A (Partial) Defense Of Nudity

When Myles McNutt popularized the term sexposition last year to describe scenes in Game of Thrones where one character explains a concept while other characters have sex unrelated to that conversation in the same frame, he came up with something really funny and useful. But, thinks Alyssa Rosenberg, people have now ended up suggesting that all the sex and nudity in Game of Thrones is prurient rather than relevant and feels really strongly that isn’t true. In truth, she believes, they’re being somewhat more thoughtful in season 2.


There are scenes in season 1 that are just ludicrous, admits Rosenberg — Littlefinger’s yammering around his prostitutes, the Dothraki wedding sequences. That said, she feels nudity is a driver of personality more the show got credit for in Season 1. There was something really likable, for example, about the good cheer of the prostitutes bursting in on Tyrion in our introduction to the character. It’s okay to use female nudity solely to advance our impression of a male character, but given the show’s very impressive investment in Peter Dinklage as a sex symbol, Rosenberg thinks that scene was kind of remarkable. She also liked the scene of Ros flashing Theon as she leaves for King’s Landing, a moment that showed her comfort with her body as a commodity while also reinforcing Theon as kind of a randy idiot. And Dany’s nudity at the end of the finale felt powerful for the same reason Margaery’s does: her femininity is as exposed as it can get, which should make her vulnerable, and instead it’s a moment of triumph and dignity for her.

This season, there have been a couple stand-alone examples that have felt particularly important. When Theon has sex with the daughter of the ship captain who’s bringing him back to his childhood home on Pyke, the show spends a lot of time lingering on her face and body, neither of which are particularly conventionally attractive. But Theon ends up complicit in our judgement of her. He tells her to shut her mouth so he won’t have to look at her teeth. He ignores her requests to go with him when he leaves the ship, and ignores her when she says her father will punish her for sleeping with him. He’s using her, and assumes that because she’s an ugly girl, she ought to be sexually available to him and grateful for the attention. The whole scene, including her nakedness, is about explaining Theon’s sexual entitlement, his voraciousness, the inflated sense of self that will later lead to his spectacular humiliation.

You can feel the same way about Margaery Tyrell’s scene with her husband, Renly Baratheon, argues Rosenberg. The scene starts with him acknowledging how beautiful she is. But he’s profoundly uncomfortable with her naked body, repulsed by the sexual attraction he knows he’s supposed to be feeling. The contrast between her beautiful body and his reaction, which I thought was a really beautiful piece of acting, is part of what makes the scene. The other part of what makes the scene great is her utter comfort in her body, in her nakedness. Margaery may be a woman, and she may be in a situation where most of us might feel sexually vulnerable. But she’s better equipped than her husband to talk about the fact that they need to get pregnant, and quickly, and she’s more at home in her body, what her body craves, and what other people want her body to be used for than Renly is. Even Melisandre’s sort of cheesy seduction of Stannis Baratheon bears literal fruit in the terms of a quick-gestating smoke monster.

Equally, she insists, the scene where Joffrey orders Ros to first beat Daisy and then rape her with a scepter was the perfect example of why people shouldn’t dismiss nude scenes and sex scenes as they come up in the show and forget that they might pay off later. We meet Daisy when Ros is giving her a tour of Littlefinger’s brothel, including scenes where she’s instructing other prostitutes on how to fake pleasure with clients more convincingly. We see Daisy naked in an interrupted tryst with Pycelle, huddling naked on the floor as her client gets his beard cut off and sent to prison, and we see Tyrion pay her off, adding a tip and a smile. These scenes, as well as non-sexual ones like Daisy crying over a colleague’s murdered child, give us a relationship with these small characters (neither of whom exist in the books, by the way). And then we see these women turned against each other, one forced to torture the other at pain of death. Without those previous scenes, Joffrey would be torturing anonymous whores. With them, he’s torturing people. That arc gives Game of Thrones a lot of credit. You would be hard-pressed to dismiss a silly sex scene now, because how do we know it’s not going to pay off painfully later down the road?

Besides, we actually don’t see a lot of the female characters nude. Two of them are children. Catelyn is a widow deep in mourning. On a factual note, Lena Headey may be naked less as Cersei because she has significant tattoos and covering them up would be a lot of work, so it may just be a tech thing. Brienne is a knight. Interestingly, we haven’t seen Shae naked at all this season, though she is Tyrion’s lover and a sex worker. I guess, concludes Rosenberg, I don’t mind seeing women naked at the same time that the show is giving them personality and humanity they don’t have in the novels. The show may make Ros and Daisy naked, but Ros is literally a line in the novels and Daisy doesn’t exist at all. Now, they’re people to us, and hurting them makes us feel pain.
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Skin Wearing Thin

Game of Thrones, HBO’s hit drama based on George R.R. Martin’s much-loved “Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy series, can be counted on for a few things: severed heads, insider intrigue, mythical creatures, and a huge and confusing cast of characters. Oh, and naked women. Lots of them. Writing in the Washington Post, columnist Anna Holmes questions whether the constant exposure of skin is starting to wear a little thin.

