Stones, Bone And Sexual Inequality

Like thousands of Game of Thrones fans across the nation, on Monday night Neela Debnath will be sitting down to watch the third season of the show. She is looking forward to seeing how the story develops, which characters get killed off and who will get a step closer to taking the Iron Throne. What she won’t be looking forward to, she writes in today's Independent, is having a pair of breasts thrust into her face every week for the next two-and-a-half months...

For those who've never seen Game of Thrones, the series is about the power struggle between several families to win the throne and rule over the fictional land of Westeros. The series has been adapted from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, and along with the uncompromising violence the show is characterised by its sexual content. On the whole the sex scenes in Game of Thrones have been taken directly from the books and serve a purpose, compared to shows such as Rome and Spartacus: Blood and Sand where the sex only really adds to the aesthetic.

Indeed I would argue that the majority of the sex scenes are integral to the plot of Game of Thrones and are important because they define the characters. Sex is part of the human condition and by showing the wants and desires of these characters they become more believable and rounded as literary creations. For instance, Theon Greyjoy uses sex to demonstrate his power and nobility to others. Whether it involves sleeping with the daughter of a sea captain or unwittingly fondling his sister (it’s a long story), the overall impression is that he constantly needs to prove himself.


Saying this, I've also found that at times the series has featured sexual scenes that are unnecessary and add very little to the plot. In the first season a brothel owner instructs two prostitutes on the art of making love and orders them to give him a demonstration. The whole sequence played out like a piece of girl-on-girl action for the fan boys and came out of the blue in the overriding scheme of things. Unsurprisingly, this scene was not in the book and in my opinion added very little to the plot, apart from shoehorning in what was essentially some softcore porn. It might not surprise viewers to learn that some of the scenes were so raunchy that a number of actresses turned down parts on the show. Porn stars were even drafted in to play the more risqué roles.

Game of Thrones is a wonderfully rich and complex story with the depth and detail of The Wire, and production values on par with Boardwalk Empire. The makers simply do not need to stray into softcore territory with superfluous sex scenes to hold their audience’s attention. I think it’s safe to say the makers won viewers over the moment Bran Stark was thrown out of a tower in the first episode. Some of the adult content works, but the additional sex scenes feel unnecessary and comes across as the thinking man’s porn of choice – man being the key word.

My main gripe is not with the sex itself but with the disparity between male and female nudity. Nine times out of 10 it is a woman who is seen disrobed while her male counterpart remains clothed. It is something that is inherent across the film and television industry and needs to be rectified starting with Game of Thrones. If there are going to be sex scenes then surely both male and female characters should both bare their flesh rather than just one party? Interestingly, I posed the question of the inequality in nudity in Game of Thrones to several of the show’s stars last year and got a particularly strong response from one actress. Natalia Tena, who played the Osha and filmed a scene involving full frontal nudity said: "I think it’s really unfair, every actor, any actress has had her tits out. Every single actress I know. Blokes it’s like, let’s see some cock. Do you know what I mean? Let’s make it more even."

It shows that something needs to change in the industry. Why shouldn’t the male form be celebrated as much as the female form? After all we are living in an ever more sexualised society where the lines between art and porn in the mainstream are blurring. As a female fan I find myself seeing a lot of women of Game of Thrones in the buff and it feels rather disconcerting. Surely the makers should be catering for female viewers as well as male viewers? Women make up a good chunk of the audience, so perhaps next year they can feature a scene in a brothel where we are shown the rent boys of Westeros or the bed slaves of Essos? Just bring some parity to the nudity for the fan girls. Or, in the words of wildling temptress Ygritte, show us the stones and bone.

Crucially, the argument laid out by Debnath is a direct criticism of the show itself and not of the source material. As Jezebel's Tracie Egan Morrissey points out, despite how boob-y its small screen adaptation has become, those who've read the five books in Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series know that the real meat isn't on the female characters' chests, but in their stories. HBO sex scenes be damned, she writes, the women of Westeros are more than sex objects — they're subjects of their own narratives. And it's something that Martin, as a "feminist at heart," did deliberately.

There's a reason that half of the fantasy series' avid fan base is made up of women. While the realm that he has created isn't exactly woman-friendly, the hardships and limitations it creates for its female inhabitants lends itself well to the rich development of their characters. Women like Cersei Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen, Brienne of Tarth, and even Sansa Stark, are not only multi-layered, but emblematic of the different ways that women respond to being designated as second-class citizens. What makes their stories interesting — certainly more so than someone like Robb Stark — is how they manoeuver in a realm that values power as its highest commodity when they were born with very little of it, strictly by nature of being women.

