Why is that Woman on Her Hands and Knees?
Much has been said and done about the objectification of women in RPG art, and the ways in which it is and is not changing in the modern hobby. At this point “objectification of women” is almost a jingle, spoken so often that it loses meaning and is often tossed off at the drop of a hat in order to shut down any discussion of sexual and gender roles and power relations. Of course, its used even more often for the opposite effect, sneered at in a preemptive attack to shut down the discussion of problems before they can start.
So I’m not going to talk about objectification of women in terms of why its bad for women. I’m going to say a brief bit about why its bad for men. Not everything I’m going to say below applies to every case. The stories of sex and sexuality in our culture are infinitely diverse, and each of us comes from our own history of petty neurosis and sexual formations, and so any given story can be as different as night at day. But there is, none the less, some aggregate truth in what I’m getting at, an issue that I’ve seen shading enough sexual stories that I can’t help but speculate that it has some relevance to at least some of us.
Let us take one picture and have a quick look at it.
Now, I don’t know if any given person is going to find the girly front and center on that cover sexy, but I do. She’s of a physical type that I like and she’s got that “I Dream of Jeannie” outfit that speaks of all sorts of orientalist fantasies of decadent other places where the sexual mores and laws of our restrictive society don’t apply. She’s round and womanly and sexy and available.
Yes, available. She’s on her hands and knees, she’s submissive, she’s probably a slave or so controlled by the evil sorcerer standing above her she may as well be. She’s available to me because of her status, because of her innate submission, because of the orientalist permission of her outfit, and a thousand years of cultural substratum telling me that a woman like that is a prize.
I don’t have to wonder, when I look at her and fantasize, what she thinks about me. I don’t have to consider why a woman like that would be interested in me. I don’t have to face the fact that she’s out of my league, physically like the type of woman I’d have trouble speaking to face to face in real life without saying something stupid. The way the picture presents her makes her mine already, and so I don’t have to think about her or her desires, I don’t have to think of a reason why she would like fat, nerdy, non-heroic me. I just get to leer and own, because she’s that low.
Of course, that makes me just as low, doesn’t it? I don’t think of a reason why she would like me, I don’t think of reasons why an attractive woman might want to have sex with me. In making her my accessible, object fantasy I do not have to face my own sexuality, my own limitations, or the fact that some women may find me attractive on my own merits and the linked proposition that other women will not. I don’t have to fear rejection, because rejection is something that only human beings give to me. Objects don’t. In my fantasy I’m able to be as little as I think of myself as and still posses her, because she has no attribute that makes her above my reach.
And no, simply giving her a sword doesn’t help. She may not be a slave then, but if the way the body is held and presented tells you she’s in heat and wants it, it’s all the same thing isn’t it? She doesn’t want you, she just wants anyone and since you’re there you’re just that lucky. You still don’t have to think about why her, why you, or that there is another human being there. Its still a body, and its just now a dominant one rather than a submissive one. There is still no equality, and the observer still owns the interaction. (Consider the “fuck me now” pose of the noble woman in the background.)
When I look at a sexy woman that isn’t objectified, I have to wonder why she would want me. I have to question my own sexuality and sexual attractiveness. I have to deal with my negative qualities and try to find enough belief in myself to think that I could be worthy of her sexual attention, much less her emotional commitment. I have to think of her as a human being, and in so doing I have to think of myself as one as well — and not just that, but a worthy human being.
Being fed a constant diet of slave girls who can’t meet my eyes, loins and breasts being offered up to my penetrating gaze, and round things with no power of their own doesn’t help women’s image in the hobby — but it also doesn’t help the boys’ image either. Is this the most that we think of ourselves, that not just an occasional fantasy is about a girl who can’t say no, but that a vast swath of them are? Can’t we think of ourselves with a little more respect than that? Can’t we think enough of ourselves to be attracted to women who might need, you know, people with positive qualities to be attracted back to?
Have I told you lately that you rock my world?
Apparently hot women find that I rock their world. This is awesome.
You got me pondering about myself. Great approach to the matter!
Good post! Laying some good ol’ John Berger on top of this is pretty interesting too–both women have directed their gaze either at or deliberately away from the viewer while the others are looking *at* something off-camera.
I really, really like that last paragraph–that needs to get posted in some publishers’ offices.
