Game of Thrones' treatment of women will tarnish its legacy: Misogyny is its original sin

Esquire

From nudity to rape, the HBO drama's treatment of its female characters remains unforgivable, says Gabrielle Bruney. She notes that Game of Thrones Season 1 had the most nudity and its chatty sex scenes inspired the word "sexposition." "The nudity on Game of Thrones was regressive, never equitable and often contrived, and consisted largely of beautiful women dropping trou to titillate the audience, again and again," says Bruney. She adds that while there was a lot of male full-frontal nudity, it wasn't sexual. George R.R. Martin has long defended the rape scenes as being part of medieval society, and that he wanted his show to be grounded in historical reality. "Fair enough," responds Bruney. "But consider all the realism the show and the books it’s based on have chosen to omit. No one seems troubled that not a single character has succumbed to dysentery, that scourge of medieval society. A realistic Thrones would have a lot more spilled chamber pots, fleas, and plague-bearing rodents. It would also have a broader variety of sexual violence. Martin and the showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, have not found that realism demands the vivid depiction of the rape of men, though it is also a widely perpetrated weapon of war. Instead, the burden of realism is disproportionately placed on the rape of women. And not old women, or unconventionally attractive women, both of whom are also the targets of rapists. The only conclusion is that the show is depicting what it imagines audiences want to see—sex, violence, and sexual violence inflicted upon attractive women."