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Subject: [enworld] D&D Historian Benn Riggs On Gary Gygax & Sexism
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Source: 
https://www.enworld.org/threads/d-d-historian-benn-riggs-on-gary-gygax-sexism.705192/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

D&D Historian Benn Riggs On Gary Gygax & Sexism

Thread starter Morrus Start date Yesterday at 11:42 PM

D&D historian Ben Riggs delved into the facts.

The recent book The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977 
talks about the early years of D&D. In the book, authors Jon Peterson 
and Jason Tondro talk about the way the game, and its writers, 
approached certain issues. Not surprisingly, this revelation received 
aggressive "pushback" on social media because, well, that sort of thing 
does--in fact, one designer who worked with Gygax at the time labelled 
it "slanderous".

D&D historian Ben Riggs--author of Slaying the Dragon--delved into the 
facts. Note that the below was posted on Twitter, in that format, not as 
an article.

D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to 
Preserving his Legacy.

The internet has been rending its clothes and gnashing its teeth over 
the introduction to an instant classic of TTRPG history, The Making of 
Original D&D 1970-1977. Published by Wizards of the Coast, it details 
the earliest days of D&D’s creation using amazing primary source materials.

Why then has the response been outrage from various corners of the 
internet? Well authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro mention that early 
D&D made light of slavery, disparaged women, and gave Hindu deities hit 
points. They also repeated Wizard’s disclaimer for legacy content which 
states:"These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This 
content is presented as it was originally created, because to do 
otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."

In response to this, an army of grognards swarmed social media to bite 
their shields and bellow. Early D&D author Rob Kuntz described Peterson 
and Tondro’s work as “slanderous.” On his Castle Oldskull blog, Kent 
David Kelly called it “disparagement.” These critics are accusing 
Peterson and Tondro of dishonesty. Lying, not to put too fine a point on 
it.So, are they lying? Are they making stuff up about Gary Gygax and 
early D&D?

Well, let's look at a specific example of what Peterson and Tondro 
describe as “misogyny “ from 1975's Greyhawk. Greyhawk was the first 
supplement ever produced for D&D. Written by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz, 
the same Rob Kuntz who claimed slander above, it was a crucial text in 
the history of the game. For example, it debuted the thief character 
class. It also gave the game new dragons, among them the King of Lawful 
Dragons and the Queen of Chaotic Dragons. The male dragon is good, and 
female dragon is evil. (See Appendix 1 below for more.)

GR9iKUjWsAAete8.jpeg

​
It is a repetition of the old trope that male power is inherently good, 
and female power is inherently evil. (Consider the connotations of the 
words witch and wizard, with witches being evil by definition, for 
another example.)

Now so-called defenders of Gygax and Kuntz will say that my reading of 
the above text makes me a fool who wouldn’t know dragon’s breath from a 
virtue signal. I am ruining D&D with my woke wokeness. Gygax and Kuntz 
were just building a fun game, and decades later, Peterson and Tondro 
come along to crap on their work by screeching about misogyny.

(I would also point out that as we are all white men of a certain age 
talking about misogyny, the worst we can expect is to be flamed online. 
Women often doing the same thing get rape or death threats.)

Critics of their work would say that Peterson and Tondro are reading 
politics into D&D. Except that when we return to the Greyhawk text, we 
see that it was actually Gygax and Kuntz who put “politics” into D&D.

The text itself comments on the fact that the lawful dragon is male, and 
the chaotic one is female. Gygax and Kuntz wrote: “Women’s lib may make 
whatever they wish from the foregoing.”


GR9iGsAW0AAmAOw.jpeg

​
The intent is clear. The female is a realm of chaos and evil, so of 
course they made their chaotic evil dragon a queen.

Yes, Gygax and Kuntz are making a game, but it is a game whose 
co-creator explicitly wrote into the rules that feminine power—perhaps 
even female equality—is by nature evil. There is little room for any 
other interpretation.

The so-called defenders of Gygax may now say that he was a man of his 
time, he didn’t know better, or some such. If only someone had told him 
women were people too in 1975! Well, Gygax was criticized for this fact 
of D&D at the time. And he left us his response.

Writing in EUROPA, a European fanzine, Gygax said:“I have been accused 
of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D 
isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female 
role, more non-gendered names, and so forth."

GR9iyo3XwAAQCtk.jpeg


"I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in 
the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’ 
chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’...and 
thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, 
and Going Viking’. Damn right I am sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if 
women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower 
in the men’s locker room."

"They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care. 
I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair 
sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.”

So just to summarize here, Gygax wrote misogyny into the D&D rules. When 
this was raised with him as an issue at the time, his response was to 
offer to put rules on rape and sex slavery into D&D.

The outrage online directed at Peterson and Tondro is not only entirely 
misplaced and disproportional, and perhaps even dishonest in certain 
cases...

Part 2: D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to 
Preserving his Legacy....it is also directly harming the legacies of 
Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz and the entire first generation of genius game 
designers our online army of outraged grognards purport to defend.

How? Let me show you.The D&D player base is getting more diverse in 
every measurable way, including age, gender, sexual orientation, and 
race. To cite a few statistics, 81% of D&D players are Millenials or Gen 
Z, and 39% are women. This diversity is incredible, and not because the 
diversity is some blessed goal unto itself. Rather, the increasing 
diversity of D&D proves the vigor of the TTRPG medium. Like Japanese rap 
music or Soviet science fiction, the transportation of a medium across 
cultures, nations, and genders proves that it is an important method for 
exploring the human condition. And while TTRPGs are a game, they are 
also clearly an important method for exploring the human condition. The 
fact the TTRPG fanbase is no longer solely middle-aged Midwestern cis 
men of middle European descent...

....the fact that non-binary blerds and Indigenous trans women and fat 
Polish-American geeks like me and people from every bed of the human 
vegetable garden ...

find meaning in a game created by two white guys from the Midwest is 
proof that Gygax and Arneson were geniuses who heaved human civilization 
forward, even if only by a few feet.

So, as a community, how do we deal with the ugly prejudices of our 
hobby’s co-creator who also baked them into the game we love? We could 
pretend there is no problem at all, and say that anyone who mentions the 
problem is a liar. There is no misogyny to see. There is no **** and 
there is no stink, and anyone who says there is naughty word on your 
sneakers is lying and is just trying to embarrass you.

I wonder how that will go? Will all these new D&D fans decide that maybe 
D&D isn’t for them? They know the stink of misogyny, just like they know 
**** when they smell it. To say it isn’t there is an insult to their 
intelligence. If they left the hobby over this, it would leave our 
community smaller, poorer, and suggest that the great work of Gygax, 
Arneson, Kuntz, and the other early luminaries on D&D was perhaps not so 
great after all…

We could take the route of Disney and Song of the South. Wizards could 
remove all the PDFs of early D&D from DriveThruRPG. They could refuse to 
ever reprint this material again. Hide it. Bury it. Erase it all with 
copyright law and lawyers. Yet no matter how deeply you bury the past, 
it always tends to come back up to the surface again. Heck, there are 
whole podcast series about that. And what will all these new D&D fans 
think when they realize that a corporation tried to hide its own 
mistakes from them?

Again, maybe they decide D&D isn’t the game for them. Or maybe when 
someone tells you there is **** on your shoe, you say thanks, clean it 
off, and move on.

========== REMAINDER OF ARTICLE TRUNCATED ==========