Oh yea. I didn’t get into sight-lines and focal points or anything like that. That’s all good stuff, but I’ve argued it before and not gotten much in the way of response.
Also, as the alt-text of the picture says, its not the worst cover I could find. It’s actually semi-moderate in a lot of ways, which is kinda a sad thing. Especially since about 4 years ago we started seeing a trend away from that sort of thing, with both the Wolf and Wizards making strides away from the bad cheesecake and slave porn and many other companies following suit. But it seems that with the downturn in sales in the last year or so a lot of it is roaring back.
Oh yea, a little technical analysis of the picture did lead me to ask the following question:
“Where is the sexy chick’s other leg? Cause she’s not sitting on a chair, it’s a step, and there is no place for her non exposed leg to go.”
Clearly she is doing half the splits, with the other leg pointed at a right angle to the viewer. A natural position if ever there was one.
Nice post! That feminism is good for men, too, is something that’s common sense in feminist circles, but is often disparaged (’all feminists are man-haters’) elsewhere.
Especially any man who doesn’t fit into the broadest (and often worst) stereotypes of masculinity.
The irony of the anti-feminism among geeky men is that they’d probably be helped by it in general — lose the focus on aggression, violence, and the ability to make and break things with your hands as the sole determiners of maleness and we’d shoot up the rankings.
Oh, btw, if you liked that, you’ll love this one: http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/common_incs/popup.php?id=conanblackkingdoms.jpg
I almost used it as my example, but then didn’t because… its just too damn much to deal with in one post.
*blinkblinks* at “The Black Kingdoms”.
Wow. Just..wow.
I see what you mean…that just leaves me speechless.
Yea. Then this quote could go with it, from the Solomon Kane story “Wings in the Night”
“another white-skinned hero had banished from Europe in an unknown age. Kane stood, an unconscious statue of triumph — the ancient empires fall, the dark-skinned peoples fade and even the demons of antiquity gasp their last, but over all stands the Aryan barbarian, white skinned, coled eyed, dominant, the supreme fighting man of the earth — whether he be clad in wolf-hide and horned helmet or boots and doublet — whether he bear in his hand battle-ax or rapier — whether he be called Dorian, Saxon, or Englishman.”
My wife (who isn’t bothered in the least by cover 1) made a good point: the biggest problem with that second cover is the addition of the cat. It amplifies everything problematic in a crazy big way.
Brand, right on.
My biggest problem, actually, is the homogeneity of the sexual vision. Power fantasies are fine. Any fantasy is fine. Murder fantasies are fine. Incest or pedophelia fantasies are fine. So is a fantasy fucking in a field on a summer morning with a woman you love, or, I dunno, getting trapped in a sexy mine with a bunch of sexy miners. They hurt no one. But if all we get is one single power fantasy, we start to get tunnel vision. That single fantasy starts to actually become the whole spectrum of sexual desire because it’s the stuff in front of you, and it’s stimulating, even if it’s mediocre as a fantasy.
OK, I guess I’ve gotta put up or shut up. I’m going to go make a game about a sex mine.
A lavishly illustrated game about a sex mine.
I’ll go with all of that.
I’d also say that I find a great deal of irony in the fact that a lot of publishers who use these sexed up covers have explicit instructions to their writers not to include any offensive or overtly sexual material. Its always reeked of hypocrisy to me — to use sex to sell a book in which you specifically ban any mention of sex.
See when games are about sex, I’ve no problem with sex being used to sell them. But when games are not about sex, or when games are being sold as open and equal to all, or when we just assume about what the sexual vision should be….
My wife tells me that that’s Hooter’s approach, and that it’s more reprehensible to her than actual strip clubs. Because it’s hypocritical and pretends to be not sexist.
oh, god yes!
Thank you - I never could quite articulate why Hooters pissed me off so much.
(Thank your wife for me too.)
I mean, no one expects me to be ok with going to a strip bar. (Well, outside of workplaces that would be subject to prosecuton under sexual harrassment laws anyway.) But people refer to Hooters as if it’s all a big joke - and I rather suspect they would think I’m just a humorless feminist for refusing to go there.
