There Are No Appropriate All-Female Adventuring Party Pics

The Golden Girls playing Dungeons & Dragons with Wil Wheaton in a frame of bacon. Pretty much the closest I could get. Image composed by Weem.

A funny thing happened when I wrote my last article.  I discovered that fantasy artwork as a genre is subversively sexist.

I’m not talking about obvious sexism featuring damsels in distress and buxom she-devils in chain mail bikinis.  Though plenty of that is out there too.  Maybe not as many damsels in distress nowadays.  I would like to think most artists feel the same way I do, and agree that strength of character is sexy.  Why our forefathers ever considered demureness an attractive trait is beyond me.  It pains me to envision a world where men held such fragile egos that they couldn’t accept the premise of a woman who questioned their decisions.

Really, Penelope Pitstop.  I’m starting to think Dick Dastardly and you had a unspoken mutual bondage fetish.

I’m also not here to rag on the pro-chain mail bikini crowd.  Certainly, it is impractical in combat.  It would provide far better protection if the coverage was reversed so that theses warriors marched in a full suits of chain mail with their lady parts exposed.  Protection isn’t the purpose; its designed to show off a woman’s physique.  And personally speaking, I don’t see anything wrong with celebrating a woman’s sensuality in combination with her ferocity.

The easiest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. You avoid the rib cage that way.  Cover art for Red Sonja #45 by Fabiano Neves.

There is nothing wrong with sexualized imagery of women (or men for that matter) because humans are sexual animals.  To claim this type of art should not be portrayed would be the same as saying that violent art, or pedantic art, or silly art should not be portrayed.  Humans are all of these things, and to imagine that any one piece of art can capture these complex emotions would be impossible.  Art, by its nature, is a generalization.  Its use portrays a message, whether simple or complex, intended or unintended.

The problem is not the existence of a chain mail bikini, but what happens when unreasonable armor standardizes.  When women are portrayed as sexual animals in exclusion to the broad complexity of their potential characters, it reinforces a stereotype among those who prefer to see the world through a limiting lens.  It encourages people to treat women as mostly sexual objects, which in turn widens a communication gap between men who continue to misunderstand women, and women who, by dint of being human, are greater than any two dimensional painting.  And this only explores the problem from an argument where men and women suffer together.  It doesn’t broach the topic of how women are made to feel when they are encouraged to play buxom tarts if they want to express their gender in a game.  And it doesn’t scratch the complex emotions an excited ten year old girl feels when she enters a comic book store for the first time and finds all of her favorite superheros are drawn as cheesecake pin-ups oozing out of impossibly tight costumes.

#NotMyHarleyQuinn

For now, let’s wipe this conundrum off the table.  It’s important, but we’ll have to solve all the world’s problems involving art and sexism at another time.  What I want to talk about, instead, is a cedar hope chest of troubles I uncovered in the attic by accident.  As it turns out there is no such thing as an all-female adventuring party.

Or, at least, that’s what I was lead to believe when I went searching for one to flesh out my last article: 14 Ways To Find a Killer Dungeons and Dragons Game (or any other RPG, really).  One of the ways I suggested to find new players was to ‘Ask Women’, since many men assume they aren’t interested, and that’s far from true.  To help frame that section, I went to Google and Bing’s image search engines to find a fantasy art picture of an adventuring group solely composed of women.  Nothing too specific—any capable looking group would do.  After hunting for five hours I gave up.  I’m sure something appropriate exists out there.  I’m not saying that no artist ever drew one, because I find it crazy to imagine no one tried.  But wherever that mythic painting is, Google/Bing was hording it like a sacred treasure, and taking 10 on my research check wasn’t going to tease it out.

I should point out that if you type in “All female adventuring party”, one of the first images Google spits back at you is this:

Which is great.  It captures everything I wanted to say about female role-players.  These ladies may show a little skin, but the overall tone is you don’t want to get caught in a bar fight with this quartet.  They, at the very least, give as good as they get.

Which is why it was an incredible shame to find I couldn’t use this picture to help sell the idea that you shouldn’t discount potential new players because of their gender.  The comic these four women hail from is called Rat Queens, and the artist was canned when it was discovered that Roc Upchurch held a long standing pattern of beating his wife.  Suddenly these bruised gals didn’t look so appealing.  And whether or not the rest of the team denounced Upchurch’s actions, or whether artwork is made less valid due to the poor personal choices the artist who creates it makes, I couldn’t use an image from someone so obviously maligned as a means of advocating female equality.  That would be like using a picture of Tom Brady inflating the tires on his car as a way to encourage people to take personal responsibility for their actions.

Here’s another image that Google (currently) shoots back when you search for “all female adventuring party”:

“All Female Adventuring Party” by MagicalNyan

There’s nothing wrong with this painting that isn’t also wrong with Monster High.  Is this style of imagery, one in which women are treated like human dolls, ‘wrong’?  Considering that most of the time this artwork is created by women for other women, I’ll leave the answer to that question to someone rocking a pair of X chromosomes.  But it’s clear that these ‘adventurers’ solve their problems through mutual understanding and the power of song.  These women kick as much as ass as a PETA volunteer on a donkey ranch.

