymore than a Christian today who reads her horoscope is really Zoroastrian.

This borders on a forbidden subject, but I will say this, I disagree. They used to say in Haiti people were 80% catholic and 100% voodoo. This was the same for many peasants in Europe, for whom the saints were thinly veiled versians of the earlier spirits. There were historically documented 'sabbatic' movements and these were often linked to peasant uprisings such as the Jacquerie, which had a notoriously pagan derived motto (pardon my french spelling, but it was the want that started something like "nous sont hommes quand ils sont...")

This is basically the same case today in many parts of latin america, or vis a vis islam in places like Malaysia, where it is practiced in a much different way than say, Saudia Arabia.

In some countries, like Germany, the burnings were far more about politics and land-grabs than punishing witches.

there is often a political side to these things, often power grabs by bishops or counts over cities for example, but many times the hysteria got it's own momentum going...

In Spain they largely thought it was silly to burn witches, because it got in the way of burning Jews and heretics.

Thats because in spain, as in other catholic countries, they had the inquisition which was altogether a different animal. The witch burnings took place largely in protestant Europe.

I agree with your points about sexism not meaning women were powerless, but the "Burning Times" are a part of a mythic tradition--not history.

The burnings are historical fact. The interpretation is something we will probably have to agree to disagree on.

DB

 

[Sir Elton]

Fantasy is at its heart escapism. Why saddle it with real world problems?

I most humbly disagree.

I would find realistic worlds boring.

I vehemently and most certainly disagree. Our world isn't all that "boring." Life tends to happen.

On Topic: Sexism as I understand it is the unwillingness to treat the opposite sex, be he male or she female, as an equal. In the sexist world view, one sex is clearly morally, physically, spiritually, or mentally superior to the other in all instances. In my RPGs, I tend to leave sexism, AS I UNDERSTAND IT, out of it.

Except when I get the PG to the Wilderlands. Then the whole dynamic changes in a couple of places. Orcus describes a world that was inspired by the Pulp Fantasy of the 50's and 60's. Sexism does exist in the world, and completely out of proportion.

You have amazons that make slaves out of men, completely dominating them. You have houri women dancing topless. You have hundreds of different little things that make the Wilderlands seem from 50's and 60's pulp. After all, there's a Frazzetta on the Cover!

 

[Drifter Bob]

Female dominated priesthoods and female deities

(snip)

. The (often female IIRC) oracle of Apollo at Delphi didn't do anything to change matters either. .

You raise a good point, but you have to understand though that Greece was an example of a society very much in transition from a more sexually egalitarian form to an eastern influenced patriarchal society. Thats why you see male sky gods (zeuss, apollo) replacing female sea (aphrodite), earth (demeter) and nature (artemis) gods.

And as for Delphi, which incidetnally was always a female preisthood as i understand it, they were very, very powerful, with a spy network across the land. They essentially pushed Athens and Sparta into fighting for Greek independence in the Persian wars, among many other feats. Though they did not necessarily fight for female equality, they obviously wielded a great deal of influence.

Herodotus incidentally mentions a female greek pirate capitan from one of the Islands who lead a squadron of ships at Salamis (I think). Though she fought unwisely on the Persian side, she did fight her way out and escape the massacre if I remember correctly.

DB

 

[Drifter Bob]

Herodotus incidentally mentions a female greek pirate capitan from one of the Islands who lead a squadron of ships at Salamis (I think). Though she fought unwisely on the Persian side, she did fight her way out and escape the massacre if I remember correctly.
DB

Here is the individual in question, Artemesius of Halicarnasus. it was the battle of salamis.

http://www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/background/42.html

DB

 

[Nisarg]

My answer to this is, "It depends." It depends on other factors that tend to produce sexism in the surrounding world. If it's a relatively egalitarian culture already because of other factors, I don't see it being terribly monopolized by either sex. If it's not, again, it depends on how magic functions. Even the patriarchal Romans had legends about female sorcerers and seers. Now imagine if that power were actually real and not just in a bunch of superstitious legends. Maybe the Romans would try to supress it. Maybe they'd fail and have to come to terms with it, being as pragmatic as they certainly could be from time to time.
If you don't see magic overcoming the gender barrier in any circumstances, maybe it's you who isn't thinking about the wider implications real magic could have. I think magic could be a considerable equalizer, especially if developed early in a culture, because it could undermine the physiologically-based division of labor and political power between the sexes. If magic can have a significant battlefield effect, then the war path to political power need not be monopolized by the sex more physiologically suited to physical warfare.

Again, it depends how powerful said magic is, and how easy it is to learn.