In an interview with the Telegraph, Martin credits his "humanizing" of his female characters with his feminism, even though he's not sure if he's allowed to be one. It is those richly imagined female characters in particular, thinks The Telegraph's Jessica Salter, that set Martin apart from other fantasy writers, and have won him a legion of female fans; women readers make up slightly more than half of his fanbase, he thinks. "It’s one of the things that please me most, the fact that women love my characters." says Martin. "I’m lucky that I’ve got such a big project; it means I can have lots of different types of female characters and so avoid stereotypes, which is what fantasy writers can end up doing."

Typically fantasy writers paint women either as angels or demons. But Martin’s women are more three dimensional - part of his creative appeal. They include the beautiful and manipulative Cersei Lannister, who would defend her children and family to the death; Lady Catelyn Stark, a strong mother, devoted wife and a shrewd political strategist not afraid of a 300 mile trek on a horse to join her son in battle; Ayra Stark, a nine-year-old tomboy who wants her own sword and Daenerys Targaryen, who wants to cross the narrow sea to win back her father’s throne. Oh and not forgetting the most awesome Brienne of Tarth, a female knight played by the 6’ 3’’ actress Gwendoline Christie.

So how does he get inside the head of, say, his teenage characters? "Yes, you're right I've never been an eight year old girl," he says, "but I've also never been an exiled princess, or a dwarf or bastard. What I have been is human. I just write human characters." He also gets plenty of feedback from his fans. "Some women hate the female characters," he says. "But importantly they hate them as people, because of things that they've done, not because the character is underdeveloped." The pitfalls of lots of other fantasy texts, he says is when writers stray into writing in sterotypes. But because Martin has a sprawling world with thousands of characters (and five books to do it in), he has the luxury of developing each one fully. "Male or female, I believe in painting in shades of grey," he says. "All of the characters should be flawed; they should all have good and bad, because that's what I see. Yes, it’s fantasy, but the characters still need to be real."

Martin should be used to female adoration by now. Although he has only hit mainstream consciousness in the last few years (his books have sold more than 20m worldwide), he has been a minor celebrity on the science fiction circuit for years. His wife’s first words to him, when she met him at a science fiction conference in 1975 were that his first novel, A Song for Lya, 'made her cry'. Now he is mobbed wherever he goes - his trademark fisherman's cap an instant giveaway that he is the man behind the globally successful franchise. His books feature sex pretty heavily (to say the least) but it is something that has been ramped up even further for the television show. Martin simply delights in describing sensory details, particularly sex and food; there is a lot of both. "Sex is an important part of life; it’s something that gives our lives meaning, for good or for ill, so I think it should be there and should be shown," he reasons.

Yet some critics have complained that there are too many sexual descriptions (HBO has, of course, ramped it up further still for television). Often crucial conversations between characters happen while one of them is having sex (not always mentioned in the book) - something that has the American academic Myles McNutt to term them 'sexposition'. "Is it simply because we couldn’t be trusted to pay attention otherwise?" McNutt asked on his blog. "It’s as though they think having a prostitute appear and only talking, without actually having sex, would be some sort of cop-out. In my view, at least, it’s the other way around: it just feels lazy."

Gina Bellafonte in The New York Times went further. Last year she wrote: "all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise." The truth was, she sniffed, "Game of Thrones is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half." Female GOT fans lept to Martin's defence, including Emily Nussbaum from the New Yorker who wrote that the strength of the series was "its insight into what it means to be excluded from power: to be a woman, or a bastard, or a ‘half man’."

But Bellafonte's comments still rankle with Martin a year later because he is, at heart, a feminist, despite being cautious about admitting it. "There was a period in my life when I would have called myself a feminist, back in the seventies, when the feminist movement was really getting going and growing out of the counter culture of the sixties," he says. "But the feminist movement has changed. Sometime in the 80s and 90s I read some pieces by women saying that no man can ever be a feminist and you shouldn't call yourself that because it's hypocritical, so I backed off. I thought if the current crop of feminists believes that no man can be a feminist, then I guess I’m not one." He then chuckles behind his candyfloss beard. "To me being a feminist is about treating men and women the same," he said. "I regard men and women as all human - yes there are differences, but many of those differences are created by the culture that we live in, whether it's the medieval culture of Westeros, or 21st century western culture."