While I certainly am a feminist - and the humorless is open to debate - I don’t want to go to Hooters for the same reason I have no desire to read Playboy: I DON’T WANT TO. That’s pretty much it. And yet Hooters tries to have it both ways. Hey! - we’re all about the boobs! - but we don’t actually show them naked so we’re still family friendly!
Bullshit.
You couldn’t have picked an example from a game that isn’t a licensed adaptation of frikkin’ Conan, the exemplar of Pulp Swords and Sorcery, and thus the exemplar of fiction objectifying women? I may not like objectification of women in RPG art, but I very well might object if a Conan RPG cover wasn’t evocative of CONAN COVERS.
This just seemed an odd pick - Nothing else out there illustrative of your point?
Look at the cover of the Conan MRB. Strong woman with sword, sexy sure, but not objectified. She seems like a woman who you’d have to earn, a person even.
I’ve read every Conan story there is, and yea — there is lots of girl slave action going on. But there are also lots of powerful and dynamic women going on. It seems revelatory that we chose to focus on the slave girls so heavily. Plus, I’d say that Howard and the image of the slave girl is important to whats going on with us at a deeper level. It isn’t like Conan is special magic that doesn’t fit into the same psychoanalysis that hits everything else. Why are so many civilized, erudite, hesitant, non-violent men drawn to the atavistic image of the barbarian who slaughters all in his path? Think there could be some self image issues there? (And yes, I am one of them. I cast not at others, but myself.)
Not only that, but I did chose Conan for another reason. Just because something was fitting in the 30s doesn’t mean it is still fitting. You won’t find a lot of people who will champion a T-Shirt saying “this was the fate of the dark savage, to kneel in terror at the feet of the conquering Aryan” for example. (That is a quote from a Solomon Kane story, btw.) But you will find people arguing that because Howard had slave girls, it’s okay to have have object like women crawling across the floor to you.
See, I’ve seen the Conan MRB cover - strong woman. I’ve seen this cover - slave girl. And I’ve seen the black kingdom cover - that’s got so many fucked up 1930s attitudes (which are entirely within genre) that I kinda wish I HADN’T seen it for this discussion. I’m not seeing this wave of slave girl focus on Conan covers. I’ll go to the mat for you on objectified women in other, more inappropriate contexts (Exalted “Savant and Sorceror”, I’m looking at you), but Conan gets my genre emulatin’ hackles up, and
I will argue that if you are looking to emulate Conan, and I mean emulate Conan, you ARE going to casually objectify women, you ARE going to make casually racist remarks, and you ARE going to glorify the violent and the uncivilized over the peaceful and erudite. That is the genre; you may disagree with everything your character says, thinks, and does, but of course, one isn’t your character. Yes, it’s not fitting for the real world of 2007 - but Conan is a fictional world of the 1930s.
This is similar to an argument I often have about Call of Cthulhu in the 1920s - except the focus is on Lovecraft’s virulent racism. If I describe non-Western Europeans in the same terms Lovecraft uses in my casual conversation, I’m looking down the barrel of some hate speech legislation, and am probably not a very good human being. But if I make that same description in character during a CoC game - isn’t that just contributing to the immersion, to the emulation? Is it acceptable to do things we abhor if it’s acting, and it isn’t meant to be prurient?
Which brings up the issue of assuming this cover is entirely prurient, and not simply so as the result of the genre emulation I’m defending here. I was creeped out a more than a little by your descriptions of how I was “supposed” to be reacting to that picture.
I won’t even get into the issues a friend of mine brought up when discussing this, as she was a little uneasy with the automatic “submissive, sexy woman is automatically misogynistic” assumptions I’ve seen.
Hand to God, I didn’t mean to provide an example of Skarka’s Law, but there was just something about the tone in the comments that makes me as uneasy as the original subject of your post.
See, here it is: I don’t find genre emulation as a motive sufficient reason to repeat behaviors we now despise. Playing the aryan superman because it’s what Howard would have written isn’t a defense in my eyes, it’s just a shield for what has to be deeper reasons.
Sure, it may be what Howard did — but why did he do it, and why do we want to keep doing it?
However, to be fair I’m not ragging on the whole Conan cover line. Some of them are actually pretty damn good in this respect. Which makes the bad ones all the more frustration. Same as with Exalted, which went from the kick as Harmonious Jade on the 1st ed cover to the trash of Savant and Sorcerer….
