When Dice Were Made of Flint #18

Remembering the low-budget fantasy movies of the 1980s in a previous column made me think about how roleplaying games, and fantasy in general, were almost exclusively male pursuits at that time. Which, in turn, made me think about how women were portrayed in fantasy media.

What follows is not the usual light-hearted nostalgia, so be warned.

Fantasy games had grown out of wargaming, which had always been a male pursuit. Science fiction and fantasy, likewise, were predominantly a male interest at the time. The hobby spread through wargames clubs and university science fiction societies, both mostly male environments. Very few women wrote science fiction or fantasy, and even fewer read it.

Pale, male, and frail became the geek stereotype. Whether the interest was fantasy games, trainspotting, or model making, young men who partook of those interests were far less attractive to the opposite sex than those who played sports or played in bands.

The cultural milieu didn’t help. Benny Hill and Carry On were both at their height, and what would today be considered criminal sexual harassment and even assault were shrugged off as a bit of harmless fun. But it got far worse in science fiction and fantasy.

Ever since Frank Frazetta picked up a brush and painted a nearly-naked woman reclining at Conan’s feet, women in fantasy art were expected to be, as one commentator put it “clad entirely in costume jewelry.” The angel-nurse-whore set of stereotypes was well established in psychology, and fantasy art played hard into all three with evil hags, succubi, and nubile princesses in need of rescue, plus the occasional priestess of healing in a flimsy robe. And, of course, the female barbarian in her battle bikini.

Frazetta was followed by Chris Achilleos, Boris Vallejo, and others - and to be fair, they all exposed as much masculine flesh as feminine. But fully-clothed men raised no eyebrows. I remember one occasion when it was my turn to edit the White Dwarf letters page - back when it had one - and Bryan Ansell told me off for replaying to the question “Why is the woman on the cover of issue so-and-so wearing so much armour?” with what I thought was a pithy “To stop the dragon slicing her to ribbons.” Apparently mocking the customers was not good or business.

Things in games were little better. When Judges Guild published one of the first city supplements, City-State of the Invincible Overlord, in 1976, there was a separate encounter table titled “Women” and the main variable in the encounters it generated was the likelihood of an encountered woman being willing to have sex with one of the player characters. Add this sort of thinking to the overheated imaginations of pale, male, and frail gamers in their teens and early twenties, and it is no wonder that real-world females were regarded with a mix of awe, fear, and less noble emotions, but never truly understood. It was the manosphere and incel culture, but without the internet as a source of validation and mutual encouragement. Thankfully.

Also thankfully, those attitudes didn’t define the hobby for long. A key turning-point was the publication of Vampire: The Masquerade in 1991. Its subject matter and new approach to roleplaying, coupled with the rise of goth culture, led to an influx of female players, and as the works of writers like Anne McCaffrey and Marion Zimmer Bradley appeared on the shelves along side John Norman’s near-porn and Howard’s blood and thunder, fantasy began to appeal to a wider and more diverse audience.

Still, it’s sobering to open the pages of a favorite adventure or supplement from the Good Old Days and be slapped in the faces with the attitudes of those times.