For three years now I have been watching Ramsey Bolton torture Theon Greyjoy in ways that might make Dick Cheney blush, including cutting off his penis, pretending to eat it, and then sending it to his family. I’ve seen Ramsey flay people alive on several occasions. I’ve seen him feed a woman to his dogs. I’ve seen him engage in creepy sadomasochistic sex with his lover.
The character is about as skin-crawlingly awful as any I’ve ever seen in a recurring television show, and I was appalled to learn that he was to be wed to Sansa Stark. He’s a sadist, and Sansa Stark has suffered more than enough. I wasn’t the least surprised when Ramsey decided to force Theon Greyjoy to watch as they consummated the marriage, nor that he chose rape for their first sexual encounter.
I didn’t enjoy watching the rape scene, and I’m even less thrilled about it now that I’ve learned that this rape didn’t even occur in the book. But, as offensive as rape is, I have a hard time taking Sen. Claire McCaskill’s outrage seriously. Game of Thrones is replete with revolting violence, cruelty, and severe immorality of every type, including sexual immorality, mental cruelty, and physical brutality. It’s an essentially medieval culture where women are bargaining chips in a contest of shifting family alliances. When you can be married against your consent to someone you don’t even know, our modern concept of rape needs to be modified a bit. In this particular case, there really isn’t any kind of sex Sansa could have with Ramsey that would be consensual by our standards. She loathes him and wants him dead. He could try being gentle, ingratiating, and tender and she’d still feel completely violated. She lives in a world in which women don’t get to choose their sexual partners, let alone when they want to have sex. All sex between Ramsey and Sansa will be rape, and that is basically true for many of the relationships in the show. Ramsey is himself a product of rape.
Later on, Ramsay asks his father about his mother. Roose tells him about how he killed a miller and raped his wife because they got married without his consent, and sometime later, the miller’s wife came to the Dreadfort and left the infant Ramsay with him. Roose had been prepared to throw Ramsay into the sea to drown, but stayed himself because he knew, deep down, that Ramsay was his son.
So, with all the carnage and cruelty and unforgivable behavior that is a routine part of Game of Thrones, the rape of Sansa Stark by her husband on their wedding night doesn’t stand out as particularly gratuitous or even disturbing. If it affected you strongly, it was probably less about seeing something horrible on the screen than about you caring for the character of Sansa Stark.
It’s true that some people might find it troubling because they’ve actually experienced something similar, whereas they have never seen a whole castle full of disarmed men flayed alive. But people may have been victims of incest, too, or they may have had a loved one abducted or disappear. Game of Thrones is clearly fantasy, but a lot of the bad behavior the show depicts is familiar to at least some unfortunate people.
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t be watching the show if you have a problem seeing women be mistreated or gays persecuted or people disemboweled, fed to dragons, burned at the stake, beheaded, or just disfigured. What goes on in Game of Thrones goes on in a different moral universe, and it has nothing to do with our contemporary problems with violent biker gangs or sexual assault in the military.
Here’s some sample dialogue between the drunk dwarf Tyrion and the ambitious eunuch Varys.
Tyrion Lannister: The road to Volantis? You said we are going to Meereen.
What’s in Volantis?
Varys: The road to Meereen.
Tyrion Lannister: And what do you hope to find at the end on the road to Meereen?
Varys: I told you. A ruler.
Tyrion Lannister: But you’ve already got a ruler. Everywhere has already got a ruler.
Every pile of shit on the side of every road has someone’s banner hanging from it.
Varys: You were quite good, do you know? At ruling. During your brief tenure as Hand.
Tyrion Lannister: I didn’t rule, I was a servant.
Varys: Still, a man of talent.
Tyrion Lannister: (considers this) Managed to kill a lot of people…
Varys: Yes, but you showed great promise in other areas as well.
