gametime: Dragon Magazine Covers - The Editor Responds

mr_orgue (

mr_orgue) wrote in

gametime,
@ 2007-03-15 18:29:00

Entry tags:

gender issues

Dragon Magazine Covers - The Editor Responds
After posting the conclusion of this series, I raised it over on the Paizo boards. That thread is here.

It included a post by Dragon's current editor-in-chief Erik Mona (whose LJ identity is lemuriapress), which he has kindly agreed to let me repost here in full:

Despite a lot of comments on your LJ that things "show no sign of improvement," I'm somewhat pleased to report that it looks like the covers from #326 to #350 are trending in the right direction in nearly every one of your graphs. Since those are the issues that best represent the staff in its current roles, I'm glad to see some progress here.

I just mentioned this thread to my art director, and he said "one of the reasons for this is that I never, ever depict females in submissive roles."

Obviously, there's a point of contention on that score, since you listed two submissive females in this period. I'm guessing that you scored #345 and #340 as "submissive," since one woman is kneeling and the other is being chased by a monster. I think both of these are a long way from a miniature woman in a cage, but it only goes to show how subjective the issue is.

Here are two facts that shed some light on the issue.

1) According to our not-too-scientific reader surveys, women account for 4-6% of our readership.

2) Issues featuring scantily clad women on the cover, in general, sell better than issues that do not feature scantily clad women.

It should not be a great surprise to anyone that magazine publishing is a business, and one in which we are forced to compete with companies that have budgets orders of magnitude higher than the average non-Wizards of the Coast game company. In fact, magazine publishers like Conde Nast have budgets orders of magnitude higher than even Wizards of the Coast.

In that environment, we've got to do what we've got to do to sell magazines, and sometimes that involves showing some flesh. Since roughly 95% of our audience are men, that scantily clad flesh often belongs to a female.

We've experimented with a few "beefcake" covers over the years, notably Dragon #294 and Dungeon #126. The sales numbers on these issues were terrible, and while it's impossible to attribute bad sales to a single factor, the cover usually ends up getting most of the blame (and deservedly so).

The 95% male issue could very well be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it's possible that the magazine would attract more women with a different cover strategy. My approach has been to allow for a certain level of laciviousness on the covers, but never let things get too far out of control. It is certainly not our intent to offend any of our readers, male or female.

All in all, this was a very interesting and thought-provoking study. In the end, I am perhaps most grateful that I wasn't drinking the corporate kool aid in the era between issue #250 and issue #275!

Thanks for bringing your posts to our attention.

--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dragon Magazine

Go read the rest of the thread to see more comment by Erik, and by other Dragon readers and staff.

One notable outcome is that I decided to go back through all the images I had classed as 'submissive' and second guess them; with a new, tighter appreciation of why I was classing images the way I did, I removed 6 female and 2 male figures from the 'submissive depiction' list. I have amended parts 3 and 6 accordingly, with notification of the changes made. They weren't major changes but they do shift some of the graphs around a bit.

In any case, I wish to thank Erik and the other Dragon staff and readers for engaging with this survey!

---

I've also hyperlinked all the entries so they link forward, but I haven't put backlinks in yet. Here is the full index of posts in this series:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Preliminary study on women in Dragon's interior artwork.

---

There are a few more bits and pieces still to do, from comments etc. I'll get to them!

(Post a new comment)

	drivingblind 2007-03-15 01:09 pm UTC (link)
	That's a good response. Mixes pragmatism and a healthy respect for the issue. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	mr_orgue 2007-03-15 11:02 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, Erik has always come across as Good People to me :-) (Reply to this)(Parent)

mechanteanemone
2007-03-15 03:35 pm UTC (link)

In that environment, we've got to do what we've got to do to sell magazines, and sometimes that involves showing some flesh. Since roughly 95% of our audience are men, that scantily clad flesh often belongs to a female.

