A Song for only one gender
If your “hypocrisy!” reaction is too strong to override, stop reading now. I’m about to grump about the depiction of women in the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire books, a popular book and TV series heralded as the second-coming of Tolkien (it’s not). Why am I a hypocrite? I strongly recommend people NOT read the books, boycotting the corrosive, flat, misogynistic headspace…yet I’ve read the full series yet published, all five books.
Still with me? Thank you for a shrug-filled understanding of human contradictions.
The world of Game of Thrones is a medieval soap opera*. As such, it contains all the warfare, death, destruction and depravity you’d expect from a backstabby, Hobbesian feudal universe. I have no beef with that general idea. Men and women act monstrously toward each other and dismiss the fates of those below their station—all as it should be given its universe. To cement it all, there are genuine inhuman monsters beyond the Wall(s). Quite fun, really. Neat trick about the seasons, too.
What fails is not the universe’s rules but the story’s repellant uneven impact on its genders.
In general, the wartime consequences for male characters is capture, torture, desecration and death at the hands of other men. It’s gory and titillating…but drives character or plot development. More often than not the central male characters overcome peril by their wits in entertaining ways.
For female characters, the wartime consequence is rape. Probably repeated gang rape then murder. If a character survives it’s often by whoring herself after barely consented rape. Add to this the fact that the Game of Thrones universe’s “coming of age” is around 13 for men and women, so the young women are all of 14 when sexual assault becomes a day-to-day possibility. Children not yet of age are verbally threatened with rape. Marriage comes across as culturally condoned, underage rape. Meanwhile the central, privileged female characters live with commodified virgin purity, creating rape fear structures that bubble just below most interactions with male characters.
All that violence is men against women. It makes the brutality more atmospherically omnipresent but only through only salacious repetition. Comparatively, male-on-male violence is complex, gory AND plot-driving. NONE of it drives a female’s character or any significant plot change. Male-on-female violence is violently sexual and, in the cases of the background peasantry, violently anonymous, too, as male characters inflict—or mention in passing—frequent assaults on unnamed farmer’s daughters, farmer’s wives, tavern wenches, serving girls, etc. Male-rape, on the other hand, is only hinted at, as if it were too crass compared to sexually assaulting children. All the while, the series treats equally instances of brutal rape, incest, prostitution, coerced sex, domestic abuse, forced relationships and (rarely) consensual sex as if they were all equally erotic.
For me, such profane treatment reveals an objectification of women where even central characters seem paper-thin in their own narratives. Even the evil ones. Which is just crappy to read. Some writers are unable to ‘write women’…but then there’s misogyny just under a thin veneer of “a brutal world”.
The HBO show does a much better job with the subject, frankly—thank you, kind actors, writers and production staff. Please just watch the TV series.
* @hellbox’s joke title for the series is “As the Winterfell Turns”, which I enjoy a lot.
