What do I you think about the way women are portrayed in Game of Thrones?

[Millie3030]

As the title says really, my husband watches it and loves it, but it annoys me, it seems like male titilation for me, half naked women, lots of prostitues, sex scenes and murder. But the main character is female and she seems a strong female character, and there are also other strong female characters in it.

What are your thoughts?

It's not that I turn off my political sensibilities particularly. It's more that I roll my eyes at it then carry on watching. It helps that it's so much better than most of the crap out there in terms of the number of active, interesting and different women it has. I have a pretty low tolerance for that kind of thing usually.

I can turn off my sensibilities and I thoroughly enjoy watching got. But that doesn't stop me dissecting and reflecting on it from different perspectives ( feminist being one of those) I enjoy lots of blatantly sexist films / shows in fact ( pretty woman for instance) but I still condemn them as a reflection on the horribly misogonistic society we live in.

I think if we refused to watch and enjoy sexist crap we'd have very little left to watch! All TV can be picked apart and most , no all, can be critiqued from a feminist gaze, in both positive and negative light

I try and ignore and keep watching but I just can't, (for the same reason I can't buy 'The Sun' newspaper) but I do think its ridiculous and outdated with its portrayal of women.

If you compare the portrayal of women in a show like 'The Walking Dead' GOT it just can't live up to it. The female characters in that are fantastic, complex, interesting, multilayed, physically strong, gutsy. And they have not once been shown as naked, or vulnerable which is constant in GOT.

I have never understood the logic behind the 'strong female characters' arguing.

So what, so it's better that 'strong' women should get beaten to a bloody pulp, raped, etc.? It's somehow more edifying to women watching to think, wow, she's amazing and strong and ... oh, she's still trapped by a misogynistic society.

It also irritates me because the underlying implication is that women need 'strong' female role models. This reminds me a little of Shonda Rimes talking about how she is always called an 'angry black woman'. People may think they're calling her strong and passionate, but it's actually pretty insulting. www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/shonda-rhimes-opens-up-angry-738715

Women should not need to be especially 'strong' to get screen time (or decent RL treatment for that matter).

I do like GoT, but I won't defend it for having strong female characters. I think that's bullshit.

Also, the pseudo-medieval as a justification for misogyny has a million things wrong with it.

I think the 'strong/complex female character' thing is related to the Bechdel test.

A crappy test, but I'd imagine every episode passes it.

I haven't looked at all the episodes, but actually, they fail surprisingly often.

Bechdel requires women to have conversations about something other than men. They're quite rare in GoT.

I did read a quote by George RR Martin that would impress me if it was true. Someone asked why or how he writes such complex female characters and he replied with something along the lines of
'Well, I've always thought of women as people.'

It's depressing that writing or portraying real women is still so out of the ordinary.

What a total wanker. If that's true.

I read it as a positive response, as in 'you wouldn't ask it about male characters why are female characters different?'

I assume he's being sarcastic though? As in 'what a ridiculous question, I write women as complex complete people because that's what they are, you idiot.'

Ye-esss, but it's such a cliche and it's quite insulting given he really doesn't write women as human beings.

Gunshot phrased it more elegantly than me, but I read it as positive too.

Insulting? I think it's a great response, regardless of how you feel about his writing.

Mmm. Maybe.

I admit, I am coming to this feeling a deep-seated irritation with male pontifications on strong female characters, which I'm probably taking out on GRRM.

Excuse me.

I think it was insulting that he was asked in the first place.

He might not write women perfectly but imho they are more than filler characters, which is often the case.

True, it's insulting he was asked.

I don't think complex and strong mean the same thing at all.

It is important that women are depicted with complex characters, and that there are a diverse range of personality types.

I'm about a season behind, but find the GoT women varied and interesting.

There's Brienne's loyalty to Catelyn. Arya's refusual to play feminine roles.

Women generally - Cersei, Danaerys. Margaery - are interested in power and how it is accessed.

Theon's sister is another fighter. Your power is related to your family status. It's the economically poor women - for example, the prostitute Ros - who are most vulnerable.