Aiiiieeee! This is so insulting to the readers' intelligence (though I will not speculate on whether it is accurate in its cynicism.) But anyhow, flesh or not, if they can at least depict strong, cool, competent, "I want to play that character!" women, I can dig it.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

	mr_orgue 2007-03-15 11:05 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, and current trends for this are pretty good. Let us never see another tiny woman in a cage! (Or, another trope I saw a couple times - near-naked woman being carried off by a dragon.) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	anarchangel23 2007-03-15 11:16 pm UTC (link)
	He does appear to have sales figures to support it. He's just responding to the numbers, the readers are doing the "insulting" themselves. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	mechanteanemone 2007-03-15 11:25 pm UTC (link)
	Hell, they'd better use gorillas on the covers instead, if that's all that matters. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	mr_orgue 2007-03-15 11:28 pm UTC (link)
	Sadly, the gorilla effect seems to no longer work. Kids these days! (Reply to this)(Parent)

	anarchangel23 2007-03-15 11:58 pm UTC (link)
	I wonder what the figures are on those! (Reply to this)(Parent)

	brand_of_amber 2007-03-15 07:07 pm UTC (link)
	I find Erik's response intelligent, articulate, and all of that. I respect his level-headed reply. It also depresses me horribly. Especially the direct and frank admission the sexy girls sell and sexy boys stop sales. Not against Erik or Dragon, but just in the face of what that means. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	arturis 2007-03-15 08:52 pm UTC (link)
	Why is that a bad thing, exactly? When 95% of their audience is male, even if we factor in the society-wide rate of homosexuality, that still leaves a huge imbalance in their audience when it comes to who they're attracted to. Why is it bad that men are attracted to women? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

mr_orgue
2007-03-15 11:26 pm UTC (link)

I don't know that I'm best equipped to answer this; I don't have Brand's understanding of the issues, nor his skill at expressing himself clearly. But I'll give it a go:

It isn't bad that men are attracted to women. (That's kinda awesome actually.)

It is bad (in the 'sad' sense) that sexy girls sell, and that sexy boys don't sell, because it means there are strong commercial imperatives for the perpetuation of essentially sexist imagery - women portrayed as sexual objects (and perhaps heroic figures as well), but men as heroic figures without the sexual angle. It means that the buying public themselves implicitly support and encourage this.

All of which means the trend for sexist imagery isn't likely to go anywhere, and when a trend for sexist imagery continues through a whole culture, that causes lots of problems.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

mechanteanemone
2007-03-15 11:37 pm UTC (link)

This is bad because it's not going help get the gender skew reflect the real gamer population, let alone the general population. I can assure you that women comprise more than 5% of the gamer gen-pop, even if we're still far from the 50/50 mark. But why would you expect women to be attracted to the magazine if the depiction of women that strikes your eye is, as

mr_orgue put it in one of his article, "women as treasure item"? It's like expecting me to pick up Esquire or Playboy. Sure, a few women buy those, but it's the exception and not the rule.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

arturis
2007-03-16 12:35 am UTC (link)

This response seems to imply that the target audience of Dragon magazine, while male-leaning, isn't as male leaning as their marketing is and as a result, they are alienating some of their would-be consumers and perpetuating a kind of bias in readership or in the gamer community as a whole. I contend that the covers of Dragon magazine are less biased than the community at large and therefore are acting, if anything, to reduce the sexual disparity and sexism of gamer culture.

While I will agree with you that women make up more than 5% of the gamer community, that isn't the same as saying that they make up more than 5% of the target market for Dragon magazine, because Dragon magazine isn't for all gamers. I'll admit that I don't have any kind of decent sampling of people, so I'm just going off my own knowledge. I know many women who game. Some of them help run conventions in my area. None of them would buy Dragon magazine, and the reasons for that run deeper than the imagery on the cover. Fundamentally, I think Dragon and even D&D as a system just doesn't hold a lot of market share among female gamers.

