sunneinsplendour:

TW: rape, abuse. 

Okay, so I’ve seen a lot of conversations swirling around recently about people getting jumped on whenever they post about their dislike for female characters and how that’s implicitly unfair because you’re entitled to dislike whomever you want. Which is completely true and valid, you’re in no way obligated to want to sit around and gab about Community with Cersei Lannister all day every day. Having said that, there’s disliking someone as a person versus disliking them as a character and it’s the latter which usually attracts other people’s ire. Which is why I’ve broken it down slightly and tried to talk about the five most ridiculous reasons that female characters get hate and why these are basically invalid. By no means a comprehensive list but avoid these, and you’ll probably avoid a lot of, what one delightful person called, “angry feminist reader” backlash too. 

1. All the women are weak (exceptions sometimes made for Brienne and Arya). 

Exhibit A why this is fundamentally incorrect: 

“The women are the strong ones.”
- Jon Snow, A Dance With Dragons.

Now, I’m not saying that Jon is the most reliable narrator in these books (he’s not) but still, when people use this as an excuse to justify their hate despite the fact that this line exists in the books I can’t help but scratch my head and wonder if we’re reading the same series. To expand on why this brand of hate is utterly idiotic, it is pretty helpful to explore why exceptions are made for Brienne and Arya. ASOIAF takes place in a medieval setting and one of the ruling tenets of a lot of medieval literature is that gender is performance (hence that one admittedly fun 12th century French tale of the woman who dresses up as a knight, falls in love with a damsel and gets turned into a man by the Virgin Mary at the end as a reward for all her good deeds). So if gender is a role to be performed, it follows that gender is essentially a social construct in Westeros. Masculinity is constructed to mean strength and rationality and intelligence whilst femininity isn’t properly constructed at all, except to be the antithesis of everything masculinity stands for. Therefore, the rationale for calling women weak is twofold: society dictates that these women should not be playing a “strong” role (and the women who come in for the most hate are, surprise, surprise, the ones who conform to the role laid out for them) and womanhood is fundamentally not set up to be strong, it’s a pretty flimsy concept, contingent upon being the Opposite to Masculinity. So if you’re going to “perform” femininity in Westeros, it’s imperative that you come off weak, that you come off as the damsel as distress not because you are but so that there is someone for the manly knight to save (because otherwise, the construct of masculinity would fall down - it only exists in binary terms, see how that works?) If Sansa and Cat and Cersei act “weak”, if they don’t go around hitting people with swords, it’s because they’re playing a game and one that’s a lot more intricate and complex to navigate than warfare. Now you could argue that the women who conform are “weak” because they don’t rebel like Arya and Brienne do but the problem with that line of thought is that Arya and Brienne don’t consciously rebel. Arya knows on a visceral level she doesn’t want to be a lady and the war creates a situation where that’s possible, Brienne simply doesn’t fit into court life so she has to give it up as an option. In fact, the only person (so far) to actually rebel, to actually call bullshit on the “gender is performance and to be female, you must behave weak” idea is Cersei who, ironically, gets a lot of hate for being weak. And if that’s a thing you believe, than I’m sorry, but your reading of these books is fundamentally wrong. Because Cersei’s a soldier as much as Jaime is, all the female characters in ASOIAF are because they have to go out on a daily basis, and fight the patriarchy that oppresses, subjugates and denies them. Yeah, we all know how hard it is to defeat a fire-breathing, three-headed dragon but imagine how much harder it is to fight an enemy that’s invisible, that the society you live in doesn’t even have a name for because it is the society you live in and to have do it, not in random spurts on bloody battlefields, but every fucking day of your life. Imagine that, and then come back and tell me how weak these women are. 

2. She’s a massive whore. 

Perhaps, the objective worst reason for disliking a woman in any piece of fiction ever (and in life too). Now I could sit up and talk about how dumb it is, that someone like Sansa, a fourteen-year-old, gets hate for being an alleged slut despite being a virgin but I won’t because this isn’t a valid reason to hate on actual sex workers like Shae or Ros either. Getting over the undoubtedly revolutionary idea that women, just like men, have sexual appetites, needs and desires - that when you’re stuck in a society, that straitjackets those very urges they might end up being manifested in odd ways - and it’s no less wrong for them to try and have fulfilling sexual lives, than it is for the men, I want to deal with the theory that its Morally Objectionable for a woman to use sex as a weapon. Because the only weapon these women are allowed in these books is sex. The only way for a woman to be seen in Westerosi society is through her body - notice how there aren’t any songs about ugly ladies? Because they’re invisible and to be invisible as a Westerosi woman is next to actually not existing because the only thing you have to offer of worth - your looks - is well, worthless. So it’s just plain cruel for fandom to pounce on women for using the only tool at their disposal to get what they want. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s look at Catelyn Stark, an intelligent, educated woman whose sound, rational advice - don’t contradict me - is routinely ignored by the men around her. People don’t listen to women, they only see them hence why Cersei is forced to prostitute herself for power in ‘AFFC’. That’s not morally reprehensible, that’s tragic. That’s the first truth about women in the game of thrones: they’re not playing on a level battlefield as the men so yes of course, they have to back-handed, they have to be clever, they have to be ruthless towards others and themselves. But that’s not a reason to hate or judge them, that’s a reason to censure the framework they operate in, so why are you pointing your fingers at the ladies in question instead?