I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree on the Howard/Conan issue, because if I’m going to genre emulate, I don’t do it halfway. I don’t see a point in the mighty-thewed homoeroticism if it isn’t matched by the overcompensating sexualization of women; emulation celebrates everything, good and bad, about the subject of emulation. *I* think about the consequence of rabid racism in my CoC games, and the depersonalization of other humans in “savage” games like Conan; but I guess to an outside observer they may only see the characters *doing* these unpleasant things.
I do agree with your final paragraph, and it’s a shame most of my discussion has been on what’s really a side line argument.
Don’t worry about it! We may not agree, but I always respect your voice. I know this is not an easy subject, nor one that is cut in stone. I even had a whole part of the post about how this changes from person to person and context to context.
As for the genre emulation bit, I think I may do a post about that sometime soon. It’s a huge topic, and one worth getting into in a thread dedicated to it.
My question to cappadocious, which sadly won’t be properly nested, regards the argument that if you’re going to emulate, do it all the way. And the question is:
Why emulate this genre?
As in: I can say that if I’m going to emulate a death camp and play sadistic Nazi officers who gas, shoot, rape, mutilate, etc. innocent children, I could make the same argument, but the question remains: why emulate something like that?
Nice! Great post and the comments thread is also full of good stuff to ponder.
“Why are so many civilized, erudite, hesitant, non-violent men drawn to the atavistic image of the barbarian who slaughters all in his path? Think there could be some self image issues there?”
I like barbarian heroes too, I like to play them in games, and I love pulp. What you say also applies to quite a lot of feminist women who deal with their own feelings of being male-identified. So as y’all nerdy guys ponder those self image issues, the attraction to the barbarian and the damage he does, consider being even more not-that, i.e. being female, and yet internalizing the idea that that’s what’s heroic & powerful. Ow.
Ug.
Yea.
Jebus.
Oh, do you mind if I quote some of your posts for a post about genre emulation and what it does with regards to difficult subject material? I don’t want to do so to attack you, but to use it to open up my own head and examine how I feel about it at more length.
Let me know.
Wow. This is a “race you to it” moment, as I’ve been thinking very seriously about just this subject recently, and have been assembling notes for a long-ish LiveJournal post about it for the last few days.
Must be that time of year.
Conan is hardly an exemplar of misogynistic fiction. I’m not saying Conan isn’t misogynistic, but unlike, say, Gor, or much of the wank-fic available online in seamy archives, misogyny isn’t central to Conan.
A Google image search turns for “conan covers” turns up plenty of Conan imagery that doesn’t feature women in submissive poses.
Regardless, “casual misogyny is okay when it’s a homage to original works featuring casual misogyny” is an argument that’s been well-demolished elsewhere.
Doh, meant to reply to cappadocius’s comment above.
I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot, what with writing Bliss Stage, which is super-fraught because it’s a game about sexy teenagers.
One thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve tried to make the characters so that they are, most of the time, meeting your eyes (and my artist has been really good about this.) What I’ve discovered is that eye contact is sexy (of course I knew this in real life, but in pictures) and now I have a pretty good reason why that’s the case.
The girl in your picture wants any man, and happens to be right close to me. This girl, while I can’t tell whether or not she wants sex now, is definitely interested in specifically *me*.
Yea, eye contact helps. It alone isn’t always enough, but it counts for something. Check out the difference between the woman on the cover of first edition Exalted and the same girl on the second edition cover. It’s startling.
I make no claims that my art guidelines are totally clean of all social preconceptions and prejudices. It was just startling to me to compare “cute girl + eye contact” versus “cute girl + no eye contact.”
yrs–
–Ben
Oh yea! I wasn’t saying you were wrong, I was saying you made a good first point. The Exalted covers totally back up your point.
Wait, so, how does changing the position of the irises of a woman in a flimsy, transparent garment standing among a bunch of well-armored men help negate the evils of objectification, exactly? I feel pressed to share the mechanism of this amazing discovery you’ve made with other artists.
Also, I do hope that both of you have noticed that that girl appears to be about twelve years old.
We didn’t say it did. We said that it is one aspect among many, and something to be considered when trying to make art that does things better. In fact, I specifically said that it alone wasn’t always enough. Please respond to what people are saying rather than to strawmen. We’re here to discuss, if you want to argue go elsewhere and write a blog post about what a dink I am.
