mr_orgue ([info]mr_orgue) wrote in [info]gametime,
@ 2007-03-13 23:57:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Entry tags:gender issues

Dragon Magazine Covers (7) - Concluding Overview
First, my favourite Dragon cover woman:


Dragon 105, Jan 1986. Its the fact that she's flying that makes me happiest. You should be able to click through to a larger version I googled up.

Aaand, my least favourite Dragon cover woman:

Dragon 236, December 1996. *Shudder*



Right, so where has all this got us?



Dragon Is Not Made By Bad Guys


Want to get that out of the way at the start. The Dragon editors down the years have seemed, to a man, to be decent, conscientious, nice people. What I'm talking about here is what has happened in spite of that. I am in no way trying to malign the Dragon crew; heck, I'm a fan, I buy and read the magazine even though my D&D playing is infrequent at best.

I am, however, saying there are problems here.


Limitations


Lets be very clear about the main limitations of this study. First up, I am one person, with no training in these issues, who took it upon himself to evaluate a bunch of pictures. I have endeavoured to be both consistent and reasonable (in the legal 'reasonable person' sense) but I am just an ordinary person, and inevitably my biases are on display here. [info]broin suggested in comments that the categories themselves (e.g. "suggestive" and "submissive") carry implicit moral judgements that could throw the whole enterprise under a cloud; he's right. It is my hope that this danger has been avoided, but I'm not really in any position to tell.

Second limitation: I am male. Given that the subject of this study is the representation of females, there are limits to how much I can achieve. This refers to the inevitable bias of my male way of seeing and interpreting, but also to the fact that, as a man, there is only so far I can go with this whole subject before I start to be part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Not that men like me can't think about and analyse this stuff; more that we sometimes forget to shut the hell up and let the women get on with it.

Third limitation, the numbers involved aren't large, particularly in some categories. A dozen images a year isn't much on which to judge a magazine (let alone gamer culture), especially when several of those images feature flying frogs instead of people. Still, my best judgement is that the numbers are large enough; stats people are invited to advise me about whether that judgement is a good one or not.

**Edited to add 14 March**
Fourth limitation, cover art is not interior art. They serve different purposes and we engage with them differently. This means we can't generalise from here to what is going on inside the books with any great confidence. (It might be argued also that Dragon cover art, doing battle on the mainstream newstand, is different again to regular gamebook cover art.)
**End Edit**


Mitigating These Limitations


The best thing about this project, and the thing that decided me on a deeply subjective method of categorisation, is the fact that the entire dataset of images is available online, at the Paizo back issue store here. I invite anyone to go through the images as I did, to test what I believe I've found or to look for something new. Some of the image resolution is poor but it should be enough for basic categorisation purposes.

I suspect the only real way to give legitimacy to these findings is to compare them with the subjective evaluations of other people. Any individual reader can spend a minute or two in the gallery there to see some cover images for him- or herself; on a more elaborate scale, someone could do a full count as I have done and publish it. It is good to know such a check is possible, at least.


What I Think I Found


With the above in mind, here are the big findings:


  • On Dragon covers, males are depicted more often than females (males in 69% of covers, females 49% of covers).

  • Male figures on Dragon covers hardly ever (10%) wear suggestive attire, but female figures do so frequently (40%). When there is a figure in suggestive attire on Dragon a cover, it is highly likely (74%) to be female. These trends have been worsening over time.

  • Most (67%) of the submissive figures on Dragon covers are female. This female majority has been getting larger over time.

  • Most (68%) of the heroic avatar-friendly figures on Dragon covers are male. This male majority has been stable for a long time.

  • Most (60%) of the men you see on Dragon covers are heroic (avatar-friendly) types; only a small minority (10%) appear in a submissive mode. In contrast, only a minority (38%) of women appear as heroes, and nearly as many (29%) appear as submissive figures. The male proportions have been stable over time, but the female proportions have been variable.



What I Conclude From This


That the depiction of genders in fantasy RPG cover art, as represented by Dragon magazine covers, remains profoundly unequal and in some areas is getting more unequal.
(**edited to specify cover art, 14 march**)

How I Go Forward From Here


I haven't said that suggestive clothing is bad in fantasy art, or that submissive women should never be portrayed (by all means we should rescue princesses from time to time), or made any other such black-and-white claims. This is all more complex and more shifty than that.

