Melissa McEwen thinks that HBO's first episode of Game of Thrones was exploitative:
Leaving aside the exploitative nature of the storytelling, it's also just lazy and intellectually insulting. I am a grown-ass adult capable of understanding that Tyrion Lannister is a lech without actually hearing the slurping sounds while he gets a blowjob and seeing three naked prostitutes gifted to him by his brother. I have the faculties to discern that Viserys Targaryen is a horrible shit without actually having to watch him molest his teenage sister's breast. Etc. And if you can't communicate these characters' attributes without lingering close-ups on tits, then you are not a good filmmaker.
Ultimately, the substitution of exploitative female nudity for actual character development turns the show into "a bunch of dudes fighting for power—PLUS BOOBIEZ!" which is a story so old it whiffs of primordial ooze. It's some kind of brass chutzpah to advertise an epic fantasy and then deliver the narrative equivalent of professional wrestling.
Alyssa Rosenberg responds:
The incestuous relationship between two of the main characters in Game of Thrones is meant to communicate their moral and spiritual rot, not simply to provide something naughty for us to get nervous and excited over. Their sex scene in the show's first episode isn't presented in romantic terms, but rather in somewhat desperate ones. And contra McEwan's complaints about a sex scene involving Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf brother of the queen and her twin brother,the insistence that Lannister is as good a lover–or perhaps an even more sensitive, passionate one–than his full-sized counterparts is a blow against the frequent use of people with dwarfism in entertainment as proxies for children or comic relief rather than real human beings.
I'm not really sure what to say about the gratuitous nudity in the show, except that most of those scenes come of as really disturbing in the book rather than sexyfied. There's a sense in George R.R. Martin's books that even sex is little more than raw power struggle in Westeros, and I think that's what the HBO producers were going for. Still, McEwen is hardly the only one frustrated with how the sex was handled--Nick Baumann called it last week when he wrote that the difficult to reconcile contrast between the books' grittiness and premium cable's bad habits might turn people off. The show has to stand on its own--and it won't if it can only rely on an audience of women who have already read the books.
I'll just say this: One of the earliest things that is supposed to be established early on in the story is that feudalism really, really sucks for women, and the show does that. Arya Stark is a better archer than her brother but is expected to do needlepoint until she's married off, Circe Lannister is regularly humiliated by her royal husband in public, Danaerys Targaryen is literally property, sold off by her brother to buy an army and raped by a husband she didn't want to marry on her wedding night. But the way in which the women of GoT manage these circumstances is part of what makes the books so worthwhile. There's really not much I can say without giving things away, but all of these characters are introduced to the reader in positions of what seems like relative helplessness and end up some place very different. Suffice it to say that men not the only people playing the game of thrones, and they don't even play the game particularly well. This is not a story that is about power struggles between and among men alone, in which women play a "traditional" or passive role.
