George R.R. Martin shares his thoughts on the controversy surrounding sexism and rape on HBO’s Game of Thrones, as well as his own work.
Martin, the best-selling author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series on which Game of Thrones is based, takes a familiarly fatalistic approach the complicated subject matter.
“The books reflect a patriarchal society based on the Middle Ages,” Martin says. “The Middle Ages were not a time of sexual egalitarianism. It was very classist, dividing people into three classes. And they had strong ideas about the roles of women.”
“There were, of course, some strong and competent women,” he qualifies. “It still doesn’t change the nature of the society.”
According to Martin, all of his most fascinating characters are “outliers” in the context of their society, and his female characters are, for the most part, no exception. Martin also feels that hewing to this historical reality is important, in spite of the fact that Game of Thrones is a fantasy complete with dragons, ice-zombies, and straight-up magic.
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“Just because you put in dragons doesn’t mean you can put in anything you want,” Martin argues. “If pigs could fly, then that’s your book. But that doesn’t mean you also want people walking on their hands instead of their feet.”
As he has expressed in previous discussions of A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin feels that fantasy elements work best in moderation.
“It’s best to only do one of them, or a few,” he says. “I wanted my books to be strongly grounded in history and to show what medieval society was like… Most stories depict what I call the ‘Disneyland Middle Ages.’ There are princes and princesses and knights in shining armor, but they didn’t want to show what those societies meant and how they functioned.”
According to Martin, employing the socially ingrained sexism – on which of medieval society indisputably worked – does not reflect on himself as an author.
“To be non-sexist, does that mean you need to portray an egalitarian society?” he asks. “That’s not in our history; it’s something for science fiction. And 21st century America isn’t egalitarian, either. There are still barriers against women.”
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One of these modern barriers, though Martin does not specifically address it as such, is the issue of sexual violence perpetrated against women.
“I’m writing about war, which is what almost all epic fantasy is about,” the author explains. “But if you’re going to write about war, and you just want to include all the cool battles and heroes killing a lot of orcs and things like that and you don’t portray [sexual violence], then there’s something fundamentally dishonest about that. Rape, unfortunately, is still a part of war today. It’s not a strong testament to the human race, but I don’t think we should pretend it doesn’t exist.”
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But, of course, rape is not only a problem in distant, war-torn societies. Sexual assault, as well as the fear and stigma which surrounds its victims, is a massive problem faced by both women and men around the world today. A fine line continues to exist between the portrayal of rape as something inevitable (which frequently leads to the exploitive imagery often employed on Game of Thrones) and as something tragic – a tactic with which Martin is rather more skilled.
Still, even Martin is ultimately a little blunt on the subject.
“I want to portray struggle,” he says. “Drama comes out of conflict. If you portray a utopia, then you probably wrote a pretty boring book.”
The conflation between a literary utopia and minimal sexual violence is rather unfortunate – as is the suggestion that drama requires this specific genre of trauma. To be fair, this trope is so deeply ingrained in modern storytelling that it can be hard to extract from the context of realism and “gritty” fiction.
But even current dramas make it clear that grim reality is perfectly possible to portray without using the crutch of sexual violence. Marvel’s Daredevil, for example, never once relies on this trope. Even when central female characters are victims of violence, even when they are fully incapacitated, the Netflix series never once exploits these women in a sexual manner – and no one would accuse Daredevil of serving a “utopian” narrative.
George R.R. Martin is not wrong that sexual violence is part of reality, and deserves a place in all mediums of fiction. But reality has many components, and perhaps it’s time to stop using rape and the victimization of women as a concept interchangeable with baseline existence.
If that means we’re promoting a utopia, well, so be it.
Game of Thrones season 5, episode 9, “The Dance of the Dragons,” airs on Sunday, June 7 at 9:00 p.m. on HBO.