Distracted, Nobody Noticed The Consultants Are All Men

I know, right? While arguing over the contagiousness and toxicity of two personalities on the list when it comes to gender-and-sexuality issues, nobody - at least looking at the first 20 google hits for "D&D 5th edition consultants male" - has commented that all eight consultants, plus the seven designers, developers and writers, appear to be male. Female names appear in the credits in editing, art direction, and artist roles - and yes, art is important, but also a different post.

I think this hasn't been commented just because it is so obvious and so usual. After all, a recent study identified 85.5% of published tabletop RPG creators as male by name, while only 6% appear to be female. Still, if you are drawing from that pool at random for 15 people there is a 60.5% chance that you will have at least one woman on the team. (Imagine rolling percentile dice for gender 15 times, calculating the odds you will roll at least one 06 or below.) So it's not unimaginable that there could be at least one solitary woman on the panel just by chance. Also not unimaginable that a woman game author or commentator could have, you know, been included on the panel intentionally to give her perspective.

Because for D&D and old school RPGs in particular, there is a thunderous statistical skew towards male creators. Now, when people celebrate gender equality or bemoan its absence they point to people at the table. Indeed, discussing roleplaying with a curious sci-fi fan at a professional conference last week, I was able to answer her gender question quite creditably: my main campaign has 3 women and 3 men and my side game, 2 and 4.

But left aside in that conversation was the almost unrelieved maleness of the top RPG creatives in my blogroll (as of this writing, only Gaming as Women hanging on with a 1 day old post), the module authors I read and use, the gamemaster role that women are less often seen in, and so on.

Often observed: it is easier and more rewarding for our primate social brainbits to personalize inequality, to make it be about pointing out who is a racist or a sexist and so on, than to take on the evidence of inequality that persists even when nice people are making the decisions, and raise hard questions about what accounts for it.

Perhaps after 20 years where DMs who would inflict rape upon their female players' characters are viewed with the same loathing as DMs who would climb up and take a dump on the table so that their otyugh miniature can have a "realistic" nest ... 20 years where most of the mostly male creators mostly "get it" in their writing ... 20 years of having as many men as women at table, as many all-female as all-male groups ... we can have a clear view of which one of these things is true:

1. Creating material for adventure role-playing is just one of those things that average men statistically tend to get into more so than average women, for whatever reason (nature, nurture, culture...) and that reason is mostly legitimate.

2. Creating for adventure role-playing is one of those things that average men authentically enjoy more than average women, but this is for a reason that should be questioned - such as women being put off by games that involve math or complex procedures, as a result of socialization that also forestalls their interest in prestigious careers and science topics.

3. Women would gladly create adventure role-playing stuff as much as men currently do, but they are kept from doing it by the implicit and explicit sexism of men in the field, as well as the message that the sausage-fest sends - that "people like you are not welcome here."

I'll just note that even if you believe #1 is true, that does not let you off the hook for women's participation and representation in the hobby. That just means you treat the 10% of creators who are women with the same consideration that you would treat the ~10% of people who are non-straight, or the ~10% who represent a local ethnic minority.

Gnolls Are Weirder Than You Think

Gnolls have long been my favorite D&D humanoid. They're great villains, based on a foul and baleful animal. What's more, they're a whole-cloth creation in the game. There's no legendary or fictional precedent apart from Lord Dunsany's "gnoles" -- to which they bear only a homonymous relation.

But if you study up on hyena anatomy and society, gnolls get weirder. "Gynocracy" is maybe too weak a word to describe the social structure of an animal where the female is larger than the male and the lowest female outranks the highest male.

Then there's the hyena's genitalia, (warning: not safe for work or lunch) which led Pliny and other ancients to classify them as hermaphrodites. This is not strictly true, but the females do have non-functioning organs that look like the male equipment, and get in the way of reproduction. And that makes life no laughing matter.

Reaper Bones mini (I'm painting 3 of these)

In addition to inverting the more usual gender roles, hyenas are violent among themselves, and often cannibalistic. What would humanoids evolved or created from such beasts be like?

As chaotic evil creatures, gnolls would be warlike, with the larger, dominant females as the warriors. Males, which in the hyena migrate to other packs to mate, would in the gnoll society most likely be seen as chattel, good only for one-time mating and subsequently a food source.

Their tough-brutal mentality can only be helped along by the anatomical facts: mating and birth for gnolls are painful and dangerous. Perhaps any given gnoll lair will have about 5-10% of the warrior females convalescing from either of these activities, having taken d4 (mating) or d4+4 (birth) damage in the process. And this can't make their attitude toward males any kinder. They might see their male chattel as a way to prove themselves in the ultimate way, fusing sexuality with a form of self-mutilation, but ultimately - as with men who take that approach toward women - they would feel nothing but contempt toward these objects of acquisition.