My ultimate goal is to get people thinking about this if they're not already thinking about it, and to add something concrete to discussions on the subject. More than once I've seen people claim gender equality in fantasy art; in fact, this was partly sparked by such a claim*. With this exercise behind me, I feel confident now to disagree.

(*That there is equal time for both genders in the skimpy-clothing stakes.)



Right. Enough. I hope this has been of use. There are one or two extra things still to post, but the main body of this effort is now complete.

** Edited to add: Dragon Editor Responds

(Post a new comment)


[info]mechanteanemone
2007-03-13 04:06 pm UTC (link)
That was a great piece of thinking, explaining, and discussing you did. I really enjoyed following it. Is it a PhD-level study? No. But it doesn't need to be. It's a repeatable, reasoned, fair assessment of a very visible feature in the gaming world, a feature that is not openly or intentionally (I think) promoting a gender-related agenda. Therefore, it's a defensible choice of indicator. I really appreciated that you clearly explained your methodology and gave examples.

I think females gamers are very familiar with the gender bias and many are exasperated by it. The response is, all too often, that such a bias doesn't exist or that it's a reflection of the gender-skew of the gamer audience itself. But I think it's as much a cause as a consequence.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]mr_orgue
2007-03-13 09:06 pm UTC (link)
Thanks. Reading this response makes me feel like I managed a good job of communicating where I was coming from, because you're saying (better than I could in fact) exactly what I was hoping to do.

Re: cause and consequence - yeah, I also think it is both. This kind of imagery makes for a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Very frustrating.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]mr_orgue
2007-03-13 09:02 pm UTC (link)
Some edits in the body, specifying that cover art is not interior art, in response to a comment by Paizo's technical director over at the Dragon messageboard:
http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/dragon/generalDiscussion/dragonCoversAndChainmailBikinis



(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]brand_of_amber
2007-03-14 07:22 pm UTC (link)
Good edit. Especially as we know from your other one that the interior art has different proportions.

However, I find it sad that the cover art -- the visible public face of the industry in many ways -- is the art that is more sexist.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]stephanie_pegg
2007-03-13 11:52 pm UTC (link)
On a slightly related note, I've been doing some thinking about the Why of Action Heroes. I mean, why are they running around being heroic, and that.

Male action heroes sometimes have some kind of motivation involving their family - their wife/girlfriend is in danger, someone blew up their kids, something like that. The need to rescue or wreak vengeance is a powerful one, right? There are other reasons, though - money, saving the world, they felt like it etc

Female heroes, however, very frequently and to the preclusion of most other motivations, have a subset of that first motivation - their child (or someone elses) is in danger. Usually the father of the child is dead or absent, leaving the woman as the only caregiver. And the thing is, it's never about revenge, it's about protection, as if the mother-child bond is the only thing that can get a woman that mad and that resourceful; and they need to be missing a male partner, because if a bloke were around he would be doing the heroic stuff.

I admit that I haven't done a systematic calculation of the numbers as you've done for Dragon covers, but, to me at least, it's a really strong trend. I'm not saying that there aren't other reasons why female characters are kicking arse, but that one particular one just keeps on turning up.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]mr_orgue
2007-03-14 11:18 am UTC (link)
You should blog this. Interesting.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]steve_hix
2007-03-15 02:57 am UTC (link)
Stephanie, if you're interested check out "Sex and Sorceror" (a supplement by Ron Edwards), which presents one possible male story type and one possible female story type. The male one is about what happens when two areas of social commitment come into conflict (for instance, family and community), and the female one is about what happens when an element of the reproductive cycle comes under threat.

Seems parallel to your observations.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2007-03-22 04:03 pm UTC (link)
The first two "female hero" movies that come to my mind are Elektra and Catwoman, and:

1) They're both about revenge to a significant degree, I would suggest, and

2) They were not actually very good, I'm afraid.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2007-03-22 04:01 pm UTC (link)
I wonder how this compares to, say, Sports Illustrated...

(Reply to this)

Create an Account
Forgot your login or password?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…