First, historically, I don’t think there were fewer women gamers in the 70’s than there are now, proportionately. Women have
been role-playing since RPG’s have been around. Yes, there were no girls in my high school games, but that was a bug not
a feature. By college (1981) however, every game I played in had some women playing and/or GMing, and most of them had been playing a while. About one in four gamers were women, and I don’t see a lot more than that now.

Second, marketing using strongly gendered demographics is inherrently sexist, in the same way that segregated schools are racist. The partition of children into Barbies vs GI Joes says that a child’s gender dictates their interests and opportunities in life. If that’s not sexist, what is?

Third, even if a product were to be legitimately targetted towards one genders, it doesn’t excuse stereotyping or derogatory or degrading portrayals of the other. Are Sambo dolls justified if they are only marketed to white kids? This
doesn’t even begin to make sense to me.

Finally, what evidence do you have that the sexism of earlier role-playing products was driven by market forces? ( I’ll distinguish sexism from sexiness. Sure, sex sells, but it also does not have to be sexist.) What non-sexist games went bankrupt? My impression is that the sexism in early games is there for the same reason they put ninjas in medieval Europe: they wrote down what popped into their heads, and they were as sexist as most people.

Russell

Oh hey, though: there’s your great camp roleplaying game.

God. Now I want to play RIFTS. What have you done, Joshua?

More seriously, there’s a big difference between, say, your Glitterboy giant phallus replacement and your hard-nosed Aeryn Sun with huge gun giant phallus replacement. One is unthinking catering to impulse, the other is conscious use of and commentary on impulse.

Has there been a great camp roleplaying game yet? There ought to be.

My take on guns is pragmatic; less guns available = less murders, and less murders is worth a little trampling on the right to bear arms.

Gender portrayals in media, however, is a lot fuzzier. Let’s just start with different audiences, determining appropriate audiences, and restricting distribution to those audiences — Bachannal is a fine game for adults and a terrible one for preteens. And while the victims and fallout of “bad” gender portrayals merit serious consideration, we’re not talking murders. This isn’t a case where “something should be done” industry-wide to prevent stupid gender stereotyping from getting in the hands of impressionable boys. The payoff of such an action is a lot less reliable than the guns->murders equation, and I don’t believe that it’s worth a little trampling on the right to free speech.

To make it a moral argument… well, it becomes a moral argument. Is Gary Gygax responsible, at least in part, for a 14 year old girl being carelessly used by her 14 year old boyfriend in 1981? Maybe? But his ‘in part’ is pretty damn infintessimal. And in the end, I’m not really interested in assigning blame for events that cannot be changed. I’m interested in what I can do now.

So more to the point, is that incident twenty-five years ago a good reason to strip gender out of games? On the contrary, I think it’s a good reason to put it in there. But you’ve got to ask if the game being written is for: (a) the now-39-year-old woman who was used, (b) the now-39-year-old man who used her, (c) a 14-year-old boy today, and/or (d) a 14-year-old girl today. Is the game supposed to mend past ills, to re-educate, to provide good examples, to build girl-power self-esteem? Whatever it is, that’s what should inform what gendered content goes in there, not what some dude printed in some game in 1981.

I agree with lots of what you say here, but this is just a terrible, terrible argument. It’s not the books’ fault! It’s not the gun’s fault! After demonstrating such a strong awareness of the influence of unconscious gender on conscious gaming, to then go ahead and deny the influence of unconscious gender on actual interactions with gendered people seems absurd. If you are worried enough about your unconscious gender beliefs that you try and make sure to consciously filter them into your games, then presumably you are acknowledging that the unconscious opinions people hold about gender will influence their behaviour. Saying it’s their stupid fault when this happens is disingenuous — and even if it were true, it’s besides the point. This is because even if it is their stupid fault for not correcting their unconscious, the reason that unconscious is telling them what it’s telling them is someone else’s fault — specifically, the fault of every cultural anything they ever encountered that made a statement about gender. The RPG books fall into that category.

It may be true that when somebody shoots someone, it’s ultimately their fault for doing so — but someone still put the gun in their hands, and if there was some way they could have avoided doing so, they probably should have.

Important to /you/, perhaps, sure. But it’s not important to everyone.

Every person has an eye colour too, but you don’t find a lot of RPGs that are fixated on it.