GoT Season 5 & Sexism: Part 1 

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A critical analysis of Game of Thrones Season 5. Part 1 includes an introduction to the “ambivalent sexism” framework and Trope #1: Motherhood.

I was recently asked what my biggest takeaway from

Game of Thrones (GoT) Season 5 was, to which I responded, “the showrunners’ sexism.” Now look, I say this in perfect understanding of the fact that George R.R. Martin’s setting for his A Song of Ice and Fire book series on which the show is based is a misogynistic world, and that the depiction of violence against women is not uncommon. I’ve also vociferously defended the value of such a setting, and how the way Mr. Martin approaches the mistreatment and relegation of women as a central theme in his novels is actually quite feminist. If I didn’t feel that this issue was handled well or with sensitivity, you can bet your butt that I wouldn’t be so engaged with the book series.

I have also argued how the way in which GoT showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss (D&D) utilize the world of Westeros in their own adaptation is sexist, due to the superficial treatment/gratuitous use of violence against women, the shoehorning of all female characters into “empowered” archetypes that are based on sexist assumptions, and the continual messaging that Good Guys™ are entitled to the affection of women by virtue of being…good guys.

But you see, even though this sexism that underscores GoT was quite easy to spot (Talisa serving as some kind of authorial wish-fulfillment for what a Strong Woman™ “should” be, Sansa happily joking around with Tyrion in Season 3 despite being a prisoner forced into a marriage because he’s droll, Ros’s shock-value death with arrows in her privates, background rape at Craster’s keep), it really wasn’t enough for me to think of D&D as sexists themselves. Just, perhaps, woefully incompetent.

Then this season happened. The pattern of the show’s treatment of women is not only concerning, but in my view it speaks for itself. There’s no part of me that believes D&D set out to denigrate women. Yet that was the result. With the overwhelming abundance of sexist tropes employed this season, there is no other conclusion that I can reach than the fact that these two men understand and view the world from a fundamentally sexist position. And their being unaware of this does not negate the fact that they’re sexist, but actually strengthens it, especially in light of the critical feedback they received in years past on their treatment of women (see: the sept scene controversy of Season 4) and how they have demonstrated absolutely no willingness to engage in such criticism or to take action to correct it (every writer/director that worked on Season 5 was a man, for example).

My first inclination when writing this essay was to walk us through every. single. woman. character. in the show and demonstrate how there were damaging sexist changes and tropes at play with every. single. one. of. them. I promise, it’s not hyperbole when I say that. However, as I got deeper into it, I realized that there was a complicated interplay of these tropes and stereotypes, and that viewing them discretely in the plot wouldn’t be helpful. So instead, I’d like to discuss each trope specifically.

Like I said, I don’t believe D&D have any malicious intent towards women. In fact, the framework of “ambivalent sexism” suggests that there are two main types: hostile sexism (which manifests in narratives as anything ranging from infantilization to rape) and benevolent sexism (“women are better parents”). Even though benevolent sexism may seem preferable to encounter day-to-day, it is no less insidious, and no less counterproductive towards the aims of greater gender equality. At the end of the day, even the most “well-meaning” forms of sexism serve to empower men on the backs of women.

Both benevolent and ambivalent sexism have three subtypes:

Paternalism: women are viewed as less-developed, and thus in need of protection (at best) or having decisions made for them

Gender differentiation: the assumption that biological differences between males and females justify adherence to set gender roles

Heterosexuality: ranging from tropes based on a desire for intimacy (at best) to fear of women attaining power through their exploitation of sexual attraction

Because these subtypes fall within both benevolent sexism and hostile sexism, there are 6 main, non-mutually exclusive patterns (or functions) that sexist tropes fall within, meaning six different types of messages that can be derived from such tropes:

Protective Paternalism (benevolent): men should care for and protect women

Dominative Paternalism (hostile): men should control women

Complementary gender differentiation (benevolent): adherence to traditional gender roles for women is important/needed by men

Competitive gender differentiation (hostile): men are superior to women

Intimate heterosexuality (benevolent): women are sexually pure and romantic intimacy is necessary to complete a man

Heterosexual hostility (hostile): women are sexual objects for men’s benefit, but should be feared in their capacity to manipulate men with their sexuality

D&D’s narrative endorses all of the above messaging in a variety of ways. And it’s not because the world of Westeros has fucked up views on women. It does, and that’s certainly in the books as well. However, what I mean is that D&D’s adaptation endorses sexism because their scripting of the story relies on characters acting in accordance to sexist stereotypes/assumptions…something that Martin does not have a pattern of doing in his own scripting of the books. And this is because D&D view the world from a fundamentally sexist lens, where Martin does not.

Prior to this season, perhaps this would have been an unfair assertion. Hanlon’s Razor, right? Don’t assume malice? But the pattern of the treatment of women this year speaks for itself.

I want to begin with the “well-intentioned” sexism on D&D’s part, and plan to cover tropes in the order of increasing hostility.

Trope #1: Motherhood (Benevolent sexism; protective paternalism, complementary gender differentiation)

One of the most obvious forms of “benevolent” sexism throughout Season 5 is how motherhood was treated as a defining and moralizing trait for women.

