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| "I'm just a young girl with no experience in war..." |
Nerds versus feminists. Who you got?
This piece Enter Ye Myne Mystic World of Gayng-Raype: What the “R” Stands for in “George R.R. Martin” written by a someone who obviously doesn't believe half of what she wrote, or at least didn't think about her subject matter hard enough to make a good case for her premise (sooo like a girl, am I right?) was a big deal on the internet last week. I'd been planning to respond to it, but I came across two other piece that did a much better job than I would have, including The League of Ordinary Gentlemen with Sexism in Fantasy, and this piece on Think Progress Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece.
I thought the piece itself was simply a very successful piece of feminist reactionary trolling. (I do, however, admit that the Orientalism stuff is a little, ehh.) The whole time I've been reading the series I've found the agency of the major female characters to be surprisingly unstereotypical to fantasy, with many of them coming off much better than you would see elsewhere. Brienne is literally the only true knight in the book. Arya is a bad ass 10 year old ninja. Cersei runs the realm. Not well, but still. Catelyn makes mistakes, but she is honorable (as anyone here can be) and forceful.
It would be unbelievable if rape wasn't a real, horrible threat in Westeros. Rape is a huge part of war even today, and always has been. Writing about it doesn't equal romanticizing it, which is one of the biggest problems I have with this type of feminist critiques of works like this. The fact that someone, somewhere, might inadvertently glorify an act of violence toward women does not mean that we should therefor never be allowed to depict that sort of thing again. Besides, there's probably more sexual violence done to men on the whole anyway. Geldings anyone? Yikes. The Unsullied? This is an equal-opportunity land of shit where people suffer constantly. Eliminating sexual violence from that equation would just seem forced.
Alyssa Rosenberg's undressing of the piece is thoughtful and effective, unlike my ham-fisted attempt. She writes:
It strikes me as oddly myopic to read a novel where literally every character makes grave strategic miscalculations as arguing that women’s bad decisions are caused by their lady bits. What’s interesting about A Song of Ice and Fire is that it depicts a world where norms and rules of engagement are shifting, rendering outcomes unpredictable for men and women alike. There is no man who seems like a more gifted rule or powerful strategic thinker than any given woman in Westeros or Essos, except perhaps Doran Martell and Varys, neither of whose plans have come to fruition yet, so it’s a bit too soon to tell. But it is telling that Sady entirely omits from her analysis Ygritte, Jon Snow’s lover, who keeps him alive when he’s failing to integrate with the wildlings; Melisandre, who is the most powerful religious figure in the novels and the only advisor who manages to keep her ruler on a trajectory that’s both strategic and moral; the Sand Snakes, powerful, aggressive Dornish women who are setting out to set various parts of Doran’s plan in action; Asha Greyjoy, by far the most strategically intelligent person in the Iron Islands; and Meera Reed, who manages to keep Bran, Hodor, and her brother alive on their quest to find the three-eyed crow; that she ignores that Brienne of Tarth is the highest living exemplar of chivalric ideals.
A world where women are perfectly safe, perfectly competent, and society is perfectly engineered to produce those conditions strikes me as one where we can’t tell any very interesting stories about women’s struggles and women’s liberation. If we tell ourselves stories in order to live, it doesn’t strike me that we do ourselves any favors as active feminists by leaching depictions of sexual violence, women making bad decisions, and institutionalized sexism from our fiction, or by dismissing entire swaths of consumers or modes of consuming fiction.
E.D. Kain takes particular umbrage with the suggestion that Martin is somehow glorifying the books' rapists. "This is wildly untrue to the point of being a fiction in and of itself," he says.
The Night’s Watch is never presented as honorable. A few of the sworn brothers are, but most of them are presented as rapists and thieves. Few are loyal, fewer still can be trusted. In Dance (minor spoiler) Jon spends a great deal of time thinking about how to protect women from rape at the hands of his sworn brothers.
King Robert is hardly loveable either. The more we learn, the less honorable he comes across, and Ned’s loyalty to him seems more and more ill-placed. He’s a drunk, a slob, a fool, a womanizer. He ruins the kingdom, brings it to bankruptcy. Even his rebellion is called into question. Even his love for Lyanna Stark.
Meanwhile we admire someone like Ned or Jon Snow precisely because they aren’t horrible to women.
Dany fiercely opposes the rapes carried out by the Dothraki (though, admittedly, Martin’s handling of other races/cultures is a bit on the clumsy side, though I would not go so far as to call it racism). Khal Drogo is a complicated character. Yes, Dany does end up loving him. Yes, that does make me uncomfortable. But again, we’re dealing with a culture here that is very different from our own, and Drogo acts as a protective figure for Dany. In many ways the relationship reveals just how vulnerable she is, and underscores her emergence as a strong, principled leader when she emerges from the fire, reborn, mother of dragons.
Nor are the Ironmen presented as somehow good or honorable, except for Asha Greyjoy who is admirable in her own right (and a woman!). Victarion is cruel and his sexism and brutality only help to illustrate just how awful it would be if he did take Daenerys as his wife (which he plans to do by force).
Sandor Glegane is a complicated character, but I have absolutely no recollection of him “planning to rape Sansa” at all. He was one of the few people who, in some small way, actually tried to protect her.
And then there’s Tyrion. Fan and author favorite. He’s forced to watch as his father orders all his guards to rape his first wife. He’s then forced by his father to join in the rape as well. If anything his father is sexually assaulting his own son. Maybe he should have fought back. But I’m pretty sure this is more of a reflection on the wickedness of Tywin than it is a glorification of rape at the hands of Tyrion.
Yes, Tyrion turns to whores for comfort – for love. He laughs and jokes about it, but it isn’t presented as very funny. It’s actually really sad.
Most importantly, Tyrion does not inherit his father’s cruelty any more than he inherits his stature. Sady leave out entirely that he doesn’t rape Sansa. Ignoring this entirely, she points out that he “gets a boner” for her. In a world where thirteen year olds are married off all the time, I think it says more about Tyrion’s character that he doesn’t rape her than any boner he may have had (his arousal made him uncomfortable). He is forced to marry Sansa and by all rights in the brutal, chauvinistic society that they live in, he is required to rape her by law and custom. And yet he doesn’t, and we admire him all the more for it, despite his many flaws. Tyrion isn’t presented as a glorified rapist – but rather the exact opposite. You have to be willfully misreading these books to draw the conclusions Sady draws.
That's exactly what she was doing.
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8 comments:
is the word "trolling" racist against trolls or is it a reference to the fishing technique?
The list of powerful women left out of the "analysis" here is long.
Lukeypoo sez, "Besides, there's probably more sexual violence done to men on the whole anyway."
Ask and ye shall receive. allhomo
i meant in the books
There are two things that feminists and conservatives have in common. 1) They are incapable of being funny and do not uderstand satire. 2) They both mistake their own inability to separate fantasy from reality as a universal malady that somehow renders all works of fiction deadly tools rather than fodder for the imagination.
The rest of us are usually capable of recognizing the difference.
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