Frequent and often outlandish, the show’s eroticism often overshadows or distracts from the actual story, thinks Holmes. It’s not just me, she says: After the copious amounts of tits & ass during the show’s first season reached a nadir of absurdity with a now-notorious scene involving two prostitutes pleasuring each other, Onion AV Club television critic Myles McNutt was moved to coin the term “sexposition” to describe the way the show’s producers often arbitrarily shoehorn sex into the narrative as a way to cover up potentially snooze-inducing exposition.


The second season isn’t much better. April 8’s episode, “The Night Lands,” depicted a three-way peep show of sorts that seemed to serve no purpose except to show as many kinds of heterosexual sex in as short a time span as possible, states Holmes. And on April 14, just two weeks after the new season began, NBC’s Saturday Night Live ran a faux promo joking that “Throne’s” success is partly attributable to the involvement of a creative consultant named Adam Friedberg, a fictional 13-year-old boy.



HBO is by no means the only cable channel to traffic in gratuitous nudity, she notes, but it may be the most notorious, what with a backlist that includes Rome, Deadwood and The Sopranos. But unlike those shows, Game of Thrones is based on a much-loved and closely analyzed series of books, which means that fans can — and do — compare the scenes Martin imagined with the ones that show-runners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff often arbitrarily insert.

These scenes seem not only forced but exploitative. As Huffington Post television critic Mo Ryan put it in a review: “Sometimes ‘Game of Thrones’ uses sexual scenes to shed light on character. But quite often, it shows naked women because it can.” It is telling that few, if any, of the series’ most fully realized and complex female characters — and there are many — are ever shown naked, with the exception of Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen and the just-introduced Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer). And it’s probably no coincidence that as the character of Ros — a titian-haired prostitute played by Esme Bianco — becomes more nuanced the less the series requires her to disrobe.

Television critic Alyssa Rosenberg, a writer for the political and pop culture Web site Think Progress, disputes the proposition that sex and nudity that don’t appear in the book serve no purpose in the series. “I feel nudity is a driver of personality more than the show gets credit for” in Season 1, Rosenberg says. “And I guess I don’t mind seeing women naked at the same time that the show is giving them personality and humanity they don’t have in the novels.”

One could also argue that the series’ creators are only trying to communicate Westerosi society’s disregard for the lives of women or trying to establish a connection between the way they are objectified and the accompanying, constant threat of assault, but the show’s softly lit and erotic staging of any scene involving a naked woman evokes Playboy of the 1960s and ’70s more than it underscores sexual politics or a culture of violence. “While readers wade through sex, violence, and even sexual assault as part of the ruthlessness of Martin’s fictional world, television audiences can seemingly only handle two out of three,” wrote the Daily Beast’s Jace Lacob last June.

As for the men, well, they aren’t asked to bare all very often, if ever observes Holmes. By my count, she states, it has happened only once, to actor Alfie Allen (brother of pop singer Lily) who plays the turncoatish and arrogant Iron Islander Theon Greyjoy. But Allen’s nude body is not presented as pleasurable eye candy; viewers are not persuaded to desire him but to despise him. And the man straight female fans are arguably most likely to want to see disrobe, Kit Harrington’s Jon Snow, is likely to remain bundled up in the animal skins and iron armor favored by his military brotherhood, the Night’s Watch. Said one Twitter user, @Aurelia_Nicole, “I understand sex as a currency in Westeros but I need it to be a bit more egalitarian.”

Like the writers of “SNL,” Homes insists she is trying to have a sense of humor about Game of Thrones — or, at the very least, look on the bright side of all the breast-baring. It’s a great source of unintentional humour, for starters. She insists she can often tell by the sort of dress a female character is wearing whether she is likely to disrobe. (If it has buttons, they will come undone.) She also marvels at the semi-medieval society’s standards for personal grooming, which seem to anticipate the Brazilian waxes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: calling the pubic hair pattern so often seen on Westerosi women “the King’s Landing Strip.”

