Dungeons and Dragons Grows Up ... the Oversensitized Aren't Quite Satisfied

I used to play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons when I was younger. Very fun game -- creative, social, entertaining ...

So when I heard they were bringing out a new edition, I wondered if I should be interested. The company went through this routine five or six years ago, and just flipping through the books in the bookstore told me they were aiming for a pre-teen/teen/MMO audience, not somewhat older aficionados of fantasy games such as myself.

Well, there couldn't be any harm in looking the new edition up online and reading some reviews, could there? Maybe a few longtime gamers would chime in and let me figure out whether it was worth looking at, or if all of us in the 35+ crowd should write the game off for good.

Wow, were there ever a lot of reviews piled up in a short period of time! And most of them seemed glowing, especially those by people who claimed to have played every edition of D&D since it was invented.

Might be worth a trip to the store to flip through a physical copy, I started thinking.

And then I came to a review that included a brief paragraph about the portrayal of women and minorities, which said there was a lot of minority representation in the artwork and that the female characters were almost all appropriately attired, except for one female archer on page 137, who had a bare midriff.

Bare midriff? Whoa, I am all over that, son. Where are my car keys?

At the store, I had to search around a little to find the book, but once I did, I went straight for page 137. Bare midriff! Oh, this is going to be good!

Page 140, too far. Page 131 ... overcompensated ... 133 ... 135 ... 137!

And there it was:

Holy shit, did you come all over yourself? Because I know I barely held it in. Salivating for more of this inappropriately attired lady?

That's it. That's the lurid display of skin that the reviewer found exceptionable enough to need remarking on.

Don't get me wrong. The guy didn't go on and on about how horrifically sexist this picture was. He didn't describe it as exploitive or titillating. He just said it had a bare midriff. But this is the example he cited to demonstrate that the women in the book were not 100% appropriately attired. Which means he thought this was inappropriate.

When you look at the entire picture, it's clear to anyone with any exposure to D&D or fantasy stories in general that this woman is intended to be a barbarian. Her midriff is bare because she's a barbarian, people. She doesn't care about social conventions. I mean look, she obviously doesn't even shave her armpits, right? (joke) And even as a wilderness-schooled outlander, she doesn't have bare legs or a naked shoulder. (Or maybe she has a naked shoulder, but we can't see it behind her hair, so I hardly think we can cry foul about its nudity.)

You can't even see her bellybutton!

Here's the scoop on this new D&D Player's Handbook (which, yes, I bought, because it is absolutely bloated with gorgeous fantasy artwork that is highly story- and character-oriented and I find I really would like to play the game again). Out of the 166 figures that I counted going page-by-page through the book (monsters not included):

99 are male.

47 are female.

20 are indeterminate.

13 are ethnic minorities.

The last of those sounds pretty skimpy until you consider the large number of pale blue elves and grey-skinned half-orcs and reddish tieflings. There are a substantial number of white European figures, but they do not dominate the book. In fact, in the section where you pick your character's race, the example shown for "human" is a black woman. 

Of the females, 13 show skin in the form of bare shoulders, necklines low enough to detect the curvature of breasts or actual cleavage, or a stretch of thigh. Quite a few others have contoured armor that makes it clear there are supposed to be breasts inside, but the contours are gentle, not bulging, and many of those figures would not be discernibly female if the armor didn't provide a cue, because they're elves or other races with slender builds and gentle facial features. 

Many of the 20 indeterminate figures are indeterminate because they have on bulky, non-contoured armor, and their features are androgynous enough that you simply can't tell their sex.

And this is all clearly deliberate. There's a human warrior who appears in three different pictures, and in none of them can I say for certain whether he's a guy with unusually soft features, or she's a woman with a muscular, stocky build like you might expect in a lady who chooses full plate armor for protection while swinging her sword. In one picture the character's jaw looks a little on the square side, but in another there's a delicate, feminine braid running through the hair.

Frankly, I'm astonished at the extraordinary degree to which the art in this book avoids even a hint of sexual sensuality. As a guy who cut his teeth on the fantasy artwork of Frank Frazetta and Jeff Jones, I just can't understand anyone calling that archer's tiny flash of midriff "inappropriate." Unless they'd put unisex clothing and hairstyles on everyone in the book, I don't see how the creators of this manual could have hit it much farther out of the park as a victory for respectful, person-centric depiction of women.

There is a brand of feminism that seems to consider female skin below the collar or above the wrist/knee an instant signal of sexism. People being watchful for exploitation have become so sensitized that they no longer accept female anatomy as a valid element in artistic or cinematic works.

In point of fact, there's a rich tradition of seductive witches, alluring succubi, lusty barbarian swordsmen, and other sexually provocative types in fantasy storytelling, and there's nothing wrong with any of those tropes, except when they become crutches for lazy writing. In a book aimed at teens and adults, shading a handful of the images with mildly erotic undertones  should be absolutely beyond reproach. Sex is a part of our humanity; there's no reason it shouldn't be part of a roleplaying game. But the creators of this volume chose to leave it out (or rather, out of the artwork, since the text openly tells players that they should feel free to create characters of whatever gender/orientation combination they'd like). I won't criticize the art directors for that; there are plenty of oversexed publications out there they they may feel a legitimate need to counterbalance.

To complain that they didn't go far enough, though, betrays an uncontemplative, reactionary force of habit, not a true concern for issues of human rights or respect for individuals' sexuality.

Whew. Now that I've got that off my chest, can anyone tell me where to find an actually inappropriate image of bare female midriff? Because I feel kind of cheated on that score.