I have been sick with the winter vomiting bug for over a week, and was unable to do much except listening to the radio in a half-hearted sort of way, in between toilet and tea breaks.
Getting tired of the never ending reports of human folly that is the news, I decided to listen instead to an audio book. I have been meaning to read A Song Of Ice And Fire by George RR Martin for quite a while now - I bought all the books two years ago but didn't get further than the middle of book 2 - but since I was in no condition to do any reading, I thought listening to the audio reading on Youtube would be a good alternative to get through the exceedingly long volumes.
I drifted in and out of sleep, with murders, rapes, and machinations going on in the background, and if things got too gory, I was too exhausted to turn off the irritating voice, as I would have done while fully conscious.
After hour upon hour of this faux-medieval rambling, and heaven knows how many scenes of carnage, I am genuinely pleased to be out and about again, cured (hopefully) of both the norovirus and my interest in A Song of Ice And Fire. It is the countless rape scenes that really turned me off. Mr Martin defends them, saying that that's just the way the Middle Ages were, and since his books are based on the Middle Ages in a loose sort of way, he had to include plenty of rapes.
Let's examine this claim.
Firstly, the "Middle Ages"lasted about 1,000 years - roughly, the period between the end of the Roman Empire in the West and the Renaissance (500 to 1500 AD). The position of women, as well as other aspects of social life, was not the same throughout this time. Sometimes women had significant rights, sometimes very few. Also, the area included in the Middle Ages is huge - all of Europe and the Middle East - and was composed of hundreds of different cultures, which differed widely in the way women were treated. Surely, if Martin really is the feminist he claims to be, he could have created a fantasy country were women were treated with consideration, and were not sexually mistreated on a regular basis?
Secondly, sexual violence against women in the Middle Ages was nowhere as prevalent as in Martin's novel. To quote the Mary Sue Blog:
"For women in Martin’s novels and the HBO show, sexual violence is a constant specter, with rape an everyday threat for many of the female characters. No doubt such violence existed in the Middle Ages, historians say, but women had some protections. Muslim armies rarely raped conquered populations, because rape was an unforgivable crime in Islam, [Kelly DeVries, a medieval historian at Loyola University Maryland] said. Christian armies had slightly less-stringent religious prohibitions, but women were more protected than commonly depicted in popular culture, he said. The uptick in sexual brutality actually occurred after the Middle Ages, during the Wars of Religion kicked off by the Protestant Reformation, he said. In those conflicts, opposing sides saw each other as heretics and thus felt free to commit brutalities."
https://www.themarysue.com/grrm-dragons-vs-sexual-violence-against-women-in-fantasy/
Thirdly, even if we were to grant that sexual violence was prevalent and needed to be depicted, did it have to be depicted in such a detailed way? Having listened to what seems to be hundreds of rape scenes within a week, I am left with the impression that most of them are gratuitous, over-described, and intended to titillate. When this is considered together with the way women are discussed in other contexts in this novel - for example, every woman who is introduced has her breasts described in detail - I have to conclude that Martin's fantasy world thinks of women in a completely sexualised way. As though that's all we are good for. Is that really how men think of women? Are they really all as disgusting as all that?
I remember some time ago there was this statement doing the rounds that men thought of sex every 7 seconds. I found this rather puzzling - how could a man ever focus on anything else, if he thought about sex every 7 seconds? Even to read a longish paragraph in this blog you need to concentrate for longer than 7 seconds. If men really stopped whatever they were doing every 7 seconds to think about sex they would never get anything done! I asked several male friends about this, and they said something like, "Well, I think of sex every 7 seconds whenever I am not doing anything else." And how often was that? "Well, I am pretty busy most of the time ....." That's what I thought - a few times a day, maybe, less during times of stress, advancing age, illness, etc.
I know it is hard to admit this in the context of our oversexualised popular culture, but most of us are not as motivated by sex as the advertisers would like us to believe. We've got a lot of other stuff going on, you know .....
If men were really as disgustingly destructive as depicted in Martin's novel, humanity would never have survived. Societies with high levels of violence against women tend to have a low reproductive rate - as for example the Yanomamoe described by Napoleon Chagnon. Every animal species protects the breeding females to ensure survival. Humans have few offspring, and without modern sanitation and medicine, death in childbirth is common, and infant mortality high. Add violence against women into this mix and few children will be born and grow to maturity. Violence, including sexual violence, could not have been the norm in human history - our species would never have survived it. It is curious how many writers would like to make us believe otherwise.
