sexism | Jay Aquinas Thompson

Disclaimer: This is a post about the HBO show Game of Thrones, not the George R.R. Martin novels on which the show is based. I haven’t read the novels, though I’ve had friends refer me to parts of the novels after talking about plot elements of the show. (I’d love for commenters to do likewise and point me to elements of the books– up to the middle of Storm!— pertinent to this conversation.)

Spoiler alert and plea: This post will ruin countless plot points from the first three seasons of the show. You’ve been warned. But I also beg you: If something heroically antisexist or relevant happens anywhere after the mid-point of Storm of Swords, please don’t give it away! Keep conversation on the show, please.

End of pleas and disclaimers.

So: TV is not social-justice work. A show can illuminate, provoke, or mobilize audiences around an issue; it can challenge an audience’s or genre’s stereotypes; but it’s made to be entertaining and to make its owners money. Buy me a hot dog sometime and I will talk for two hours about how grateful I am that I watched The Wire, but having watched it doesn’t make me an organizer.

That being said, a TV show is part of a cultural conversation, and takes place in an environment contested by social forces larger than TV. Two lessons from social justice work come to mind as I try to untangle my feelings about GoT.

First: It’s possible to perpetuate oppressions even as you strive to challenge them. Game of Thrones is a world full of richly-portrayed, interesting, and morally complex women of all ages. Cersei Lannister (who shades from diabolical to trapped and miserable as the series goes along), Catelyn Stark (an older woman, the linchpin of her family) and her daughters Sansa and Arya, Brienne of Tarth (a tall, tough, physically intimidating woman!), and, of course, Daenerys Targaryen don’t spend the show as props for male ego, competing love interests, or caricatures. (Nor do GoT‘s writers condescend to them by sanctifying them as noble sufferers: rather than pity Arya, I’m frankly starting to get scared of what’s going on in her head.) The women of Game of Thrones are reflective agents struggling for independence in a sexist world. In other words, they are people, striving for fuller lives in an oppressive society.

But Game of Thrones is also crammed full of tits. That is, the show’s producers go to incredible imaginative lengths to decorate scenes of male power with (often anonymous) naked women. The prostitutes of King’s Landing are shown as victims of male violence, but are also presented, as when Tyrion invites Podric to his first sexual experience, in scenes of pure objectified perfumey mystique. Any chance Daenerys can be shown naked (including scenes where, I’m told, she was just, you know, clothed in Martin’s novels), the producers take. Have her be bathing when a hunky barbarian bursts in to defect to her? Check. Have her then step nude moodily lit and gently dripping from the bath to say thanks? Check. One character, Ros, whom I’m told is a composite of a number of minor characters in the book, got the worst of this. She spent the maybe the majority of her scenes naked, including in a staged “educational” lesbian sex scene that was one of the most obnoxious and gratuitous things I’ve ever seen on TV, until being crucified and shot full of arrows by Prince/King Joffry. There are some intriguing theories explaining the preponderance of naked women in the show. I’ll leave you to evaluate their credibility.

The issue is related, I think, to the show’s vaunted realistic approach to its fantasy world: people curse, sweat, switch sides, and struggle for power, honor, lust, and shame in moral circumstances much more complex than in, say, Tolkein’s world or even Gene Wolfe’s. But this also means that GoT recognizes no courtly presumption of women’s honor or distance from the fray. Sexual violence is everywhere in this world; in that sense, there’s a resigned quality even to its imaginative ambition, a subtext of “this is just the way people are” that’s curious in a show so imaginative in other regards. (As my genius cousin the fantasy novelist said once in exasperation, wouldn’t it be a more imaginative feat to create a fantasy whose world centered on an active struggle against sexism or violence or whose conceit flipped our expectations of such on their heads? Then she told me to read Zoo City, which I got for my wife instead.) But the show blurs its own ethical position by actively exploiting the sexism we already have– setting us up to ogle female characters or non-characters— to “realistically” portray the sexism of Westeros. So: Game of Thrones can challenge some aspects of sexism while at the same time working hard to perpetuate others.

Second: If you as a person with power are striving to address an oppression, you should expect more criticism from members of the oppressed community, not less.