There are, of course, other images.  But the majority are sketches, some awkwardly assembled computer graphic models with zero background, anime-style harems built around fan service, or screenshots of a movie or television series like Xena: Warrior Princess.  In the end, after spending far too long digging for anything half-appropriate, I found this:

Which is fine.  It does the job.  Granted, there’s a dude in there, but at least he’s uncentered and outnumbered.  And the women in question are not only combat ready, but look as if you asked to join their party, and they’re sizing you up.  Great.  It fits almost all the qualifications I was looking for.  It is also, however, a screen shot of potential romantic partners for the game Dragon Age: Inquisition.  Inquisition is open-minded when it comes to gender and sexuality.  Good on them.  But this fantasy art depicts what looks like a mostly female adventuring party by sheer accident.

So you couldn’t find any appropriate intentional artwork of an all-female adventuring party.  So what?  There’s a lot of artwork featuring strong female protagonists.  Why isn’t that enough?

First of all, I want to be clear that I’m for equality.  I want men and women to have equal opportunities in their fantasies.  Let’s face it.  If we’re going to draw barbarians carving into a fifty ton dragon, it doesn’t matter if the warrior in question is male or female.  The likelihood of any human surviving an assault from such a mammoth beast is nigh impossible.  That isn’t how fantasy works.  Fantasy, in many spheres, is about overcoming insurmountable odds.  If that’s the case, why shouldn’t we depict men and women fighting alongside each other?  Why not give most girls, women, and some men, a slew of archetypal female heroes they can envision themselves as, who are as capable and durable as any fantastic male hero?

I like seeing artwork that depicts that.  I’m not arguing that idealized fantasy artwork depicting men and women working together isn’t a good goal for an artist.  I’m also not arguing that all-female adventuring parties should tip the balance of fantasy artwork and fiction in women’s favor.  For one thing, that’s silly and counterproductive.  But for another, the sheer volume of artwork needed to balance the scales is already overwhelming.  At least for the next two decades, it would be absurd to even worry such a problem could exist.

The real problem with the lack of an all-female adventuring party is that it relays a subconscious message that, somehow, women are dependent on men.  That all-male groups can handle themselves in the wilderness, but all-female groups don’t even exist, and if they don’t exist then there must be a reason.  That a party of adventurers must keep a few men in tow to make sure the women don’t back down from a challenge, or devolve into indecision, or fall prey to mass hysteria.  This is, of course, is all bumpkiss.  But you wouldn’t be able to tell that by pointing to artwork that operates as contrary evidence.

I think in our eagerness to express a modern shared fantasy where men and women work together as equals, we forgot that in order to be true equals, there must be occasional inequality.  Game companies we love who are interested in displaying gender diversity focus on evenness among the sexes as a way of achieving egality.  But as long as a market for male dominated artwork and fiction remains, there can not be equality among the sexes without female dominated artwork and fiction as a counterpoise.

There is one category of popular art breaching this problem.  In the last decade, a number of comic books began featuring all-female superhero teams, partly to court a female audience, and partly to stand out from other books.  Birds of Prey, Fearless Defenders, Brian Wood’s all female X-Men team, and the upcoming A-Force.  And since we might as well be completionists here, Femforce was created back in 1985 and ran for twelve years by the independent publisher AC Comics.  And Danger Girl by IDW Publishing, first printed in 1998 and still going strong, might also be considered an all-female superhero team, depending on whether you think superspies count.  I should point out that while Femforce, Danger Girl and Birds of Prey operated as outliers showing what may be available in the future, it’s only been the past couple of years that the industry hit a real breakthrough with Defenders, X-Men and A-Force.  Whether this trend continues depends on sales, I suspect.  But considering that 46% of those who identify as comic book nerds are female, I can’t see why the books wouldn’t receive support, assuming the writing is good.

Woah! Ladies, this might be overkill, but I’m digging it.

Which brings us to an important point.  In the world of art, we get what we ask for.  If there’s a great demand for a team of superheroes featuring of an all-female cast, even stodgy comic book industries consisting of old boy networks will find a way to supply a cast of characters we can respect and wish to emulate.  It may take time for the out of touch boys’ club to catch on to what works. But if money is to be had, it will happen.  The same applies to fantasy artwork.  Some of the best artists in the industry are tied up in games that seek a perfect balance between men and women.  Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons don’t want to exclude anyone in their desire to provide fantastical paragons people would prefer to personify.  They have very good reasons to maintain this level of diversity.  But they don’t need to maintain it all the time.  A Magic or D&D plot that only involved women could make for an interesting change of pace.  Considering both games reinvent themselves on a regular basis, it wouldn’t hurt their brand to move the needle to an all-female cast for six months.

But these companies can’t read the minds of a timid audience.  If we don’t ask, we will never receive what we want.  And the most important people to ask are not major companies like Wizards.  It’s smaller independent companies willing to take risks, and individual artists who are actively soliciting feedback.  These publishers and artists are the most likely to change their methods due to even limited input.  And if their work becomes popular, then other publishers and artists will take notice and attempt to mimic their success by keying in on what is different.

So, if you happen to be a game publisher or an artist, please spend time before your next project thinking about whether the project could be portrayed with an all-female cast.  And if you happen to support an artist, either emotionally or financially, request some artwork that doesn’t require the presence of a male guardian.  Maybe in the future this sort of request won’t be needed, but it’s needed now.  Let’s work together to make this article anachronistic.