Dungeons, Dragons, and the OTHER Phallic Desire

"You may be a group of unsightly men sitting around a card table on a Friday night, but your players will still be looking for chances to meet girls"

-Shamus Young, DM of the Rings XII: NPC Non Grata

I've been reading through old Dragon Magazines, and one of the things I've noticed is that, despite largely being by sweaty wargamers for sweaty wargamers, about Advanced Dungeons and Dragons  with an approximate guy/gal ratio of 9/1, a lot of early Dungeons and Dragons material is...distressingly horny. 

via Dragon 33, "The Eyes of Mavis Deval" by Gardner F. Fox. I needed a header image, but also holy shit this story is emblematic of everything I'm gonna talk about today.

This post came to me when I saw the mechanical term "Sexual Charisma," used in Dragon 33's Bazaar of the Bizarre entry for the lotion potion Cleo May, Cleopatra, Come to Me. Which...seriously, what the fuck.

Just above this is "African Ju Ju" if you were curious what the rest of this list looked like. Note also the lotion that makes someone obey you when you rub it on them.

Smarter and better blogger Marcia B of Traverse Fantasy has described Dungeons and Dragons, particularly early Dungeons and Dragons, as a "Phallic Game" is a Freudian philosophical sense that, to be honest, I only half understand. What I didn't expect to find was that the phallic desire in the early D&D scene was a good deal more literal than Marcia intended. I don't mean to sound like a prude here, I h*ld h*nds with my girlfriend every chance I get, just like any red-blooded American would. It's just that:

1. Because the audience of Dungeons and Dragons at this point is overwhelmingly young men, it has a certain juvenile bent to it that just makes me feel like I need to take a shower. 
2. Applying this horniness to a very rules-and-procedure heavy game like Advanced Dungeons and Dragons leads to results that are, to put it lightly, extremely funny. 

Also in Issue 33, a Libido Table brought to us by H.R. Lovins (yes, really). Yeah baby, nothing gets me going like rolling on charts. 

The causes of this are, of course, obvious. For one, porn was a lot harder to come by in those days (no pun intended), so people had to get it where they could, and what pornography did exist tended to be a lot more...restrained (again, no pun intended).Gygax was very open about being inspired by Robert E. Howard, and Howard did it because he was writing what the audience wanted, and the audience was a bunch of sexually frustrated young men who wanted to be the Big Man and have a babe (or ideally, a series of them). You can't show a woman just straight up having sex, it always has to be in couched terms, centered around a man's domination; women being "taken," or being under threat of rape, or things like that. 

This would live on in the tradition of things like Men's Adventure Magazines and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, but the internet kinda killed it (though lord knows the Gamergate crowd wants to bring it back). 

The original illustration for Queen of the Black Coast. My collected edition from 2004 has a lovingly drawn image of Belit with her ass out kneeling in front of Conan.

This sort of thing can also blend into fantasies that are...less consensual and more misogynistic. Things like Gygax's "biological realism" creating a world where women are strictly mechanically inferior, or the Gor books. And again, just to be clear: there's nothing wrong with CNC and the like (there's apparently a whole group of Gor Kink People and I wish them nothing but the best). But the 20th century famously did not have the best standards for things like consent, again harmed by the fact that you average D&D player was probably under the age of thirty. In Dragon #57, then contributing editor and creator of Dungeon Roger E. Moore discussed a game he played in, where the DM created a world of savagery. When describing NPCs, the DM said:

“If you’ll look at all the women characters,” he said, “you’ll see that I made their charmismas really high and their strengths really low. That’s so they’re easier to rape when their city gets conquered.”

-Dungeons aren't supposed to be 'For men only', Roger E. Moore, Dragon Magazine #57

Moore would go on to spell out the concept that if DMs wanted their campaign to appeal to women, they should maybe not include rape. 

Which kind of answers the question "Hey, why were only like 10% of D&D players in the 80s women?", doesn't it?

Women Want Equality (and why not?) by Jean Wells and Kim Mohan (Dragon #39) criticizes how the then-current state of minis and fantasy art featured women in various states of undress. This is the image editorial chose to go with this article.

Any sort of pushback in regards to this climate ended up being limp-wristed, filled with caveats, because the editorial staff was dominated by men who blamed women for not submitting more when asked why they didn't publish more stuff written by women, and they had a letters page that agreed with them (whether that was because of editorial decision or not is unknown.) Even the "Women Want Equality" article from above simply makes a case for giving women less harsh ability score penalties. 

Would it surprise you to learn that Jean Wells was pushed out of working on Palace of the Silver Princess and subsequently reduced to secretarial duty because, according to Frank Mentzer, she was “large, insecure, brashly outgoing and outspoken.”

(Note: I'm pulling that quote from Danielson's paper, but the link is dead, so I can't verify it.)

In his Q&A on ENWorld I've been reading through (full post on that one of these days), one of Gary Gygax's complaints he routinely levels at Lorraine Williams is that she is not a gamer, and that she didn't respect him or the other gamers there. I wonder why.

From the article above. With stories like these, it's no wonder women didn't come back.

This sort of thing continues, ranging from Oriental Adventures adding the Beauty State

 (hell, Palladium still has it to this day, cultural relativism be damned), the Book of Erotic Fantasy, and so on. I don't really have a conclusion on that front that will be satisfactory to reader or audience; if you're reading Magnolia Keep, you've likely been, to quote Adam DeCamp, "...swimming in this horseshit for so long my arms are getting numb."

Thankfully, though, we have seen a bit of a change as more women, queer people, and other people-who-fuck flock to the medium of roleplaying games. Sure there's still stuff like Kinks and Cantrips for the 5E crowd (which again, very funny), but there's also great stuff like Dracotrophication, Let These Mermaids Touch Your Dick Maybe, ORCFUCK: THE RPG, and Praise the Hawkmoth King. 

Things aren't perfect, obviously. There's the ongoing thing where right-wing groups are pressuring payment processors to debank sex workers and people who make pornography. But holy fucking shit things could be so much worse. Let's never go back there, please.