Also, the statistics elucidated here put Dragon several steps ahead of more mainstream magazines. If you did the same review of, say, Rolling Stone, or even Time, you'd find a whole lot more provocative imagery of women on the cover than of men. Some of the examples given here are of some pretty bad imagery (like the women in cages), but some of the example given for 'submissive' imagery, such as people kneeling, aren't doing any harm to gamer culture or society at large.

With 95% of Dragon readers being male, I think it's absolutely false to draw any kind of negative response from "Especially the direct and frank admission the sexy girls sell and sexy boys stop sales.". The audience that they cater to is attracted to sexy girls. I don't think that's a bad thing any more than any other biological trait of humanity is a bad thing. It isn't a sad commentary on American society that a largely male audience is drawn to purchase something with a sexy woman on the cover and is uninterested in covers containing sexualized men.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	mr_orgue 2007-03-16 12:40 am UTC (link)
	Very good points. I shall ponder. Thanks :-) (Reply to this)(Parent)

grandexperiment
2007-03-16 01:13 am UTC (link)

Whilst I have some sentiment with the idea that it is OK for a mostly male audience targetted magazine to use sexy females over males on its covers, the real issue I still have is with Morgue's findings on submissive depictions. That there is a greater percentage of the female pictures that are submissive compared to male pictures.

This doesn't arise just because the magazine has more male readers, it arises because it is promoting a particular attitude to women.

In summary, its OK to be a guy and to like women (give me those sexy strong women!). However, promoting the depiction of women as submssive to appeal to those male audience members who like to see women in that way is not something I agree with.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

arturis
2007-03-16 01:51 am UTC (link)

I definitely agree with you on the submissive count, though again I'd like to offer a bit of a different explanation.

Role-playing games are rooted primarily in Sci-Fi/Fantasy literature. Specifically, D&D is based on a lot of war gaming and Tolkien. I think a lot of the ideas of females as damsels in distress come from the fact that Fantasy literature is rooted in fairy tales and set in the past. On both counts, there's an inherent bias against strong female characters. So I would say the depiction of females as submissive more often than not arises not because it is promoting a particular attitude to women, but because whoever drew it was thinking of the kinds of stories typical to the genre and coming up all princesses held captive. That may be unimaginative, but I don't think it's intended to keep women down.

That being said, anyone alive today should be aware of these issues and even if the artist isn't having an easy time coming up with interesting ways to juxtapose sexual equality with medieval stories, the publication still has a responsibility to modern sensibilities. This is also a situation where the magazine has to take the moral high road where their marketplace will not. Many of their customers will gravitate toward fantasies about rescuing damsels because, well, they're 13-year-olds. So it is important for those of us who are responsible adults to speak loudly about the need for some equality there. But it sounds like the current staff is on the right track on the issue.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

grandexperiment
2007-03-16 02:29 am UTC (link)

Again, I agree to an extent. For example, I disagreed with the recent comments made regarding Spirit of the Century about sexism, mostly because it is set in the 1920s and I personally thought they acted very responsibly to represent the genre accurately whilst being respectful of modern attitudes.

The line can be hard to draw, especially when you move aware from a physical fact about the market (i.e. the audience is male) to something more intangible like an attitude. However, I consider it equally naiive to say that the overuse of submissive women in most fantasy today is due to being faithful to the genre. There is a distinction between what kind of people you use and how you use them.

These depictions of submissive women do not just favour one part of the customer base (using women in pictures is not per se offensive). They are also offensive to another part of the cutomer base, albeit smaller. This shortminded attitude keeps D&D in the past and limit its growth into new markets. If nothing else, Dragon should be concerned about the effect this is having on its flagship product, if not the hobby at large.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

brand_of_amber
2007-03-16 04:27 am UTC (link)

The rescuing damsels is understandable.

The rescuing bondage fantasy fuck dolls that look vaguely like women is less so.

However, in that Dragon is better than many other mags. As the study shows at least the submissive woman angle has gone down in the last couple years (after a sharp upswing the few years before that).