That’s a different moral universe. Varys isn’t speaking entirely non-seriously here. He gives Tyrion credit for being capable of great violence, as this is at least somewhat desirable in a leader. You could call it a prerequisite for the job. Still, what Varys admires is Tyrion’s relative restraint and intelligence. Needless to say, in our present society, having killed a lot of people isn’t something we see as an essential and somewhat admirable quality in someone we want to lead us.
So, Sen. Claire McCaskill can sign off of watching Game of Thrones for a long list of reasons, including just her personal taste. But to single out one rape scene as being singularly offensive and over the top?
I think she’s trying to make herself look virtuous when she’s really just posing.
Claire McCaskill was barely willing to take a stand on the NON-FICTIONAL bullshit in Ferguson (and when she did, it was pitiful to say the least, she was more willing to defend her “friend” McCullough), but GoT…well, that FICTIONAL ACCOUNT was a bridge to far for her so she had to take a stand.
Eyeroll…I don’t even watch GoT. Either way, she can miss me with this grandstanding.
Some of McCaskill’s constituents must have deserved a pander. And then there’s the so very serious Democratic opposition to the war on women–at election time only.
There is no common American culture anymore. I know a little about Game of Thrones to know that it is not my kind of drama or fantasy. But to pretend that the imagery is not afoot in our world mistakes how gravely serious the state of the world has become. It is not just a matter of more information about brutality; the world has become more brutal as artificial austerity tightens. It is about current society if not presently, in prospect. Without the space ships of a generation ago. Or the veneer of chilvalric honor.
The imagination of radical scarcity, energy collapse, and social disintegration transformed into a prior age of collapse. Instead of society or state, there is only radical and vicious personal patronage and loyalty. Instead of systems that provide some formal distance and boring mechanical transactions, there is in-your-face rawness.
Game of Thrones is the ultimate libertarian fantasy. Likely it is also the destination of anarchist illusion. It is in fact the mindset out of which the GOP Congressional caucus and the gangbangers at Twin Peak come. Not to mention the cultured decadence of the financial shenanigans on Wall Street. All of that is why folks seek refuge in Game of Thrones. They can comfort themselves that at least is fictional.
No doubt Sen. McCaskill objects on the basis that it is “advertising for a lifestyle” instead of symptomatic of where the corruption in Congress of the milquetoast Democrats is taking us.
well it’s completely off base as far as depicting a middle ages social structure or concept of society goes [omnipresent, highly structured, characters would be very aware of where they are situated] because the ppl who produce it only understand individualism. otoh I only watched 1 episode and found it pretty annoying that it develops the audience’s investment in a character then kill off that character in the episode. but as far as the violence goes, in general, it has been pretty well documented that film and tv are allowed to depict violence as far as they want but depiction of affection between ppl, is highly restricted.
Although the costumes and trappings appear to be High Middle Ages, the politics as described resembles the period 500-800 AD. And the writers seem to take similar liberties as Shakespeare did with his treatment of decadent Rome. And excuse for airing the mood of sadism that was in the Elizabethan and in our zeitgeist beneath the veneer of “courtesy” (Elizabethan) and “normality” (21st Century global culture).
Needless to say, in our present society, having killed a lot of people isn’t something we see as an essential and somewhat admirable quality in someone we want to lead us.
A lot of people wouldn’t agree with that. In any case, it’s not a disqualifier.
I knew someone would pick at that sentence, but I left it anyway because it’s basically true.
It’s not just McCaskill. There’s a huge uproar from people who were last heard from when Cersei was raped. This is where they stake their claims: it’s OK to show obscenities beyond imagination, but not the comparatively familiar crime of rape.
I get the feeling that it’s due to regarding Sansa and even the vile Cersei as human Presumably because Sansa and Cersei seem like the kind of people they could watch Oprah with. Not like Roz the whore, or Craster’s ignorant girls, or foreign-ish Daenerys– no outrage on their behalf. And forget about the men: Theon, Ned Stark, Mance Rayder, the Viper, etc., are all chum.