If you're in a society where most women aren't taught to read, then magic based on spellbooks isn't going to help them.

If magic is something that you can just learn relatively easily (or an inherent power), available to anyone who bothers to train (or is born with it), and is powerful enough that it would make a difference in politics or war, then yes, I could see it leading to greater power/equality for women.
But then it also would definitely NOT produce a "medieval" fantasy society with castles, knights, kings, the feudal system, weaponry, etc. etc. etc.

My problem is NOT that you can't have a fantasy setting where women have as much power and are considered equals (or superiors) to men, its that you can't have that AND have a vaguely pseudo-european quasi-medieval society too. And a lot of D&D's vanilla settings try to have both worlds, all of the medievalisms and all of the PC-egalitarianism.

Nisarg

 

[Nisarg]

This idea that in medieval europe women were powerless is itself unrealistic. There was sexism and women had a specific place in society, but that was hardly a universal hard and fast rule. It can be taken so far in the name of realism as to make a fake world. Even in the most repressive patriarchal socities on earth women have made their voices heard, and wielded power. Arab kindoms in the middle ages were often ruled from the Harim.

DB

Very very true. Women in medieval society could wield incredible power. Eleanor of Acquitaine, for example. In pre-medieval societies as well; look at the Roman world, women like Livia for example, who used marriage, politics, and poison to insure her son's place on the imperial throne.

So incredible power, yes. Equality no. What it means is that in a realistic pseudo-medieval setting, women could do a lot of things (and as some people pointed out here, might be wizards or clerics depending on how those things were handled in the specific setting). What they were not, was "Just the same as men". They could not do the same things in the same ways. And when they tried (Jean D'arc as a classic example), they usually came to a bad end.

Nisarg

 

[mythago]

This borders on a forbidden subject, but I will say this, I disagree. They used to say in Haiti people were 80% catholic and 100% voodoo.

Voodoo is a syncretic religion; it's a melding of traditional West African religions and Catholicism. The peasants of Europe may have feared fairy-hills and worshipped old gods dressed as saints, but they thought of themselves as Christian, not pagan, by the Middle Ages. (There were exceptions during transitional periods--there is supposedly a Viking myth in which a drunken Thor challenged Jesus to a wrestling match.) The 'witches,' primarily but not always women, burned for witchcraft believed themselves to have been led astray by Satan, not the Triune Goddess.

Thats because in spain, as in other catholic countries, they had the inquisition which was altogether a different animal. The witch burnings took place largely in protestant Europe.

There's a reason it's called the Spanish Inquisition in most texts; there were large and small Inquistions, by both Catholic and Protestant bodies, depending on the country and principality.

My problem is NOT that you can't have a fantasy setting where women have as much power and are considered equals (or superiors) to men, its that you can't have that AND have a vaguely pseudo-european quasi-medieval society too.

Sure you can. If you can come up with a plausible reason elves rub shoulders with humans, you can come up with a plausible reason for female knights. Yes, there will be differences, but what you're essentially saying is Vague Pseudo-Europe can absorb orcs (with or without pies), wish spells, polytheism, and so on--whereby we get FR and Eberron and the like--but eliminate historical sexism and you have to throw everything out and start over? Honestly, I am not seeing why 'magic is real' is so much more of a change from the modern day than 'girls get to be paladins'.

 

[Nisarg]

This borders on a forbidden subject, but I will say this, I disagree. They used to say in Haiti people were 80% catholic and 100% voodoo. This was the same for many peasants in Europe, for whom the saints were thinly veiled versians of the earlier spirits. There were historically documented 'sabbatic' movements and these were often linked to peasant uprisings such as the Jacquerie, which had a notoriously pagan derived motto (pardon my french spelling, but it was the want that started something like "nous sont hommes quand ils sont...")

There were "pagan survivalisms", but these were not religions in and of themselves, only "christianizations" of old pagan practices.

If you read "Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts", by Anne Llewellyn Barstow, you would see that the number of deaths from the witch craze was not more than 200 000 over a 400 year period, and may have been as few as 75 000. You will also see conclusively that 99.9% of these deaths were people who were avowed christians and went to their graves as christians.

This is not the only book that takes this perspective. In fact, all of legitimate academia today is more or less agreed on the numbers (at least inasmuch that it wasn't much more than 200k deaths), and that there was NO vast pagan undeground in christian europe.

Also, given that "wicca" was a religion invented in 1950, those few medieval europeans who might have thought of themselves as "witches" would have born no resemblance to the modern witches trying to somehow assume the mantle of their martyrdom.

Nisarg

 

[GSHamster]

There seem to be two issues here: sexism against players; and sexism against characters.