So there is some hope that we'll do better than we were doing 100 years ago sometime soon. Maybe.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	mr_orgue 2007-03-15 11:11 pm UTC (link)
	It does depress me as well. Although not horribly; I suspect that is because I still haven't internalised the material I've been reading the last few weeks. It has been a surprisingly enlightening time. And to think initially I was just intending to post about how excited I was by New Horizons! Talk about your sidetracks. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

brand_of_amber
2007-03-16 04:31 am UTC (link)

Now I want to stress when I say this, I don't have a problem with Dragon. I suspect that if your study was done industry wide then Dragon would probably be -better- than the average. At least in the last couple years, since that nasty downturn in the late 90s there.

But... a lot of the "its business" stance goes only so far with me. If business is really that bad, the target market really that into using their covers as soft core porn rather than fantasy art, then man... it's a depressing mode to have to do business in. Sort of like... I dunno... the tobacco industry.

But at least bad soft-core porn covers don't kill anyone. So I only am minorly depressed, instead of majorly.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

buzzandhum
2007-03-15 11:14 pm UTC (link)

Good response by Mr Mona; and I certainly appreciate the whole commercial aspect of it all. That said, there is always room for companies to market leaders, not just market followers.

This is all making me think of what White Wolf did when they really took off in the nineties. Anyone remember this? In all of the White Wolf books all the play examples were written in the feminine pronoun - "she roll a 6 and misses the target" instead of "he rolls a 6..."

I very deliberate attempt by a company to challenge and lead the market away from the male-dominance of the genre.

However, I also remember that it became annoying after a while - because they'd exclusively use "she" even if it wasn't really warrented - even in cases where there was othewise no personalisation in the given example. To illustrate what I mean;

Rebecca misses her save roll, so next turn she will only be able to recover.

The feminine pronoun in there is perfectly okay, we're talking about a female player/character, so "she" is appropiate.

But White Wolf would also do stuff like;

If a player misses her save roll, she'll only be able to recover in the next turn.

For me, that just jars - why introduce a gender specific pronoun at all? The sentence reads perfectly well, and can be totally gender neutral, by replacing "she" with "they."

But they kept doing it, and eventually it just began to feel awkward and cumbersome - but, still, I salute them for having the courage to remove the male bias from their game langugage.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

mechanteanemone
2007-03-15 11:32 pm UTC (link)

I founf it jarring for about three days. I got used to it amazingly easily. Then again, I'm a woman, so I found it easy to be the "default case." (Yes, you see where I'm going with this.) In our current DragonMech game, we have seven people -- six of which happen to be women, including the GM. The only man is my husband. It's just a fluke, we didn't do this by design. (In our regular campaigns and club games, we usually break 40/60 or 60/40.) We've been joking that in the new gamer English, feminine is therefore the default gender, and "she" is inclusive of all Womankind, men included.

That said, hats off to White Wolf. They certainly succeeded in bringing a lot of women to gaming in the 90s, and more power to them. (They've done other things I don't like, but that's for another day and topic.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	mkcs 2007-03-16 08:27 am UTC (link)
	Great series of posts. Really interesting. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	mr_orgue 2007-03-18 12:00 pm UTC (link)
	cheers Maire :-) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	revena 2007-03-18 10:08 am UTC (link)
	This whole series of posts was really interesting and thought-provoking. Thank you. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	mr_orgue 2007-03-18 11:57 am UTC (link)
	Thank you for reading it! (alos, nice icon!) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	revena 2007-03-18 06:06 pm UTC (link)
	Heh, thanks. I'm pretty fond of it, but I'm a little depressed by how often I get to use it. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	mechanteanemone 2007-04-13 04:40 pm UTC (link)
	Hey, now that we've discussed Dragon covers in detail, may I just comment that I like the swashbuckling lady on the cover of Dungeon's April issue? :-) (Reply to this)(Thread)

	mr_orgue 2007-04-13 10:06 pm UTC (link)
	Cool, hadn't seen that one yet! (Reply to this)(Parent)

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