I’m amazed, though I suppose I shouldn’t be, how vituperative the online responses have been to commentators of color who identify GoT‘s appalling racism. In its portrayal of the Dothraki in Season 1 (and, though it gets less screentime, in its thin characterization of the black pirate Salladhor Saan, eager to “fuck a blond queen” in Season 2), Game of Thrones hits every single ugly trope of white SF/fantasy’s conceptions of people of color. I’ll leave it to these two excellent posts linked to above to spell out a more detailed look at the show. Daenerys’s crowdsurf on the backs of the slaves she’s liberated at the end of Season 3 is the white-superhero-daydream cherry on top of a show whose interest in cultural complexity seems to end at the shores of Westeros. All I’d add is: please, please, please listen carefully when someone of color names racism, even if you’re not expecting to hear it, struggle to see it, or feel personally hurt. Listening carefully doesn’t mean wigging out, getting defensive, blaming the victim, or holding up your opinions over others’ actual lived experience of oppression. If your defense is “hey, they’re trying” (and, honestly, I don’t see GoT trying very hard on matters of race) then consider criticism to be candid feedback on how intentions don’t match effects.

Hey readers, any other recommendations for fantasy which addresses these issues in more complex or radical ways?

Last month I finished my third-ish read in twelve years of Michael Azerrad’s 2001 history, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 and found more to challenge in it than I expected.

This is a book I love for its nerdy minutiae and its big historical sweep. For its glory-days stories, too: 18-year-old me was over the moon to hear how Husker Du recorded “Reoccurring Dreams” on acid in a desanctified church, how Ian MacKaye ran Dischord Records out of his mom’s house, how Black Flag was so broke early on they ate dog food rolled up in white bread.

Stories of firsts are also always a thrill, even if they were miserable for the subjects: Mission of Burma playing empty bar after empty bar without a radio station in the country that could even make sense of their music, without a community, without anything like a “scene” beyond Boston. I appreciate, too, in a culture as anti-hierarchical as indie, the chance to acknowledge forerunners, the folks whose sweat sprouted into crash pads, friendly basements, left of the dial stations, and make-it-work clubs even if their bands didn’t live to see it.

The book’s decade-long arc is a story of groundbreaking and, simultaneously, cooptation. Bands (especially those like Dinosaur Jr and the Replacements, who liked classic rock just fine) jumped ship to major labels and crumbled. The scenes grew up and split on drugs and rhetoric. Sub Pop was too smart for its own good, creating a scene to sell records that resulted in a nationwide crop of horrible knockoff bands.

Azerrad examines these paradoxes but he leaves others unexamined. I would love to read a history in full of indie rock’s change from being “new redneck” (in, I think, Joe Carducci‘s phrase) music, created by working-class suburban kids in Minneapolis, D.C., L.A., etc., into being the turf of urban, arty, cool-conscious, middle-class kids (like, sort of, me). In passing, Azerrad gives Sonic Youth much credit/blame for the shift. But I want to hear a historian’s perspective on the consequences: the leveling-down of regional scenes, the increasingly collegiate and referential tone of 90s-00s indie (to be fair, this has gone much farther since the book’s publication), and the continued devaluing of the role of working-class and small-town folks in creating culture in general. (The prestige of online need-to-know cultural meatgrinders like Pitchfork, again post-publication, have far exacerbated this as well.)

Though indie rejected rock-god-hood and emphasized a horizontal, collaborative, community-building approach to art, the format of Azerrad’s book (lengthy profiles of thirteen of the biggest, best-known American indie bands of the 80s) goes along way toward building an alternative canon of scene Heroes that, yet again, diminishes certain scenes, groups, and artists, and shortchanges the communities which made these scenes possible. These thirteen groups were overwhelmingly white men; plenty of hardcore punk’s earliest fans were, too. But how would the book have looked different if it had included a chapter on Lydia Lunch, the poet and bandleader, instead of just quoting her concert review of Big Black? Or a chapter on Barbara Manning, the mercurial, outrageously gifted songwriter whose Lately I Keep Scissors has been a touchstone for dozens of later groups? Or, for that matter, Bad Brains? The all-black virtuoso hardcore, thrash, and reggae group from D.C. broadened the musical palette of East Coast punk considerably, smashed the color line around hardcore, and mixed religious and revolutionary exhortations as few other indie groups did.

There is little about the sexism and occasional sexual violence of the 80s indie scene (though we do hear that part of the draw of the Replacements was that “girls liked them”), and Minor Threat’s ugly reactionary rant “Guilty of Being White” (“I’m sorry / for something that I didn’t do / I hurt somebody / I don’t know who”) is defended by Ian MacKaye as being an “anti-racist” song misinterpreted as racist– this from a group who shared the stage with Bad Brains.

Our Band Could Be Your Life is loaded with inspiring stories and gives storytelling room to artists who lived out their political-aesthetic values and make incredible music. But, on reflection, I also see in the book a missed opportunity to tell the story of indie through the lenses of class, race, gender, and local community. Maybe that book is out there, who knows? (Any recommendations?)

Tag Archives: sexism

Sexism and Racism in Game of Thrones

Who Get to Be the Heroes of Indie Rock?