14
Berserker in a Skirt: Sex and Gender in Dungeons & Dragons

Shannon M. Mussett

As a young girl, I always chose to play the role of druid in D&D because that class allowed for the perfect blend of magic, the association with animals and the healing arts, and just enough weaponry so as not to be as much of a sissy as a magic user. In short, it felt girlie enough and yet tough enough that my older brother would still let me play with him and his friends. As I rediscovered D&D as an adult, I found myself more drawn to being a fighter – the barbarian class in particular – even entertaining the madness of the berserker from time to time. At a certain point, I had to ask myself why I had so radically abandoned what I perceived to be the gentle docility of a druid in favor of the bashing ethos of the fighter. I determined that my education and writing in feminist philosophy enabled me to embody a far more dangerous and physical fantasy than I would have previously allowed myself. Surprisingly, D&D, as the quintessential RPG, pointed me to something about the nature of gender that academic discussions on the topic could not quite capture, namely, that gender identities and gender roles are far more fluid than we realize in our daily exchanges. Although D&D on the whole does not actively promote the notion of gender flexibility, I believe that the deeply imaginative structure of the game can allow for players to explore the intricacies of gender and sexuality in creative and potentially radical ways. Where better than in a dungeon of the mind, surrounded by friends pretending to be elves and dwarves, to play with this idea?

Sex and Gender

Although it often comes as a surprise to find that some people either have played D&D in their younger years or continue to play well into their adult years, the surprise always seems greater when the player in question is a woman. It is no secret that most who play tend to be boys and men, and there is little doubt that the world of Dungeons & Dragons is largely geared toward a masculine, rather than a feminine, fantasy. One would be hard pressed to argue that cartoonishly large breasts and skin-tight leather skirts really allow for dexterous swordplay or quick getaways. And yet, for some of us who play, there seems to be something liberating in taking on the roles of both male and female characters in the world of D&D. One of the first choices that one makes in rolling a character is the sex: male or female. Sure it’s fun to decide whether or not one will play a bard or a druid, but how about the foundational decision to be a man or a woman? Many of us make this choice automatically (usually playing our own sex). But it is fascinating that in a game of supposed brutally physical adventuring, it doesn’t really matter, as far as the success of the character, which sex one chooses to be.

As Shelly Mazzanoble notes, “One of the coolest things about D&D is gender equality. As in real life, whichever gender you choose to play is a matter of personal preference but unlike the real world, female and male characters are equals.”¹ Here we see a critical, if often challenged, distinction between sex and gender that lies at the heart of feminist scholarship. Typically, one’s sex is tied to biological or physiological descriptions – what organs one has, or what hormones are coursing through one’s body. We tend to believe that biological sex is determined by physical forces that are largely beyond our power to alter – at least without varying degrees of medical intervention. One’s gender however, depends on whether or not one exhibits masculine or feminine behaviors and traits. In other words, my gender is a matter of whether or not I act like a boy or a girl. I can play a little bit more with gender insofar as I entertain different roles, but we also tend to think unreflectively that gender is somewhat fixed as well. If this distinction can be upheld (and some wisely argue that the distinction is altogether problematic) then the question arises: is one’s biological sex a cause of one’s gender or are they entirely separate? Put differently, are the mannerisms of masculinity and femininity tethered to whether or not one has ovaries or testes or are they only loosely connected? Can we even inquire into the differences between biological sex and socially constructed gender from within language, which often imports assumptions about these terms by the very rules of its execution?

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), acutely aware of the problems of asking about women from within a historical discourse dominated by the male point of view, noted in 1949: “If I want to define myself, I first have to say, ‘I am a woman’; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious.”² As Beauvoir points out, language favors men insofar as “man” is often assumed to be “human” (think of our use of “mankind” to mean all human beings, for example). If I am a woman, I have to first make it clear that I am a woman when I talk about myself – as if being a woman is a special class of human being and being a man is not.

