![]() The binary “X is in the work because X is in the world” ignores the absolutely crucial fact that there are many, many ways something can be “in” a work. Novels don’t just talk about stuff: there are many ways of representing anything–violence against women, to take one example. Henry, your use of “talking about” is a dead giveaway here. 12įwiw, not read the books after glancing at the first and don’t want to but the people who thought they were playing cards to defeat Doyle were mostly people who don’t know how the game of cultural analysis works, which leads me to think things aren’t so simple. But still, when you have a book with an unrealistically exaggerated and vividly portrayed amount of sexualized violence against the female characters, a statement that any reading that concludes that the violence is meant to be titillating on some level can’t be in good faith doesn’t seem to me to be defensible. Now, there’s a fair argument that there’s a wildly inflated amount of ghastly things happening to all the characters, male and female, compared to any likely slice of life from a real-world historically analogous period, and so the extraordinary amount of sexualized violence is just the result of that across the board inflation. The amount of sexual violence against the upper-class female characters is at least inflated a great deal for the sake of adding exciting incident to the books. ![]() Conditions in the GRRM books are much rapier (if that’s a word, which I’m sure it isn’t) for aristocratic women than conditions in corresponding historical periods actually were sure, knightly chivalry was a crock, but plausibly chaste and unraped noblewomen were a dynastic asset which it was generally understood as wasteful to devalue by raping them (outside of involuntary marriage/marital rape). I don’t think that there is any plausible good faith reading of GRRM under which he is talking about violence to women for the creepy kicks that Doyle says he is. It’s clear that he talks about this stuff precisely to make it clear how shitty a deal mediaeval society was for women, even powerful ones (one of the threads running through these books is how much knightly chivalry is a crock).I _do_ think that there are enormous swathes of fantasy that you could make a good case against, and that there is a more plausible case against GRRM on weirdnesses in his depiction of non-‘Western’ societies. On the actual merits, I don’t think that there is any plausible good faith reading of GRRM under which he is talking about violence to women for the creepy kicks that Doyle says he is. ![]() When ‘you are mansplaining’ drifts into ‘anyone who disagrees with my reading of these books is either a mansplainer or a traitor to her sex who is in it for the money’ it becomes a bit of a problem. And then accuses Rosenberg (whom I am certain is far more widely read – the stats say that ThinkProgress is a monster of blog) of ttacking high-trafficked posts by other women, play into nerd martyr complex, get $$$!. Then, when people argue that she’s actually _wrong_ and provide countering evidence, she doesn’t argue back but instead deletes the relevant comments and does the whole ‘la-la I can’t hear you’ thing. Doyle wrote a post which was quite explicitly an exercise in trolling for outraged responses. Tom, I actually thought that that was one of the more dishonest posts I’ve read on the internets in the recent past, for reasons laid out by Alyssa Rosenberg.
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