As for the age of the girl in Ben’s picture, I’ll leave that between you and he — but not on my blog. Elsewhere gents, and have fun.
You still haven’t answered the question of why the image of a woman looking at you is better than the image of a woman looking away.
Sometimes (not always) well done eye contact in a picture can get you to consider something about a person and not just a prominent sexual asset as your first impression. If you have to deal with them as a person before you deal with the size of their breasts, it may help to reduce the “sexy thing” impact and make it more of a “sexy person” impact. I suppose it probably has to do with the whole “my eyes are up here” thing that happens IRL all the time.
I’d have to disagree that eye contact makes you deal with someone as a person; more often, it seems to be another indicator of sexual desire. Covers that don’t objectify women would have to show them actually doing something, rather than gazing at you or lying around.
I think a lot of effective covers do some of both. First Edition Exalted does, and it works. Just adding action doesn’t always help. A lot of the Avalanche Press covers had the girls with weapons doing things (or at least posing with the weapons), and it didn’t help the objectification at all.
Although, I do think at least one of them at least was making eye contact, and it didn’t help in that picture either. Possibly because it wasn’t head forward, it was breasts forward and eyes after. The Exalted cover, otoh, is head and eyes first.
Which leads me to think that it depends a lot on how the eye-contact is handled. It also can be sexual desire and be sexual desire from a person, rather than an object you get to use — which isn’t wonderful, but is at least something one human does to another. (To be clear, I’m generally against overly sexualized women as fodder for selling games to teenage boys. However that specifically isn’t what this post was about — it wasn’t about making women non sexual, it was about making them not objects.)
So, like I said, I think it is one little thing that can help. It certainly isn’t a one bullet cure. But then, I don’t think there is a one bullet cure.
Kiru - it is the gaze itself that makes a big difference.
As people are saying, it’s not by itself, enough. But it is an important part of the equation.
Making they eyes prominent can, depending on how it’s done, make it clear that the person you are looking at is looking right back at you.
Quite often people (usually women) who are shown as sex objects are shown to not really be looking at anything at all, or at the very least definitely not looking at you - giving it a voyeristic quality and putting the power in the hands of the person who is doing the gazing. Such as in the cover from the post. While none of the characters are looking at you, the viewer, the woman in foreground is looking off to the side in such an awkward way that most people would probably conclude that such a person was deliberately avoiding their gaze if they met them in real life. Avoiding the gaze of another is a position that is very, very submissive. Oddly enough, the only character who is looking at the viewer is the only other woman in the picture - one that is too far back to make real eye contact. Which helps to reinforce the idea that their focus is all on you - but that they know their place.
While it’s not a universal fix, making sure that the person being gazed at is also gazing as well means that one of the many ways that women are shown to be submissive - avoiding the gaze of their betters - will be likely avoided.
Unfortunately, one can - and many often do - nullify this by doing all kids of distracting things with the way women are gazing that end up still making them look submissive - tilting their head to the side, putting their hands near their face, tilting their head down as if they are trying to avoid your gaze, etc. But that’s another rant.
Mickle,
Sorry your comment took so long to show up. For some reason it got caught in the spam filter.
Did the part about “this is extra fraught because it’s a game about sexy teenagers” just pass you over?
Whoa, whoa. Why is the assumption that the girl who doesn’t get to choose her clothes and isn’t looking at anything in particular wants to have sex with any man who comes along?
At that point that isn’t always the assumption. The other assumption is that she doesn’t have enough say that we have to care.
Really, she doesn’t look like a miserable slave just dying to escape, beaten, hollow eyed or even with a look of pain or desire for freedom in her face. She’s just rather blank, and thus the perfect canvas for our desires to be written upon. She may want sex, she may not, but either way it doesn’t matter because her wants aren’t important enough to change it one way or the other.
That, btw, is the difference between a woman who choses to be submissive and one who is just an object. A submissive woman is still a person and still has needs and wants. An object doesn’t have anything you have to care much about, except maybe an owner. I think the biggest block to screwing that girl is the bad-ass guy standing behind her. Once he’s gone, she’s yours.
