This guest post is from Andrew Daar, who writes about pop culture, baking, photography, wordplay, and the law on his blog Pop Tortes. Follow him on Twitter @AndrewDaar
Pop quiz: Whom is the show Game of Thrones “made” for?
A. Men
B. Women
C. All people
“All people” seems like the obvious choice, right? No one involved with the show – not HBO, the network that broadcasts it, not showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, and certainly not George R. R. Martin, author of the books upon which the show is based – has ever said that the show is intended only for a certain gender.
And yet, some critics seem to be under the impression that Game of Thrones is a “man’s show,” and that it does not appeal to women. In one of the earliest reviews of the show, New York Times television critic Ginia Bellafante argued that the showrunners include romance plots and sex in the show “out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise.” Bellafante goes on to state that women are uninterested in fantasy and that Game of Thrones is “boy fiction.” More recently, in one of the worst-argued pop culture pieces I’ve ever read, Renata Sellitti of Thrillist made the sweeping generalization that women don’t like the show because it caters solely to men with its ickiness, swordplay, and nakedness. Sellitti’s arguments were made without citation to any evidence and were insulting to both women (one of her arguments was that the plotlines are too complicated to follow) and men (they only like the show because it’s “gross” and features lots of naked breasts).
This idea that television shows, or, for that matter, any work of popular culture, is meant to be consumed by only one gender is one that needs to be eliminated. It is not only insulting to both genders, it is bad for our culture. Many people who would otherwise enjoy a work will dismiss it based on a silly prejudice, and many potentially great works will go unproduced out of fear that not enough people will consume it because of said prejudice.
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