In GoT, mothers must be chiefly concerned with caring for children, else they are “bad,” like we saw in the case of “Ellaria Sand.” She was cartoonishly evil, driven solely by revenge. Doran, the only seemingly reasonable voice in all of Dorne, had to remind Ellaria that she had children in the second to last episode, and asked her to drop her ill-advised quest for “vengeance” against Myrcella. The framing here was motherhood = good option. Yet Ellaria eschewed this role, opting instead to poison the innocent girl. Only villains get to escape being defined by their motherhood, yet their doing so is very much presented as a negative.

For Cersei Lannister, the safety of her children was her guiding motivation. In fact, the “cold open” with Maggy the Frog’s prophecy was a truncated scene. In the books, the maegi predicts the deaths of Cersei’s children, the younger and more beautiful queen, and Cersei’s ultimate demise at the hands of “the valonqar” (High Valyrian for “younger brother”). Book!Cersei spends just as much time obsessing over the location of Tyrion and assuming he has a hand in every possible scheme as she does trying to bring down Margaery Tyrell. Though she is certainly concerned about Tommen, Book!Cersei thinks about Myrcella rarely, and her worry for her son seems as much out of self-preservation as it is for his well-being (in fact she’s a rather terrible, abusive mother, showing little compassion for Tommen when he “embarrasses” her, and forcing him to whip a boy until he bled after Tommen dared to repeat good and relatively innocuous advice that Margaery gave him, for example).

Fox only told Cersei about the death of her children and the younger queen. And though Cersei worked to bring down Margaery, it was in the context of keeping her son safe; by aging up Tommen, D&D wrote a narrative in which he was being sexually abused and manipulated, a fate Cersei wished to save him from. Cersei also reasonably worries about Myrcella after receiving a very real threat from Ellaria. Because of this, her desire to not be cast aside and to keep some power in King’s Landing seemed to stem more from her tiger-mom instincts than any form of self-preservation/projected paranoia. In fact, there was no projected paranoia because she was justified in all of her concerns. A notable change, a sympathetic change, and one in keeping with the theme that motherhood defines women.

However, one needs no more proof that in D&D’s world, motherhood is a defining trait than with the featured extra from

Hardhome, Karsi. This Wildling mother of two was so overwhelmed by her maternal instincts that she could not even defend herself against zombie children (a choice that ironically leaves her actual children more vulnerable). Yet what is even more horrifying about this moment is that Karsi’s role was originally planned to be a man.

“She was a guy originally, and then somewhere in the process we thought it might be cool if she were a mother, and show her sending off her own kids to make that moment with the corpse children really resonate emotionally.”

This quote above suggests that only a woman can be defined by parenthood. This downplays fatherhood, because the idealization of motherhood requires that only women are the caring ones.

Yet this womanly weakness is also punished, and it’s punished with the sole intent of stirring the audience’s emotions. And that’s only possible because mothers are placed on a pedestal, whereas fathers are shoved aside in importance. Had it been a man brought down by the zombie children, it wouldn’t have resonated emotionally, according to the showrunners. Because men can’t be defined by parenthood; that’s reserved for women.

This is made exceedingly obvious the very next episode with the burning of Shireen. Here, Selyse, who had done nothing but talk about how much she hated her daughter for four seasons, pulled a character 180° and broke down as Shireen died, ultimately killing herself the next episode. Stannis looked upset, but was focused on his “ambition.” He didn’t cry, nor did he break down; in fact, he barely moved a muscle as his daughter was set on fire, despite being the one to have been shown bonding with Shireen the entire season. Only Selyse and her motherly weakness could be the one to break-down and react to her screaming, suffering child.

“In that moment, she finally becomes a mother again.” -Dan Weiss

Note “finally.” She “finally” assumes the role she “should” have. And Selyse apparently wasn’t a mother before in the scenes where she was mean to Shireen. Because mothers are idealized and there’s no space for abusive mothers in D&D’s world.

In a way, Selyse’s suicide was her redemption. Her breakdown marked her ultimate embrace of her proper womanly role, making her death both sympathetic and tragic. It was done for shock, it was presented as a punchline to a joke (“can’t be worse than mutiny”), and it once again demonstrates the pattern in which mothers must be defined as such.

The one notable exception to this trope is Dany. She is frequently presented to us as “the mother of dragons,” yet this season was actually all over the place in terms of how she used her “children.” And oddly, unlike the books where Dany climbs onto Drogon in the pit because he is being hurt and she wants to help her child, in the show, Dany is spirited away from a battle so that her life is saved. I guess we can call this joy-ride “empowerment” on some level, which is her only example of all season, aside from roasting a slaver. So perhaps there’s subtle messaging that she only has value when she’s interacting with her “children”? But really her “motherhood” is just so inconsistently handled (what happened to all those hissing ex-slaves after 5x02…she didn’t need to like, interact with them or anything after that?), that I think it’s okay to keep the conversation narrowed to mothers and their actual human children.

“Women are better parents” might seem like a harmless assumption in some ways, but that assumption is far from innocuous. It forces women to be stuffed into a box with little agency outside their “acceptable” role as a mother, a pervasive attitude even in today’s society (double standards with working mothers vs. working fathers). Yet Season 5 only solidified this, with two women brought down entirely because of their motherly weakness, one of which was changed from a man to a woman just for that purpose, and the other of which was presented with a moralizing message.

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288 notes #meta#got meta#got#game of thrones#sexism#got season 5#karsi#cersei#selyse#Benioff and Weiss#d&d#cw: rape mention#cw: abuse#cw: suicide#sexism & S5