The rape scene involving Cersei - which wasn't in the book - was the scriptwriters' biggest mistake.

A PP mentioned that the books were not that graphic.
Not sure that's true. There are lots of things missed out of the show that would be shocking if shown on TV. e.g. Daenerys is 12 or 13 when she marries Drogo, when she walks out of the fire she is naked and all her hair burned off, this is not shown. At one point she wears a dress with one breast exposed which is not in the show.
There are also a lot of slaughtered civilians, bodies floating down river, etc. which is missed out of the show.
And whoever mentioned Spartacus being more equal - there was gratuitous male and femal nudity, true. But some of the female nudity was laughable, like women in the crowd at the arena just having their tits hanging out for no apparent reason.

S'pose it depends on your personal benchmark when it comes to 'graphic' scenes in literature: Game of Thrones is seriously tame if you've read a lot of Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, etc!

Sorry...A Song of Ice and Fire...! (as technically that's what the books are called)

Skeppers I've tried a Brett Easton Ellis but gave up halfway through chapter one as it was too much for me.

I have read, and re-read the whole of ASOIAF many times. I'm gonna say probably 10 times so far. The Theon/Reek chapters are awful to read(especially Ramsay's wedding, which I am hoping like hell doesn't make its way into the show) but the reason they're so awful is that GRRM is very good at depicting the mental response to physical abuse. The physical torture that Reek has endured is agonising, but the way his spirit has been broken comes across as the worst of it.

There is one part of the whole series that I can't bear to read and it's in one of Arya's Harrenhal chapters in ACoK. When the Mountain and some of his men are laughing about a woman they just brutally gang-raped. Again, the reason it's so disturbing is that GRRM has written the conversation in a way that comes across as true and realistic - these are evil, brutal men, but they are not depicted as cartoonish villains, which makes them far scarier.

One thing that is notable for me is that GRRM as a writer really understands his characters, whether they are women or men... or a wolf.

He also comments a lot on the unequal status of men and women frequently throughout the books. Catelyn and Brienne spend a lot of internal dialogue thinking about their lack of power and their vulnerability compared to men. Cersei rarely goes a chapter without cursing the fate of being born a woman and how men are all dumb assholes who can be controlled with sex. While, of course, stabbing every woman around her in the back.

The show is a different beast from the books and yes there's a large amount of male gaze-y nudity although they do seem to have made an effort to even it out. We've seen Hodor and Theon full frontal and we've had lingering backside shots of Daario (twice) and Jamie. Certainly there is more female nudity and yes this is a marketing measure, of course it is. Some nudity is in context but some is there to draw in viewers. It doesn't stop me watching. (Jamie's character assassination, on the other hand...)

I haven't watched the TV series, but I read all the books last summer.

The female characters develop in complexity over the books, but I'm not sure how complex they really are. Many felt like stock characters to me.

The Bitch, the Tomboy, the Mother, the Smother, the Romantic Teenager.

I bet you all knew exactly whom I meant with each descriptor, didn't you?
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Cersei, Arya, Catelyn Stark, Lysa Arryn, Sansa Stark

And as for Brienne of Tarth, how interesting that a character very strongly interested in traditional male roles is also incredibly 'ugly' and looks wrong in female clothing. It's a trope that women with swords in fiction are somehow mannish looking, thus neatly implying they're not proper women, and explaining why they're not conforming to gender roles. If they're not conventionally ugly, they're sexy. Ordinary, unexceptional-looking women can't go round using swords, though. It's like the homophone's perception of lesbians: 'butch' or 'lipstick'.

Gwendoline Christie who plays Brienne is neither ugly nor does she look 'wrong' in women's clothes.

She's just six foot three.

www.hawtcelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/gwendoline-christie-at-game-of-thrones-fourth-season-premiere-in-new-york_

Wil try that again...

www.hawtcelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/gwendoline-christie-at-game-of-thrones-fourth-season-premiere-in-new-york_3.jpg

I would consider her to be very beautiful.