And yet the differences between human beings based on sex are important, both socially and philosophically. As contemporary philosopher Luce Irigaray (1930– ) claims, “sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.”³ The first thing we say about a child when it is born is: “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” In other words, the first distinction we draw between human beings is a distinction based on sex, so sexual difference must be pretty important for philosophy even if it’s not immediately so in D&D. But this fundamental distinction is so central as to be almost invisible to us, which is why philosophers such as Irigaray believe it may be the defining issue of our age. In D&D (as in mundane life) the issue of sex is relatively concealed even among the explosion of images of male and female characters and monsters. Philosophy can make this invisible issue more visible by critically examining it in language, and role-playing games such as D&D can allow us to explore these structures by actively engaging them in imaginary campaigns – thus effectively putting theory into practice.

Although I earlier mentioned that the first choice we make in rolling a character is their sex, this is actually nowhere made explicit in the rules of the game. Take a look at the character-generation guidelines in various editions of the Player’s Handbook: the second edition (1989), the 3.5 edition (2003), and the fourth edition (2008). In all of them, we are told that the first deliberate decision that we make after we have taken our chances with the random role of the die is to choose our race and class. Certainly this makes sense – you need to know whether or not the “genes” of your rolls allow you to be a dwarf fighter or a half-elf thief – but why isn’t the decision about sex primary to all of it? The writers of each Handbook have increasingly become more sensitive to the issues of gender bias by using “he or she” or “you” instead of “he” and by using females as examples of characters as well as males with almost as much frequency.⁴ Such sensitivity, as well as the fact that sex does not affect one’s success in almost any imaginable campaign, is laudable. But yet why wouldn’t the choice of sex – and gender – be just as central to the fun of character creation as one’s race and class?

Gender Games

As Beauvoir notably asserts in The Second Sex, “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”⁵ By this, she means that there is nothing (or at least very little) that causes a biological female to become the social construction of a “woman.” Rather, women are made through multiple forces that can be examined through philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, mythology, literature, and so on. If she were to take a side on the sex/gender distinction, Beauvoir would certainly favor the gender side – there is no feminine essence that can be linked to biology or physiology. She is also an existentialist philosopher, which means that she advocates a conception of radical freedom where we choose who we are because there is no such thing as a set human nature determining our actions. Once we apply this idea of existential freedom to the question of gender, we see that we can actually choose our gender, rather than be held captive by it. And how exciting is this revelation in terms of D&D?

Think of it this way – D&D liberates us from the limitations of our sex by making male and female characters equal in terms of abilities. Therefore, there is no disadvantage to playing a man or a woman in any of the races or classes. Taking it a step further, since there is no inherent limitation to a character’s sex, this means that men and women (and even better, boys and girls) who play the game can play their own sex or the other sex with full freedom from unnecessary constraint. And to go one step further than that, choosing the sex of the character – whether it is your own or the opposite – does not tie one to a particular set of gender traits.⁶ The shyest of men can be the most outspoken of wizards, the most honest girl can play the most unscrupulous rogue, and the pacifist woman can don full armor and fly into a berserker rage on a group of bugbears ambushing her adventuring party because, after all, bugbears are her species enemy and she just can’t help herself when they are around.

Fantasy and Imagination as Vehicles for Social Change

So if we accept the common feminist presupposition that gender is not necessarily tied to our biological sex (and even if it were, good luck getting past our cultural codes and gendered language norms to somehow gain access to it), then we can see some of the revolutionary power of envisioning different gender norms. That’s right: D&D can actually bring about feminist social change. To explore this point, let’s think about what the imagination is and how it functions on a social level. One key method employed by any dominant and dominating system of power (political, social, pedagogical, you name it) is to curtail any collective change that might threaten its claims to legitimacy. One of the best ways to do this is to limit the ability of those under its power to imagine a different kind of reality. For example, if I want to convince slaves that their state is one imposed by nature (that they are slaves essentially and not by mere convention) then I actively discourage or disallow stories, poems, criticism, and religious ideas that might cause them to imagine that their lot could be otherwise. To limit the imagination is to limit critical thinking in the most brutal way, which keeps people subjected and afraid of change. D&D, on the other hand, requires that to play the game well, one has to use the imagination actively. One has to invent a character – with a past history, present situation, and future goals – place him or her in a totally fantastic fictional world with other imaginary characters, and try to solve problems that may be unreal (I mean, how many times does one have to combat a gelatinous cube at the office?) but which still require using problem-solving and creativity.