Yet there is something wearying and numbing about the series’ relentless oogling of the female form, concludes Holmes. It’s a constant reminder and reinforcement of the fact that pop-culture creators make content mainly for heterosexual men and then, maybe, for everyone else. They get tiring, these continued nods to the male gaze. (The implication is either that women aren’t watching or that the women who are watching have no interest in erotic eye candy of their own.) They’re also alienating, particularly when the sex seems to serve no purpose other than to titillate. Ultimately, her cluck-clucks of disapproval are as much about the situating of women as sex objects as they are my own sudden and reluctant prudishness.
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The Sexplanation Show

Corrina Lawson is relatively new to Game of Thrones fandom. She got hooked on the story about halfway through HBO’s televised adaptation of the first of George R.R. Martin’s books and when the show ended she kept reading. Having caught up with A Dance of Dragons, she then started indulging in the same pastime as everyone else who’d read the books — namely examining the show for differences. So far, she notes, the biggest difference is that the HBO show seems determined to introduce sex as a method to explain the hefty backstory in the books. Writing in Wired, Lawson states she finds this frustrating, a little bit offensive but mostly detrimental to the story.


In season one, she notes, there was Petyr Baelish’s monologue about who he really is set to the tune of two female prostitutes learning how to pretend to please each other for a male audience. Grand Maester Pycelle had a lovely morning with yet another prostitute, then we had a scene with Theon Greyjoy and his hired companion to explain why Theon is, well, Theon. (The same prostitute was in both Theon’s scene and Balish’s scene. I can just see the wardrobe order for the actress: ‘supply this one with easily shed tunics.’) Now, Shae’s night with Tyrion is in the books and Cersei’s liaison with Lancel is in the books too. Those were absolutely necessary scenes, especially given how those liaisons turn out.

But in only four episodes the second season, we’ve had Joffrey beat up two prostitutes hired by his uncle, Margaery Tyrell’s nudity to add something to Renly’s story, namely that he’s really, really gay, as if we didn’t know that from his (mostly clothed) scene with his lover, Loras; Baelish again, explaining to one of his prostitutes how he’s going to sell her to a seriously abusive person if she doesn’t stop being upset about watching a baby be destroyed; and Theon again, with the daughter of the captain of a ship and trying to fondle his sister. Theon’s escapades are in the book, too, and the scene with Yara is character driven, so you can give that a pass too. We also won’t count Melisandre’s “your vagina is haunted” moment either because that was one of the most harrowing scenes in the books, concedes Lawson, before countering you can count her and Stannis on top of the battle plans in an earlier episode, however. Seeing Stannis have sex was not on anyone's list of most wanted scenes in an adaptation.

Lawson insists she has no objection to nudity on cable channels. Spartacus on Starz is one of her favorite shows and you really can’t fit more nudity or sexual escapades than are in that show. But there’s a balance to Spartacus, in that the men are often as the women to be involved in either sex or violence and the nudity is equal opportunity for the most part. It feels part of the fabric of the story.

I also don’t find A Song of Fire and Ice as a whole anti-female or anti-feminist as some other critics of Martin’s series have. He’s chosen to write in a medieval-style world where women are valued as they were in our medieval age: for the children they produce and the alliances they can make. HBO has even made Catelyn Stark somewhat stronger on screen than in the books, especially in this new season. I credit that to the actress, Michelle Fairley. Similarly, Cersei comes off as more sympathetic on the show than in the books. There’s also Daenrys and Arya, characters who are as strong in the show as in the books.

Yet this constant need on the part of HBO to insert naked women to let us know that, say, Joffrey is a sadistic creep or that Baelish is someone not to be trusted is completely unnecessary and throws you out of the story, argues Lawson. It was very clear that Joffrey is a nasty piece by the scene where he wants to have Sansa beaten naked in front of his court and Baelish’s betrayal of the honorable Ned Stark last season is plenty of reason to remember that he’s not a good guy nor one to be trusted in any form.

There’s so much story in these books and some of it, such as the full story of Davos Seaworth, get only a quick mention instead of the greater focus that it deserves. We could see more of Joffrey’s Kingsguard and what they’re like and more of the City Watch as well. I know what they’re like from the books but if I were watching the show without reading, the banishment of Commander of the City Watch wouldn’t have meant nearly as much.

For this reason she hopes the trend doesn’t continue because it’s frustrating to watch the show resort to nudity as a device to catch viewers when the books are so rich. With Joffrey’s scene last week, this is now firmly a trend. Enough. There are plenty of actual reasons for nudity to happen for the story, we don’t need to add more because someone high up on the show or at HBO thinks the story needs more breasts to be good.

Because what’s happening is exactly the opposite, she concludes: it’s making the story worse.
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