http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2011/08/29/alyssa-rosenberg-on-a-game-of-thrones-and-that-sady-doyle-piece/ - she has most of the points that I would make. Mostly along the lines of the fact that we do not watch Mad Men because we love glass ceilings and male dominated office politics.
Middle Ages Literature is VERY different than Middle Ages history and social settings. Most of the Middle Ages literature was written as a way of endorsing a misogynist worldview in which knights were able to dominate the poor and men were able to dominate women under the bullshit excuse of "courtly love". So many of these stories involve the knight being all passionate and obsessed that the woman's viewpoint is not even mentioned. Hell, Chaucer's Miller's Tale is a feminist narrative by comparison.
And right now I am reading La Morte D'Arthur and I usually am not shocked by much but there's a very cheerful acceptance of rape culture in the book that is way more disturbing than anything today. One of the stories concerns a farmer's son who seems more noble than everyone else and it's revealed that his mother was raped by King Pellinore before she was married. So that's why he's of noble lineage.
And since it happened before she was married, it wasn't adultery. So everyone is happy.
Seriously. The kid is just happy that he's a knight now and he's not terribly concerned with the fact that King Pellinore raped his mother.
But OF COURSE people don't cite LOTR as an example of Middle Ages brutality because it's a ROMANTICIZED version of the Middle Ages in which kings were noble and wonderful unless their servants got to them first, everyone lived in tune with nature, wars were fought with swords and it was all so much cleaner than the trenches of WWI. And women were shuffled off to the side until it was time for them to kill Wrights based on the technicality of having vaginas - only to be then promptly shuffled off stage so the boys can be the big heroes.
Game of Thrones depicts misogyny. It does not endorse misogyny. It depicts a world in which everyone is brutal and playing at power games. I'm not "excusing" Game of Thrones because I get off on a social order in which women and men are trapped in shitty gender roles and I'm getting off on the rape culture that it depicts. I'm respecting it for being honest in its portrayal of the horribleness of this social milieu even as I'm enjoying the ways that the female characters are able to negotiate, subvert and oppose the rampant misogyny.
Of course, I also love the fourth book precisely because that's the one that is most concerned with gender politics (introducing an egalitarian kingdom of Dorne, giving the perspective of Cersei, Briene and Arya, etc.) and most seem to think that one is the "boring one." So I can't really speak for others.
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Middle Ages Literature is VERY different than Middle Ages history and social settings. Most of the Middle Ages literature was written as a way of endorsing a misogynist worldview in which knights were able to dominate the poor and men were able to dominate women under the bullshit excuse of "courtly love". So many of these stories involve the knight being all passionate and obsessed that the woman's viewpoint is not even mentioned. Hell, Chaucer's Miller's Tale is a feminist narrative by comparison.
And right now I am reading La Morte D'Arthur and I usually am not shocked by much but there's a very cheerful acceptance of rape culture in the book that is way more disturbing than anything today. One of the stories concerns a farmer's son who seems more noble than everyone else and it's revealed that his mother was raped by King Pellinore before she was married. So that's why he's of noble lineage.
And since it happened before she was married, it wasn't adultery. So everyone is happy.
Seriously. The kid is just happy that he's a knight now and he's not terribly concerned with the fact that King Pellinore raped his mother.
But OF COURSE people don't cite LOTR as an example of Middle Ages brutality because it's a ROMANTICIZED version of the Middle Ages in which kings were noble and wonderful unless their servants got to them first, everyone lived in tune with nature, wars were fought with swords and it was all so much cleaner than the trenches of WWI. And women were shuffled off to the side until it was time for them to kill Wrights based on the technicality of having vaginas - only to be then promptly shuffled off stage so the boys can be the big heroes.
Game of Thrones depicts misogyny. It does not endorse misogyny. It depicts a world in which everyone is brutal and playing at power games. I'm not "excusing" Game of Thrones because I get off on a social order in which women and men are trapped in shitty gender roles and I'm getting off on the rape culture that it depicts. I'm respecting it for being honest in its portrayal of the horribleness of this social milieu even as I'm enjoying the ways that the female characters are able to negotiate, subvert and oppose the rampant misogyny.
Of course, I also love the fourth book precisely because that's the one that is most concerned with gender politics (introducing an egalitarian kingdom of Dorne, giving the perspective of Cersei, Briene and Arya, etc.) and most seem to think that one is the "boring one." So I can't really speak for others.