The first step in all of this is, of course, to imagine oneself as a completely different person – but a different person who yet relies 100 percent on the mind and experiences of the creator. We find this mantra repeated in various editions of the Player’s Handbook. In the second edition we are told: “The character you create is your alter ego in the fantasy realm of this game, a make-believe person who is under your control and through whom you vicariously explore the world the Dungeon Master (DM) has created.”⁷ In the fourth edition we are called to “take a minute to imagine your character. Think about the kind of hero you want your character to be. Your character exists in your imagination – all the game statistics do is help you determine what your character can do in the game.”⁸ In other words, the entire game is there merely to support your own creative vision, not to dictate it to you or to play it for you. Such a core component of the game emphasizes the allure of transforming oneself imaginatively into something that one feels utterly unable or at least discouraged to do in mundane life.

For example, this transformative appeal can be seen in spell-casting. One of the key draws for classes like rangers, druids, and bards, and the attraction of the wizard class, is the ability to cast spells – many of which involve the alteration of the character into some other form. The 1st-level bard spell, disguise self and the 2nd-level alter self are obvious in this regard, as is the shared cleric, druid, and wizard spell, shapechange. One of the most popular schools of magic, the Illusion School, uses spells to “deceive the senses or minds of others. They cause people to see things that are not there, not see things that are there, hear phantom noises, or remember things that never happened.”⁹ Even more relevant, perhaps, is the Transmutation School, wherein one can “change the properties of some creature, thing or condition,”¹⁰ thus allowing the spell caster to do amazing things such as enlarge or reduce person, alter self, or even polymorph. And yet in all of these spells, whether one is changing one’s appearance to look like someone else, to appear as an animal, or to appear different in size, there is no real desire or necessity to change into the other sex. In part, this is because, as noted above, there is no noticeable disadvantage to playing one sex or the other in the world of D&D. And whereas one could envision a situation wherein a bard may need to change into the other sex to talk up the owner of a tavern for some information, sex and gender remain relatively invisible against the backdrop of swordplay and thievery that draws us all to the game in the first place. But this may be a missed opportunity for game players to use their imaginative power to conceive of different realities that could spill over positively into their daily lives.

Let us return to the power of this largely invisible issue of sex/gender from the larger perspective of feminism. Two feminists are helpful in this endeavor: Luce Irigaray (mentioned above) and contemporary philosopher Judith Butler (1956– ), albeit for different reasons. Irigaray believes that sexual difference, as the key issue of our age for philosophy, has been made invisible by the way in which the male perspective (in language primarily, but also how this perspective bleeds into culture, politics, literature, and any other major human endeavor – even games!) dominates how we think about others and ourselves. This leads to a kind of sameness, wherein we reproduce the same ideas, arguments, and patterns instead of allowing for different – specifically feminine – perspectives to emerge. As a result, women are forced to “masquerade” at being what men think they should be – to wear a kind of “girl” costume so that men will desire them. Rather than masquerading a fake notion of femininity in order to be desired by men (which really just fails for both men and women), Irigaray advocates the strategy of “mimicry” where women take on and exaggerate the cultural norms of femininity in order to uncover how they work to situate women in oppressive constructs. She tells women to “come out [of] their [men’s] language. Try to go back through the names they’ve given you”¹¹ in order to reveal the bias and artificiality of linguistic structures. Once we recognize the masculine biases inherent in language, we see how even our imaginations are fixated on a particularly masculine desire and orientation. This is an issue that is important in the fantasy world of D&D, which evokes a certain kind of masculine desire.