It’s a basic failure to engage with the material, to just root for the characters you like. And since rape is the worst thing they can imagine happening to themselves, it must be the worst thing on the show.
But at least it’s dressed up with moral outrage. Huzzah.
I too found her sudden sanctimony…odd. On that show, people have been skinned alive, burned alive, had their eyes gouged out/head crushed in, had molten gold poured over their head, been torn apart by hunting dogs, been used as crossbow target practice, and been mutilated and tortured in every conceivable way. The show has also depicted rape on several occasions, including one instance where a brother quasi-raped his sister right next to their dead son’s corpse.
I can’t get my head around how McCaskill can be down with all of that but would draw the line at Sansa’s rape, which for the most part was handled offscreen. The society depicted on the show is so consistently, monstrously cruel that I don’t see how this one act of depravity could tip the scales for anyone who has seen all of the episodes that came before it. Maybe McCaskill hasn’t actually watched the show at all/that much and is looking to score cheap political points, like when Romney went to a NASCAR event.
… or better yet, the Roy Dotrice-narrated audiobooks. The books are like The Wire with Baltimore replaced by medieval world in which a few things we can do today with smartphones could be done with “magic”.
The television show, quite frankly, is a pathetic joke in spite of its great music, strong production values and stunningly brilliant acting (the only exception being the guy who plays Ramsay Bolton, who in my opinion is over-acting). But what the showruiners have done to the books is like what that other Bolton did to foreign policy and human rights. Game of Thrones is not-ready-for-HBO.
yeah…you’re just wrong on this. So, so wrong.
Not on the esteemed Senator. I could give a damn about her opinion. However, it is correct.
Here’s how I feel:
^THAT is the issue.
The book Sansa has a tremendous arc in which she grows steadily out of one female stereotype after another, finally (it would seem in the next book) arriving, like many other strong female characters in the books, at agency and self-determination.
The TV Sansa is a casualty of the dim-witted combination of the above character with a very minor character who is forced to endure infinitely worse treatment, making in the process, some powerful points about institutional abuse of females. The show does this all the time – they throw multiple plot lines (some that they’ve stupidly invented) onto whichever name actor is most convenient, ignoring the fact that the current absorbed role is totally out of character for the character in question.
A Song of Ice and Fire, after The Wire, is my favorite work of fiction, and its abuse on HBO has made me hate these two TV producers – Weiss & Benioff – more than any public figures this side of SCOTUS, the Bush Administration and the Tea Party.
There’s an argument that violence is being done to the plot and the characters when the television series deviates from the books in almost any way, but if you’ve been watching the show, Sansa Stark has been through so much and been transformed by tragedies so much bigger than this rape, that anyone who interprets the future solely though this incident will be showing that they have an agenda.
The moment she was told that she’d be marrying a Bolton, she was basically raped. Watching her reconcile herself to her fate and steel herself for eventual revenge was amazing, but that occurred before the wedding, before she even reached Winterfell.
… pretty dim-witted of her not to see that the whole scenario – and the books in general – are a clear and devastating indictment of the historic roots of female persecution and their continuation in current GOP policy.
Booman: “What goes on in Game of Thrones goes on in a different moral universe, and it has nothing to do with our contemporary problems with violent biker gangs or sexual assault in the military.”
If you read the books, you’ll see that this is absolutely wrong. The whole story is a brilliant allegory for everything that’s wrong with this country – VERY much including the examples you’ve cited.
Please listen to the audiobooks – I’d love to read more posts from you on this topic.
It’s McCaskill’s “Murphy Brown” moment. Politicians gonna pander. As for me, never seen “Game of Thrones” and your description has eliminated any possibility that I will.
I haven’t gotten to the latest episode, but it seems like the show runners have been struggling since the original material started running out. And they’ve definitely upped the titillation whenever possible, often to the detriment of the product.
That said, any honest reckoning with war would acknowledge the brutality with which citizens — women especially — are treated.
Yikes. I’ll stick to the cooking channel instead.