In the game, how do you think a male player with a female character would be treated? How would a female player with a male character be treated?

Judging by S'mon's comments, it seems that he agrees that female characters are being discriminated against. I don't think this is too bad, as long as it isn't too pervasive, and eventually stops after the character has proven herself. However, when I read StalkingBlues' post, it seems that she feels that the female players are being slighted, and I'm pretty sure we'd all agree that this is unacceptable.

Of course, it's problematic, because sometimes the boundary between player and character gets blurry. Perhaps in this game, the social structure of the gameworld unintentionally reinforces the gender divisions of the players.

Solutions? I dunno. It's tricky. Perhaps talking with your group about it would be a start. Maybe the male players don't realize they're excluding the female players, and will try and be more inclusive. Also society doesn't exist in a vacuum independant of the characters. The presence of powerful females characters would probably encourage more women (especially younger ones) to challenge society. S'mon could use the opportunity to gradually shift attitudes in the nations. For example, if the player who's a king needs a position filled, have women apply, and have them be more qualified.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

You raise a good point, but you have to understand though that Greece was an example of a society very much in transition from a more sexually egalitarian form to an eastern influenced patriarchal society. Thats why you see male sky gods (zeuss, apollo) replacing female sea (aphrodite), earth (demeter) and nature (artemis) gods.

That's a pretty dubious contention. The Greece of Homer and Hesiod is certainly different from the Greece of Plato and Aristotle and that is different from the Greece of Phillip and Alexander, which, of course is different from the Greece of Polycarp, Eusebius, and the early church fathers. Yet in all of those, the greek pantheon appears to remain relatively stable. Artemis is the goddess of Ephesus from very early in its history to the days of Saint Paul. Athena is the patron of Athens from its founding until it became Christian. If that's replacement, it's operating on a geological time scale. From what I've read, it doesn't seem like the pre-socratics were any less sexist than Aristotle. Though Plato made no sex distinctions among the higher castes in his Republic, I see no reason to believe that he represents an older "more egalitarian" form of life.

In any event, the idea that Zeus and Apollo "replaced" Aphrodite, Demeter, and Artemis doesn't seem to fit any of the evidence I'm aware of.

As far as I can tell, Greek religious practice remained relatively stable for quite a while as did the male dominance and the worship of the godesses in their society. I see very little

And as for Delphi, which incidetnally was always a female preisthood as i understand it, they were very, very powerful, with a spy network across the land. They essentially pushed Athens and Sparta into fighting for Greek independence in the Persian wars, among many other feats. Though they did not necessarily fight for female equality, they obviously wielded a great deal of influence.

As if neither the Athenians nor the Spartans would have considered their independence worth fighting for without the Oracle? I'm sure the Oracle and her priesthood were influential. However, you seem to be really pushing the boundaries of plausibility here.

Herodotus incidentally mentions a female greek pirate capitan from one of the Islands who lead a squadron of ships at Salamis (I think). Though she fought unwisely on the Persian side, she did fight her way out and escape the massacre if I remember correctly.

What this demonstrates is not that the Greeks were a sexually egalitarian society. They weren't. Nor does it support the thesis that the greeks were in transition from some mythical egalitarian society to immediately pre-Christian Greece. (The battle of Salamis would have to be rather late in this development--hundreds of years after Homer and Hesiod). What it demonstrates is that monolithic patiarchy is a myth.

As during the medieval and Renaisance eras, there were a good number of women who wielded significant power (Elanor of Aquitaine, Queen Mary I, and Queen Elizabeth being prominent examples). Even in the tribal cultures of the pre-Islamic arabs, there were influential women. (Mohammed's first wife was apparently quite influential WRT both her society and her husband). In any given medieval city, it was likely that there would be a number of influential widows who occupied their late husbands' seat in the guild or who controlled a significant fortune and who pursued their own agendas. In the Greek era (if Herodotus is to be believed--he's not the most credible of Greek historians though this particular story doesn't seem hard to believe), there were a few women who even led pirate fleets.

Getting back onto topic, this should demonstrate that it's not necessary to sacrifice historical credibility on the altar of PC gender equality in order to create a game with opportunities for female PCs. It may well interfere with the pulp Sword and Sorcery feel of any particular game (as I recall from my very limited Conan reading, and my extensive Ffard and the Grey Mouser reading, sexism is one of the genre's defining characteristics; female characters were generally either nude and nubile slave girls, old crones, or seductive princesses but their primary role was to sleep with and titillate the main characters). However, that particular aspect of the Sword and Sorcery genre probably isn't worth keeping.