Using elements of psychoanalysis from Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Jacques Lacan (1901–81), Irigaray argues that we have an imaginary body that is largely imbued with fantasy. In other words, my body, as imagined by my mind (or ego) is not an objective representation of how it actually is (which is impossible to access) but is an artificial creation resulting from my entrance into language and society with others. What language says about bodies – male and female – within a cultural framework largely determines what we imagine our bodies are, what they can do, and what they look like. The imaginary body is an inevitable result of our entrance into culture for Irigaray. As such, there are a lot of pitfalls that can result from distorted imaginary bodies (eating disorders, for example, emerge out a problematic self-perception of the imaginary body) but also a lot of promise for what we can do when we actively change our perceptions through imaginative exploration. If I realize that my view of my body is largely imaginary, and I free my imagination from harmful self-representations by exaggerating and miming them – essentially making fun of them – then I can conceive of totally new ways to be in the world. In other words, by using mimicry, I can see how problematic many formulations of gender are and thus be motivated to reject them if they are harmful to others and myself. And where better can we see this mechanism than in the world of D&D? Open up to any page in any manual and you will find the imaginary body writ large. Males and females from a variety of races with impossible beauty, grace, strength, fabulous clothing, and weaponry that would make a medieval knight swoon.

Obviously there is something a little annoying about the buxom women who are supposed to be able to fight all gussied up. One cannot really deny that these images, like their comic book counterparts, are the male imaginary run amok. But once we see that, we can begin to play around with these images. Both men and women players are free to choose whatever sex they want to play and then on top of that, whatever gender as well. If we can stretch our minds beyond the limitations of our own imaginary bodies, as well as the bodies depicted in the books and miniatures, just think of where we can go to liberate ourselves from sexist representations. Are you a scrawny, awkward girl with braces? Why not play a 6-foot 4-inch male paladin? Are you a stout 40-year-old dockworker? Why not play a lithe, 250-year-old, female elf paladin? Are you young? Play an ancient wizard on the way out of this life! Are you straight? Play a bisexual, halfling druid on a revenge mission! The only question to ask yourself is: why not?

Berserker in a Skirt

One thing that I have come to realize is that my own game play has increasingly become less an extension of what I think I could realistically do (as a young girl, I figured a skinny, animal-loving druid was what I could actually pull off if D&D were “real”) and more a way for me to strain myself into imagining sex and gender far beyond my comfort zone. This led me to realize that different players therefore can either magnify their own self-image (or imaginary body) whereas others can try to totally alter it through character construction.

Judith Butler can help us think this through. At the end of Gender Trouble, a work that challenges the very idea of a natural sex, Butler turns to a discussion of drag and cross-dressing. What is it, she asks, that is so captivating in the performance of drag? Whether in a show on a cruise ship or mildly exaggerated butch/femme identities in the gay and lesbian communities, drag reveals something that otherwise remains largely concealed from us. Namely, drag illustrates that gender itself is performative. That’s right – gender doesn’t express some kind of inner gender core, but rather shows us that all of our gendered mannerisms are a performance that gives us only the illusion that we have some kind of masculine or feminine essence. It’s not like any girl (or boy) naturally takes to a pair of high heels – one has to train oneself to walk in them through many repetitions, thus retroactively creating the idea that women can and should wear high heels because they have some kind of feminine essence. This gendered nature is like a glamor spell that gets cast on us at a very early age. But it is really only retroactively produced by the habitual repetition of various gender performances (like performing walking in high heels) and in no way expresses some kind of human nature.