Last night one of my players remarked on the tendency of my adventures to include content rated "raw and gritty" after they did some exploring of a dwarf latrine in the dungeon. I don't think I overpedal these elements, and have no desire to continually throw "flies and dung" in players' faces. But if I'm running a game where players confront the monstrous, I reserve the right to play all the keys of that concept, including the hyenas' "monstrous" gender politics that invert the worst human tendencies.

AD&D Gender Differences: Not Big Enough for Realism

If you defend gender limits on Strength in a game because of "the basic facts of anatomy," are you going far enough?

Most research studies put men on average at about twice the physical upper-body strength of women, whether measured by lifting or throwing (even this meta-analysis challenging the importance of psychological sex differences has to acknowledge the strong physical sex differences on this score.) To put it statistically, effect size differences on things related to the Strength stat in roleplaying games range from 1.5 to 3 standard deviation units (d). The distribution overlap for a d of 2 looks like this:

What this would mean is that 2.5% of women are physically stronger than the average man, and 2.5% of men are less strong than the average woman. If you assume that the male is the norm for the D&D character (and given the premises of this discussion, hey, why not?), this translates to a -6 penalty to female Strength, so that the top 2.5th percentile cutoff of the female distribution (3d6 roll of 17+) matches the top 50th percentile cutoff of the male one (3d6 roll of 11+).

Nothing this size exists for psychological differences, so unless you're positing some very bizarre cultural constraints, balancing out male strength  by giving women characters a +6 to "wisdom" or "charisma" or what have you is just as unrealistic.

And people are arguing about AD&D capping human females at 18/50 strength? It's clear that neither realism nor equality are served by the classic  rule, which can only be defended on the grounds of tradition.

My own game's rationale for not having gender modify strength: Along with the wizard, the dwarf, the elf, the barbarian - each of which rests to some extent on a suspension of disbelief - there is another fantasy archetype, the "warrior maid" or "kick-ass woman." Whether her name is Penthesilia, Bradamante, Wonder Woman, or Xena, both men and women love to watch her, and sometimes to play in her role. Anything the system does to make this character possible, and attractive to play, is allowable.

Long story short: why the hell are people so concerned about female anatomical realism when half the female fighters in D&D art look like this:

And if so, why can't they equally "unrealistically" look like this?

Unsexy Matriarchies

I’ve been vacillating about whether to include feminist/intersectional gaming blogs like The Border House and Go Make Me A Sandwich in my blog roll. 

On the one hand, it’s important to keep up awareness of these issues.

On the other hands, a) most of their articles are about computer gaming, which is not my focus here; b) a lot of the content boils down to outrage at the latest example of dumb and obvious sexploitation in the industry, which is a bit like writing about Hooters and saying “Boy howdy does this place objectify women.”

I really appreciated, then, this recent post on Border House that breaks away from both molds. It’s a breakdown of how a lot of fantasy matriarchal societies are unrealistic reflections of patriarchal male fantasies, centering on that ever-popular Gygaxian invention, the Drow.

The Underdark, as cast by Rick James.

Zaewen's line of argument: a real society in which women hold the power wouldn’t have them dressing up all sexy in thongs and 1980’s pirate boots. Flaunting sexuality is soft power, on those occasions when it even constitutes power. 

Which then raises the question, what would a more realistic society dominated by women look like? I think the answer to that question falls one of two ways depending on how much you want to incorporate la difference ... the biological differences between men and women ... as a part of this hypothetical female power.

Star Trek: The Next Generation ... well, tried, and failed famously, to flip la difference in the episode Angel One. It presented a society where women were big matronly amazons, men were little twinks, and everyone had feathered hair. Of course the whole setup ended up collapsing like a house of cards when some real men showed up, so the episode ended up being more regressive than progressive. But the squicky feeling at seeing those little guys with bare chests and earcuffs was a pretty good sign you weren’t just being treated to another Sexy Matriarchy.

Canadian writer and artist  Dave Sim took another obvious tack when he created a feminist dystopia in the latter half of his decades-long Cerebus comic book. Instead of reversing the gradient of physical strength, he based supremacy in Cirinist society on women’s ability to bear children. We get a pretty credible, if caricatured, matriarchal society from this convert to Islam and admirer of Oscar Wilde who explicitly hates women with every shred of his being (except for those who in Sim’s estimation carry, instead of extinguish, the creative spark that he associates with men ... like, uh, Coco Chanel ... I can’t make this stuff up). Men who don’t submit to female authority and take part in family life are confined to the company of other such men and encouraged to drink their life away in bars. This of course has nothing, I mean everything, to do with Sim’s own personal history.

What these random examples show, perhaps, is that even the most imaginative writers prefer to see female reign as just as morally bad as male domination. And that stereotypes run deep. The Star Trek episode plays with the discomfort of reversed sex roles but eventually upholds the Federation perspective which turns out to be only as semi-enlightened as 1980’s America. Sim’s world only feels plausible because it’s built on such solid stereotypical bedrock, where women entrap men sexually into becoming dads while men oscillate between creative genius and drunken dissipation.

I hear Joanna Russ did a better job of this, so I really need to pick up The Female Man.