3. Bitches be crazy. 

This is related to refuting “all the women are weak” argument because like strength, rationality is once again the domain of the Male so it follows that whenever a woman makes a decision that appears, from the outside, to be bizarre, she is dismissed as being insane. Forget that we’re often in the head of these women when they’re doing these things, so we can literally hear the train of thoughts that takes them from Place A to Place B, people still think its okay to dismiss them as being crazy. And it’s not. If you respect GRRM as much as you claim to, than it follows he’s gifted enough not to have all his female characters behaving in ways that are unmotivated or unjustified. Take Cersei, whose a prime example for this type of hate, in ‘A Feast for Crows’. She’s constantly condemned for being paranoid and crazy but listen here’s the thing, here’s the truth at the core of Cersei’s character: she’s vulnerable. She’s always vulnerable. She’s a woman who grows up with hardly any female presences in her life, whose father has her sister-in-law gang raped, who lives in a world where the woman who would have been Queen before her is raped and murdered (and Elia Martell is a perfect symbol of how unfriendly Robert’s regime is towards women: it’s literally built on the bones of a female rape victim). So Cersei knows, from day one, what a vulnerable position she’s in as a woman, it’s the reason she can fuck with Sansa’s head so well in A Clash of Kings - a wolf surrounded by lions, because that’s who Cersei is her whole goddamn life, a woman surrounded by men. The only reprieve she has is in the form of her brother (and even he can’t save her from seventeen years of domestic abuse and marital rape - and hey, let’s keep in mind that these aren’t actually Terms That Exist in Westerosi society, so Cersei suffers almost two decades of injustice without being able to ever name that injustice, hence the absolutely imperative nature of the nominal when fighting any kind of discrimination) and in AFFC, even that’s stripped away from her, because Jaime’s not emotionally in a place where he can give his sister the support she needs. So yes, Cersei, already paranoid, already hemmed in from all sides, becomes more so but it’s not craziness, it doesn’t come out of nowhere - how can you say that, when it’s perfectly plotted out in the books. If you sincerely and genuinely believe these women are unlikable because they’re crazy, then you should put the ASOIAF books down because you don’t deserve to be reading them. 

4. Character X is responsible for huge, insurmountable tragedy Y. 

Oh God, this is a fun one (she says, loading her hypothetical shotgun). I don’t get if this is perhaps some kind of residual Eve guilt that is still being passed down through the ages but its stupid and its boring and fandom needs to stop. Let me explain cause-and-effect to you, let me demonstrate how nothing that happens in ‘Game of Thrones’ is the cause of the war of the Five Kings, not even a short-term one, the events are only catalysts. The trigger is Ned’s death but it’s still not a cause. The causes of the war are grounded in the natures of the players: Lannister greed versus Baratheon ambition and in the legacy of the Usurper’s War which is never fully resolved, namely who has the “genuine” right when the rightful king is murdered on the throne he sits on? Does anyone sit around blaming the assasination of the Archduke Ferdinand for the whole of World War I? No, because that’s not how history works. That event’s close to being equivalent to how tiny an action like Cat arresting Tyrion is to the wider backdrop of the war fermenting in Westeros, which is to say in actual time, it means chicken-shit, the war was going to happen one way or another and only happens when it does because of the specifics. You could change the specifics of the timeline a hundred times and still have the same bloody outcome which is why it’s so ridiculous and fundamentally wrong to single out one woman for causing a huge, full-scale civil war. It doesn’t happen like that. Ever. Stop pretending like it does. 

5. She’s a bad mother. 

Okay, wrapping this up quickly now because I’m almost certain my ‘read more’ cut has ceased to work, and you’re presumably sick of me, but look: a woman is not her womb. A woman’s worth does not solely reside in her womb. That’s what Westerosi society says but as readers, good lord, we’re supposed to Better Than Westerosi patriarchy not Same As. The worst imaginable possible thing a woman can be is not a bad mother. It is not okay that fandom cannot understand why these women sometimes fall down in their mothering yet can somehow mysteriously understand how Tyrion would feel “forced” to partake in the gang-rape of his own wife. Plus, if you think that, you’re not taking the circumstances into account, which is to say these women are constantly being undercut by the very society they live in! They try to teach their sons the values they believe in but it’s next to impossible for Cat to be a valued war advisor to Robb when he’s told her only worth is her appearance, it’s impossible for Cersei to actually make Joffrey understand that a King should never strike his lady when he’s constantly being told what a weak heart she has a woman. Like I’ve said before, all these women are fighting a war on two fronts - against their material enemies but also against the inexhaustible foe of a society that discriminates against them. If they’re less than perfect in that situation, if God forbid, they’re actually bad, dislike them, fine, but as people, not as characters. To dislike them as characters is to suggest what they’re saying isn’t pertinent to the narrative and that’s completely fucking wrong. Because these women are constantly saying something very important about the difficulty of living in the iron grip of a patriarchy and it’s something that’s relevant to modern dialogue too (because guess what, we don’t live in a post-feminist world, there’s no such fucking thing). To ignore them, to condemn their problems, is to deny the importance of female narratives and female problems and if you do, people will descend upon you with the wrath of vengeful Gods and it will be well within their rights to do so. 

(via khaleesi)