Entry tags:

gender issues

Dragon Magazine Covers (3) - Suggestive Attire
A comment that seems to come along with some regularity when discussing depictions of women in game art/fantasy art: "There are just as many instances of sweaty muscular men to be seen, so it all evens out."

Well, not in terms of Dragon covers there aren't. In fact, this survey demonstrates precisely the opposite: women in scanty clothing are depicted far more often than men in similar garb, and moreover, a far greater proportion of depicted women are suggestively clothed than is the case with depicted men.

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Before getting into this, recall that in this post I clarified what I classed as 'suggestive attire'. I'd like to add that I tried to be conservative in my categorisation, in order to underestimate any bias that might be found. I did this specifically because I wanted to be very confident I was actually finding a real bias here. Examples:

I classed this image of a woman (seen in that earlier post) as Not suggestively attired, despite the hefty amount of leg on display:



Whereas this image of a man I classed as suggestively attired, even though I find it hard to imagine anyone actually responding to it in that way:

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Findings

Of 179 depictions of males, 18 (about 10%) were classed as suggestively attired (Fig 4a).



In contrast, of 126 depictions of females, 52 (about 40%) were classed as suggestively attired (Fig 4b).



The difference is obvious. If there's a woman on a Dragon cover, it is 40% likely she's not wearing much; if there's a man on the cover, it is only 10% likely he's showing skin.

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Breaking this down across the 350 issues of the magazine (Fig 5a), we can see that women have consistently been more likely to be depicted suggestively than have men. A brief moment of equal opportunity occurred around issue 150 (in 1989), and suggestive depictions nearly disappeared entirely around issue 225 (1996). However, issues 250 to 300 (1999-2001) take us into an unprecedented era of gender-disparity where women are getting their kit off frequently and men hardly at all. Thankfully, this disparity has lessened since.



The absolute numbers here are relatively small in 25-issue blocks (about 2 years each), so here is the same data replotted in 50-issue blocks (about 4 years each). It gives a clearer view of long-term trends, particularly the consistent gender bias on display.

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And now, here's the actual numbers themselves, grouped in 25-issue blocks (Fig 6a) and 50-issue blocks (Fig 6b). Remember, this is the number of actual depictions of men or women in suggestive attire.





Take note of that big spike around issue 275. We saw it just before, and we'll see it again before this exercise is done.

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Up above we plotted how attire is divided up within each gender - that is, how many women were shown in suggestive attire vs. how many weren't. Now, let's look at this a different way, and plot how the group of figures in suggestive attire break down by gender. If, as has been claimed, men and women turn up in scanty clothing with roughly equal frequency, then the graphs below should show roughly equal divisions split along the 50% line.

Well, they don't.







In fact, as these numbers make clear, this situation has been getting worse and worse over the 30 year history of the magazine.

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All of this information makes clear that, in the Dragon cover image sample, women are much more likely than men to appear scantily clad, and women make up a much higher proportion of scantily clad people. If we can take this as a representative sample of RPG art, then the claim of gender parity in this imagery appears to be utterly without substance.

(Note also that this doesn't really mesh with the trend inside the covers, as suggested by the pilot study here. This study is more comprehensive than that one, so it could just be an artifact of chance in the previous case - however, it could also be explained by brand_of_amber's suggestion that cover art tends to be more biased than interior art.)

Next: Submissive depictions

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