These performances are not benign according to Butler. They produce social and political ramifications wherein we are kept in line, monitored, and controlled without anyone having to do anything because we do it to ourselves: Am I acting masculine enough as I am walking down the hallway? Is it feminine for me to eat like that? What if I don’t really care who wins the big game – do I still have to fake it? If I want to cut my hair short will everyone think I am lesbian (whether or not I am)? So much energy trying to live up to the fantasy of a true gender! And guess what? Everyone fails to do so. What is so entertaining and often funny about drag is that it highlights the performative nature of gender identity – “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself.”¹² Drag shows us that there is no original gender core because the parody of a man, for example, wearing lavish makeup, sequins, and high-heeled boots magnifies the silliness of many women doing the same on their way to work.

What happens when we open the pages of the Player’s Handbook? Well I don’t know about you, but if those Eladrin on page 38 of the fourth edition Handbook aren’t in drag, then I don’t know who is. And isn’t that part of what makes the game so enjoyable? I may be embarrassed by my desire to wear shining velvet and lace robes in reality (since Stevie Nicks was probably the last one who was able to pull off that look), but once I become Archimodar, the 4th-level Transmutor Mage, I can relish in the swishing of the luxurious fabric as I cast magic missile on the kobold swarm. And as for myself, I may be nervous directly confronting (often male) authority at my day job, dressed in my TJ Maxx finest casual business-wear, but once I become Raya the Barbarian, low on charisma (and thus known to smell a little off-putting to her fellow adventurers) but high in ass-kicking with a war hammer, I can fly into a rage that lasts five rounds. And boy, does that feel awesome.

Liberation and Laughter

Do I want to be a large, smelly barbarian in “real” life? Good God no, how unfeminine. But when I play one in D&D, I realize that femininity is itself a construct – both in my own world and in the world populated by dungeons and dragons. And this realization allows me to laugh at the unrealistic gender expectations we all try and fail to embody. As Butler points out, “the loss of the sense of ‘the normal,’ however, can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when ‘the normal,’ the original’ is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived.”¹³ Do we laugh at drag queens in the Pride Parade? You bet. And do we laugh at ourselves, painstakingly painting our minis as if these avatars were really copies of the original us transported to Toxer, the mining town at the foot of the Slippery Mountains? Of course. And do people who don’t play RPGs laugh at us because we play D&D? Well, obviously. But we have the last laugh, because in role-playing all these male and female characters performing nearly infinite variations of masculinity and femininity, we see something that many people go through life never realizing – gaming our genders in the world of fantasy, means we can game them in our daily lives – and that, is what liberation is all about. So, who’s laughing now?

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Utah Valley University Philosophy Club for their feedback on this paper, especially Kris McLain, Ray Mucillo, John Christensen, and Richard Blackburn. I would also like to thank C. Thi Nguyen and Mike Shaw for their comments on earlier drafts, and Matt Horn for being such a great Dungeon Master.

Notes

1. Shelly Mazzanoble, Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girl’s Guide to the Dungeons & Dragons Game (Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2007), p. 32.

2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 5.

3. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 5.

4. The makers of D&D have become more aware of the use of gender-exclusive language over time. For example, in the second edition they claim that the male pronoun is used throughout the book not to discourage women from playing, but because “centuries of use have neutered the male pronoun. In written material it is clear, concise, and familiar. Nothing else is” ( Steve Winter and Jon Pickens, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Player’s Handbook for the AD&D Game, 2nd edn. [Lake Geneva, WI: Tactical Studies Rules, 1996], p. 9). By the time of the fourth edition, this idea of male pronouns representing all people has been largely abandoned, and rightly so.

5. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 283.

6. Special settings do entertain the relationship between sex and gender such as we find with the sexless Warforged in the Eberron campaign that can actually choose their gender.

7. Player’s Handbook, 2nd edn., p. 18.

8. Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins, and James Wyatt, Player's Handbook: Arcane, Divine and Martial Heroes, vol. 4 (Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2008), p. 14.

9. Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet, and Skip Williams, Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, 3.5 edn. (Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2003), p. 173.

10. Ibid., p. 174.

11. Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 205.

12. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 137.

13. Ibid., p. 139.