Fourthly, if Martin was really interested in depicting sexual violence 'as it really was', why is it only the women who get raped? Surely he knows that men, too, got raped, on a regular basis? Or is this something he would rather not burden his male readers with?
To be sure Martin mentions male rape here and there, but only in throw away half sentences; he does not lovingly dwell on details, as he does with the female rape scenes. And more often than not there is the insinuation that the male victim was a wimp, like the healer who was 'treated like a maiden' by Victarion Greyjoy's men.
How would the young men who are the main consumers of fantasy fiction react if:
(1) Vargo Hoat and his gang had buggered beautiful Jaime Lannister to within an inch of his life, leaving him with a permanently damaged rectum, unable to sit or walk properly, instead of cut off his hand?
(2) The Mountain Clegane had brutally raped noble Prince Rhaegar Targaryen until he bled to death?
(3) King Stannis was buggered with the hilt of his own sword by Brienne, instead of beheaded? (only in the TV version, as far as is currently known)
(4) Eddard Stark were forced to participate in perverted sex games by Cersei Lannister, then stripped naked and paraded publicly around King's Landing, and finally sold to a brothel keeper of Astapor as a sex slave?
I could go on, but you get my point. I don't think Martin's male readers would like to read that sort of thing. Women don't like to read that sort of thing, either, Mr Martin.
For information about male rape - which is very hard to come by, incidentally - see this article from The Guardian, 17 July 2011:
"
It's not just in East Africa that these stories remain unheard. One of the few academics to have looked into the issue in any detail is Lara Stemple, of the University of California's Health and Human Rights Law Project. Her study Male Rape and Human Rights notes incidents of male sexual violence as a weapon of wartime or political aggression in countries such as Chile, Greece, Croatia, Iran, Kuwait, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. Twenty-one per cent of Sri Lankan males who were seen at a London torture treatment centre reported sexual abuse while in detention. In El Salvador, 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in the 1980s described at least one incidence of sexual torture. A study of 6,000 concentration-camp inmates in Sarajevo found that 80% of men reported having been raped."
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-men
Men get regularly raped in the UK, too. See the Telegraph article of 25 May 2015 on the subject:
"Police crime figures for 2014 in England & Wales show there were 38,134 incidents of rape or sexual assault of a woman and 3,580 against men. Yet due to the shame and stigma surrounding perhaps the darkest male taboo of all, Survivors UK believe only 2-3 per cent of men report their rapes (official figures for women are 10-12 per cent reporting) meaning many thousands of men are suffering in silence. Furthermore, there are an estimated 1.5 million adult male survivors of childhood sexual abuse in the UK – abuse against boys accounts for around 70 per cent of cases."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11587324/Why-doesnt-society-care-about-male-rape.html
I really wish male rape was more in the news, so that people realise that this isn't just a women's issue, and take it more seriously. It puzzles me that so many men - including the author of A Song Of Ice And Fire - seem to think it is OK to constantly depict / read depictions of acts of sexual aggression against women. How would they feel if the sexual aggression depicted was against men? Men they identified with, their heroes?
Is the silence about male rape victims, and the emphasis on female victims, simply a way to protect the male ego, to suggest that males are safe and females are not, and that the more 'male' a man is the safer he is from this sort of victimisation - and surely, lewd jokes and misogyny in general are an excellent way to showcase that one is truly a man?
When will we realise that violence isn't something that men to do women, but something that some human beings do to other human beings, and that we should all unite against the perpetrators, if only because we are all potential victims, and because no one is safe?
I do grant Mr Martin this - his novel shows that everyone, no matter how strong, powerful, rich, beautiful, virtuous, ruthless, manipulative, etc etc, someone is, everyone can be victimised (though in gender specific ways).
And judging by the recent news items on the radio, every profession, class, gender, social group, category of family member, nationality, age, etc etc, contains predators who will try to victimise those who are decent or innocent enough not to expect that sort of thing from them.
Alone there is no safety for anyone, but together we can protect one another.
"The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives."
For more information on male rape victims, try this Wikipedia link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_males
For more information on the accuracy of Game of Thrones depiction of the Middle Ages:
https://www.livescience.com/44599-medieval-reality-game-of-thrones.html