I’m still struggling to put into words why this argument is just so damned CREEPY to me. I don’t see a blank slate on which I can write my desires, and I don’t see the bad-ass behind her as my only obstacle to screwing her. Talking like that feels a lot like “rape talk” to me - it’s like buying into the assumption certain feminist thinkers have that all men are potential rapists.
I don’t feel that “looking away” objects automatically become people just because they make “eye contact”. A lot of the objectifying of women comes first from the assumption that they can be objects.
I don’t think all men are potential rapists. At least no more so than all women are. And it has a lot to do with things other than just eye-contact. That’s one small tool that you can use to analyze things, but isn’t in and of itself the whole (or even an important part) of the argument.
It’s also possible that for you there really isn’t any of the stuff I’m talking about going on. That’s why I had the whole bit about sexual narratives up before the picture. Some folks really won’t feel any of this. Some folks will. And some will but will deny they do.
All I’d really like to ask of you is that you carefully think about some of the stuff we’ve brought up, about your own reactions to the art that graces our RPG books, and about what it means about you, me, and everyone else. For you it may well be that there is no objectification going on. If you can say that honestly, down to the deep dark places where we only go when we’re alone at night, then bully for you. I’ll even believe you when you tell me it, because I think it is true of some people.
But I think we both know it isn’t true of everyone. Really, can you honestly tell me that there aren’t some people, guys you’ve known at the FLGS, who aren’t a little too into the image of the woman they can posses and own?
rock on Frances
sometimes I wonder how many men who make such arguments (”but I don’t think that way - I see women as people!”) ever stop to consider that it’s the very fact that they cannot feel how helpless and objectified such images show women (or, at least, that woman) to be that scares us so much.
How can you look at her, put youself in her shoes, and not feel like an object? It’s a question that strongly suggests that the answer is not so much “because not everyone would be feel like an object in that position” but rather “because someone is having trouble with the whole empathy thing in the first place.”
And (sigh) I really should know better than to try to respond to this - but it’s this normal, healthy worry that makes any logic minded feminist wonder about the average man’s propensity towards rape (given culture - not biology). It’s really not that we think most men consiously hate us and are deliberately lying when you say “but I see women as people!” It’s not that we hate you, either. It’s that we sometimes see a disconnect between your actions (ability to empathise) and your words - but you don’t - and so we also have to wonder what other times we may be using the same words to mean different things.
We don’t generally worry that you might think it’s ok to hold a knife to a woman’s throat and force her to have sex. We worry about how much manipulation you think is ok when it comes to trying to get sex, how willing you are to believe your buddies and disbelieve us when it comes to sexual assault, and most important of all - are you just listening for a “yes” (or, more often the absence of a “no”), or are you actually considering what we want and all the nuances that always entails and working with us to communicate such things? Are you treating us as a person because you are nice and want to be a good person and that’s what good people do, or are you treating us as a person because you actually see us as one?
It’s not that we question your desire to be good, it’s that we question your ability to do good when other things suggest your internal moral compass is a bit off. Through no or very little fault of your own, usually, but still a bit off, nonetheless.
“A submissive woman is still a person and still has needs and wants. An object doesn’t have anything you have to care much about, except maybe an owner.”
A related misconception is that submissive women are submissive to anyone, which is of course utter bullshit in all of the cases I’ve encountered (and is probably a direct result of the object categorization you mention). Just because a woman (or man) likes to be submissive in a relationship with a specific partner does not mean that she’s out there to be dominated by just anyone.
Here, wash your eyes:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/06/Runequest_cover.jpg
Heh. There have always been some.
She rocks!
Brand,
I’ll throw in some Devil’s Advocacy, but Cappadocious has mostly beaten me to the punch. I don’t think it’s quite fair to hold this up as a representative of “game art,” when it’s required to also be a representative of “Conan art.”
I think it’s important that we talk about “Conan art,” which needs only be related to “Conan fiction” by publishing association.
I actually have a whole folder on my hard drive of collected “Conan art.” What really startles me about the collection is nearly every single image features a scantily-clad objectified female. Sometimes, the inclusion of this seems so… conspicuous… it’s as though “nekkid chick” was on some checklist of layout elements that had to be included to make the sale. Conan… fighting evil guy… with helpless bimbo in impractical ornamental thong… Those three in particular seem to define their own little genre. (There IS also a much smaller genre of “Conan wading into an army of foes” which requires no female presence of any sort.)
