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olderthannetfic · 1 year

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I'm having difficulty with trying to place some of my fandom's feelings about misogyny in our source materials, GoT and HotD. On the one hand, I can understand how as women, we may not want to be confronted with the pitfalls and dangers of misogyny in the real world in a fantasy story with dragons, but on the other hand, it isn't like GRRM discusses misogyny in the books without tact. Margaery, Sansa, Cersei, and now Rhaenyra all have complicated relationships with gender and power in their own storylines that make sense in the context of the world. And GRRM doesn't shy away from showing the dangers of masculinity, either. Like, how mens' prides can doom themselves, their families, and entire nations, how most of the ones who die in battle are the poor foot soldiers who are usually men. Even how some men, in their pursuit of perfection/reinvention through their sons, harm the rest of their family, like Tywin. Or how there are men who use others that he thinks are weaker than him (sex workers, women, children, the poor) to feel bigger and more important, but their harm doesn't actually improve themselves, so they repeat cycles of hurt.

I don't think people are inaccurate in saying there is misogyny in the books, but this misogyny is purposeful and not accidental. Idk, to me pointing out how Cersei thinks misogynistic things about other women is like pointing out there's racism or homophobia in a Baldwin novel... yes, that's the point. Do you or others think that there's a disconnect between audiences of fantasy and mainstream? Like, with some people just wanting fun escapism but being reminded of the real worldvs. people who just want the story as-is. Because sometimes it sounds like when Anglophone westerners try to make "feminist" retellings of myths like The Iliad about Helen or Briseis, when all it ends up doing is proving that maybe Homer was more conscious of the realities and perspectives of women than they gave him credit for, or that they missed the point of Helen's story to begin with. Sometimes I think modern reviewers/critics get so caught up in pointing out every societal ill without context of the work, that we present discussions of these ills as failing of the work. Any thoughts?

A lot of "feminist" retellings are junk that misses the point of the original, sure, but the complaints I've heard about GoT are mostly about "But it's realistic though!" bullshit, particularly about the show rather than the books.

It's realistic for women to face sexual violence. It's also realistic for men to face it. It's also realistic for women to have nice lives.

This is fiction: everything someone chooses to put on page or on screen was just that: a choice.

I haven't consumed any of these canons. In the books' case, I hadn't heard of them back when I read fantasy doorstops by men. I no longer do that unless it's a queer book.

The show broke one of my cardinal rules: female full frontal without equal or greater male full frontal presented equally sexily and GOD DAMN shaved pubes that 1. don't make sense and 2. aren't equally common on men.

I'll watch a rule of horny show, but not if it's aimed at someone else's libido.

In the horny premium cable with sex and gore realm, I did watch the first season of Spartacus. That show was campy trash in many ways, and far less critically acclaimed, but it managed to show vastly more male full frontal and a really sensitive depiction of sexual coercion of a big, manly dude and what it did to him emotionally.

Lucy Lawless' horrible slave owner character was fantastically interesting and also shaped by misogyny and the expectations that she was only valuable for bearing an heir. All kinds of awful things happened in that season, but the only time I got the feeling we were there to gawk at tragedy porn or naked bodies, it was men on the receiving end.

People see GoT as neutral because they're so used to only seeing media that is by and for straight guys who are used to fapping to women's crying faces and calling it realism.

I can't speak to the books. From what people have said, they sound marginally more thoughtful than the show but still firmly in the Old Guy SFF tradition where "historical realism" upon which one builds one's dragon fantasy realm means abused women, not third gender priests or Muslim travel writers or any of the other underused historical shit you could pull from.

I'll give GRRM that many of the other cliched books are stealing from him and not vice versa, but this trend is more than old enough to predate A Song of Ice and Fire, which wasn't published till 1991.

So no, I don't think it's about escapism. I think it's about being bored of the same old, same old.

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