mr_orgue (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} mr_orgue) wrote in ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} gametime,@ 2007-03-13 23:57:00 |
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| 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.
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
