It's all about the perverted sex -_-

[dragonimp]

The show has been elaborately made to the point that producers turned to a professional at something called the Language Creation Society to design a vocabulary for the savage Dothraki nomads who provide some of the more Playboy-TV-style plot points and who are forced to speak in subtitles. Like “The Tudors” and “The Borgias” on Showtime and the “Spartacus” series on Starz, “Game of Thrones,” is a costume-drama sexual hopscotch, even if it is more sophisticated than its predecessors. It says something about current American attitudes toward sex that with the exception of the lurid and awful “Californication,” nearly all eroticism on television is past tense. The imagined historical universe of “Game of Thrones” gives license for unhindered bed-jumping — here sibling intimacy is hardly confined to emotional exchange.

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that 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. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

From here.

:|
As a woman who's been reading fantasy since she discovered reading, I ... don't really know what to say to that. So many wrong assumptions I don't even know where to start.

Comments

[militsa.livejournal.com]

Wow, fuck her, seriously.

How can she say such dismissive things about women's reading tastes? I personally know more women who like fantasy over Lorrie Moore. Women who prefer not to read "Oprah" books don't join book clubs (I don't). This really makes me angry enough to sign into my NYTimes account and make a comment.

[binaryalchemist.livejournal.com]

Have you read the books yet? I've read all but the last in the series and have loved them--they are riveting and has more than its share of strong female characters, especially Arya Stark and Danerys Tagaryen...and plenty of honorable male characters like Eddard Stark and Jon Snow. I am hoping that HBO does not fuck it up.

[eve_n_furter]

This smells like projection: big, big issues with sex, identity and womanhood. She also kicks in all directions without making much sense. Is she indignant because it has too much sex, or that people enjoy it in the wrong way or what?

[shawk.livejournal.com]

???!!!

Maybe they made the series more about sex than I remember the books being, but I didn't read the books because of the sex, thanks. Nor did I read the many other fantasy books I have read solely because the author threw in some sex so my poor little lady brain wouldn't get bored of all the politics and swords and complicated stuff (or.. whatever her point was). I don't even know how to respond because the underlying assumptions are just... wrong.

[zwickygirl.livejournal.com]

(I tried to comment but I don't think it worked? Trying again.)

There's a pretty funny response to the NY Times article here:
http://io9.com/#!5792574/really-why-would-men-ever-want-to-watch-game-of-thrones

The thing that stuck with me after reading the Song of Ice and Fire books wasn't the sex - it was the fact that every time I started to like a character they ended up dead in some horrible way. Not good books for bed time reading, but excellent otherwise.