Point being, inclusion of this particular element in artwork is a huge flag identifying your product as “Conan pastiche.” If your marketing goal is to attract consumers of Conan stuff — as I certainly hope a licensed Conan RPG would attempt — including the object babe is a pretty surefire way of communicating that.
Not that that makes it okay or anything, or that your thoughts on how objectification of women hurts men aren’t correct… just, I think you’re setting up a bit of a strawman on this one.
If you just want to call out Mongoose, specifically, for not having the balls to reinterpret the material for more enlightened audiences, that seems fair.
The funny thing is I chose this picture because it wasn’t as bad as many.
I mean, seriously, do you really think its only Conan? Or should I spend 5 second online finding art from other games that are as bad or worse? Avalanche’s books, Savant and Sorcerer (and the new White and Black Treatises), Exalted 2nd edition’s ass shot, and the list goes on. Hell, even though she may be powerful I find the cover of The Gathering Storm to be pretty objectifying, and the covers of Fae Magic (hump the tree!) and Chaos Magic while not as bad still manage to be pretty objectifying and treat the woman more as a thing to fulfill your fantasy than a person to be desired, much less emulated. Ditto many of the Slayers Guides, though I’m willing to cut those more slack due to being at least partly tongue-in-cheek.
And that’s just covers. Even some of the games that have had better covers still have had some gratuitous interior art work. Green Ronin for example has usually been stellar in its handling of the subject, but there have been some interior pictures in the M&M line that got an eye roll from me. Magazines haven’t been impressing me a lot either — there was a run of sexy woman covers on Dragon mag about 8 months or so ago that was a standing joke among the teenagers at the FLGS. (They weren’t impressed, and they were teenage boys playing Magic.)
So sure, it’s particularly Conan here, but it’s particularly something in a lot of cases. Particularly anime-porn in Exalted, particularly Heavy Metal in Avalanche, particularly boys jerking to comic books in Mutants and Masterminds. We’re talking about geek hobbies and geek genres, and there is always going to be a “but its only that thing” excuse. When that thing is everything though, it stops being just one trope.
Now, there are also a lot of companies doing a lot of good work too. There are many attractive covers without women, or with non sexualized women, and (most rare of all, but still not unfindable) sexy women who are empowered persons. There are many of them — but I’m not sure that there are more of them now than there were a few years ago, and sometimes feel like there are actually fewer of them. And some of the companies that used to stand out on it have been backsliding. (I was really happy about Wizards for a time there, and they’re still ahead of the pack, but since the “Hi, have a whore” picture in Sharn, I’ve seen occasional throwbacks that get the note.)
Brand,
Yes. You should take five seconds and scrounge up the other awfuls, just to thwart against “The Conan Defense” or whatever “but it’s not us, it’s that thing instead!” (Not now. But it seems like a good general thing for presenting your case.)
You know, I think this example actually kinda fails on the “Conan art” criteria, because there are no sexified men. None of those overly-clothed dudes feed into my deepest wuss-boy “I wish to be strong and swarthy” scenarios. So… they’re willing to flout the Conan conventions if it makes the art less homoerotic, just not if it’s less misogynistic. Interesting.
Word.
Funny enough, I hadn’t even noticed that. Whereas on the MRB Conan cover Conan is totally hot and sexy.
Hey Brand, among many thoughts, this prompted a quick imagery survey of my Dragon collection through the ages. Check out the post here:
http://community.livejournal.com/gametime/18920.html?view=125160#t125160
This actually struck me as well, Brand. Your fight with that cover is not really a fight with sexism in roleplaying so much as sexism in Conan and the entire sword & sorcery genre. Its those genre expectations that make that kind of cover the expectation instead of something that everyone accepts is awful.
Yes, roleplaying rarely challenges those expectations, and that blows. Like Larry, I agree with your assessment, but your choice of targets is just a little off, I think. I do feel that highly artistic and less misogynist work can be done in the Conan genre, though. So maybe that’s your point? That, even given their source material, they could have taken this in more positive directions?
It’s probably a little bit of both.
But tell me Jonathan, oh lover of Exalted, what about Savant and Sorcerer? Exalted 2nd Edition as opposed to 1st?
