Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago Read Online Free PDF Page A

and across the narrow sea can be nasty, brutal, and short. And if you’re a woman—and occasionally a man—the threat of sexual assault is omnipresent.
    The series’ sexual politics have been one of the most-discussed—and most-misunderstood—aspects of Martin’s books and HBO’s adaptation of them. The New York Times ’ Ginia Bellafante, in her review of the series, wrote that its “costume-drama sexual hopscotch” suggested 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.” In an (admittedly snarky) discussion of Martin’s writing in A Game of Thrones , the feminist blogger Sady Doyle wrote that “George R.R. Martin is creepy [. . .]. He is creepy, primarily, because of his TWENTY THOUSAND MILLION GRATUITOUS RAPE AND/OR MOLESTATION AND/OR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SCENES.”
    When writer Rachael Brown asked Martin in a 2011 interview how he decides when to include depictions of sexual violence in his novels, he gave an answer that didn’t exactly debunk his critics’ arguments:
            I have gotten letters over the years from readers who don’t like the sex, they say it’s “gratuitous.” I think that word gets thrown around and what it seems to mean is “I didn’t like it.” This person didn’t want to read it, so it’s gratuitous to that person. And if I’m guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I’m also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot.
     
    Martin isn’t kidding about the volume of sex scenes and sexual assaults, which show up almost as often as the introduction of a new house crest, if not with the frequency of new dishes at feasts. Despite their frequency, the depictions of sexual assault are often fairly muted, viewed through the lens of painful memory rather than happening in the present tense. For readers who are sensitive to depictions of rape and domestic violence, the number of those assaults or discussions of assault may be an insurmountable barrier to enjoying the books or the show. Everyone has an individual threshhold for violence in art, but it would be a mistake to suggest that depictions of sexual and domestic violence in A Song of Ice and Fire are merely lurid exploitation.
    While not all of the sexual assaults that occur in the novels advance the plot, rape is an act that sparks wars and assassinations that reshape continents and the rule of law. And those specific acts that don’t impact the larger plot still serve a critically important purpose: attitudes toward sex and consent are one of the ways that citizens of Westeros, the Ironborn, the Free Folk, and members of the societies across the narrow sea distinguish themselves from each other. In Westeros in particular, where the ability to kill is a sign of manhood and even of honor, it’s sexual misconduct that signifies monstrosity.
    When we’re first introduced to the characters whose adventures begin our trek through Martin’s expansive world, it’s on the occasion of King Robert Baratheon’s visit to Winterfell, the holdfast of his old comrade in arms, Ned Stark. Robert justified the war in which he and Ned fought together, and during which he usurped the dynasty that preceded his own, in part because he believes that the heir to that dynasty kidnapped, raped, and killed Lyanna Stark, Ned’s sister and the woman Robert was pledged to marry. As he and Ned discuss the war in A Game of Thrones , that alleged atrocity is meant to seal Robert’s argument that their campaign was just: “What Aerys did to your brother Brandon was unspeakable. The way your lord father died, that was unspeakable. And Rhaegar . . . how many times do you think he raped your sister? How many hundreds of times?”
    The defeat of Rhaegar is a personal story for Robert, but