I reacted as I did to this picture because I was talking about this picture. I was trying to talk about something general by giving specific examples. That, however, does not mean that the same problems don’t happen elsewhere. It is not just Conan tropes. It is many tropes, and RPGs repeated rushing to embrace those tropes is the problem.
Savant & Sorcerer was a debacle. That was a horrible decision from a company that’s traditional tried to promote a more equitable approach to women in roleplaying. Cult of the Illuminated wasn’t much better either. I get the sense that most people who love Exalted love the dream of what it could be more than what it is. The art direction is only one thing that falls under that banner.
I think your post was a more interesting approach than these discussions that are happening around it, actually, which tend to repeat old points. Yes, this is a problem. Yes, it is an abomination. But I’m more interested in concrete things that can be done and ways to convince people it’s a problem.
When I commission art, I generally try to pick people I feel draw women “well” (empowered and not overly sexualized). Sometimes that means trying to get Jennifer Rodgers to not put everyone in garters
I also wrote White Wolf a long email over Savant & Sorcerer, expressing my anger and disappointment. But you saw their reaction to the Pimp backlash. It’s going to take a persistent effort to see any change there.
So where do we go from here?
We do it ourselves. We keep talking.
One of the things I wanted to do in my post was to make something of myself vulnerable and speak in terms of the self rather than the other as the thing that goes wrong. Its easy to say “those people do these things that are bad.” It’s harder to say “I have some issues, and working them out isn’t always easy, but here are some things I’ve thought about and how they may affect me and might affect others as well.”
See, I do find the girl in that picture up top sexy. Very sexy. I don’t want to rape her or make her my slave or prize anything, but I do become aware when I concentrate on why I find her sexy that its all about her body, her presentation, her garments, her status (as fantasy more than as slave, slave doesn’t really get me hot). There is no “her” there, nothing about what the picture tells me about her personage that draws me to her (because the picture doesn’t tell me much, but because that also means I don’t care). I’m not looking at her as a person I want to have sex with, I’m looking at her as something to break off a little something something.
So how do I fix that? I acknowledge it. I deal with it. I grow past it. As I’m doing that maybe others do the same, maybe they don’t. But I sort of have to be the change I want to see. It’s a crap small step, but its got to come first.
Cross-posted. Maybe I was just looking to hard for a new insight into all this. I mean, it’s been this way for a while and will only change if we are able to create an environment in which it’s not profitable or acceptable.
Dammit, that’s not what I meant. You did try to approach this from a new perspective and I appreciate that. Grrr, I’m being really inarticulate today. Apologies.
Actually, I think you and Lary do have a point. There is a lot of the S&S hate in my blood right now. Also, the Savant and Sorcerer thing isn’t really from Exalted, it’s from the genres that Exalted draws on.
So yea, maybe the point is that RPGs shouldn’t pander to the lowest elements of what they’re drawing from — but that runs right into the problem of why we’re going there in the first place. Which, in the end, I think comes back to the issue of objectification one way or another.
And because I’ve had to reference them so many times now:
Savant and Sorcerer — Exalted
Exalted Second Edition — Are You Lookin at My Ass?
Exalted First Edition — This is My BoomStick.
And just to add them in:
Avalanche
And Have a Whore!
I’m unfamiliar with that last one. Some context?
Eberron, if memory serves. I think they are supposed to be prostitutes in one of the big cities.
Yep. There is a whole section on whores in the city of Sharn. This is the picture that illustrates it.
I do believe that all the prostitutes in the book are female, but I can’t remember if that’s true or not. I know it generally is in RPG books though, so….
I’d seen that S&S picture before, but it still shocks me every time.
Nice stuff, Brand. I now must buy you a refreshing beverage that accords with your beliefs.
In addition to your keen ideas above, another tack to consider is that the more men (and sometimes women) project sexual traits onto women, the fewer traits remain to identify male sexuality.
Sorta like how if white people want to express any sort of personality, they mimic people of color.
And the only things left to identify male sexuality are aggression, violence, and direct physicality. A woman can be sexy by just being there (sometimes can’t be sexy if she’s doing anything else — which is stupid, as we know active women are the sexy of sexonia) but a man must be jumping a pit while being chased by thugs or be killing or having just killed the thugs in order to be the hot.