Totally agree. I do enjoy the show, but the gratuitous nudity and sex is embarrassing. HBO seems to have made this a staple of its original programming. Do we really need the titillation so badly that it needs to appear in every “adult” show?
“and a perfectly manicured crotch—a historically inaccurate detail…”
You know this isn’t actually history, right?
Do we really need the titillation so badly that it needs to appear in every “adult” show?
It doesn’t.
I am afraid the answer is yes. It would be nice to see the parallel universe with less nudity and the same plot-lines to see if Game of Thrones is as popular there.
Perhaps someone can count every nude scene and number of nude characters in every episode (*wow supercuts also exist for seasons 1,2,3,4!) and plot vs the popularity of the episode and look for a correlation.
I don’t see what the problem with ogling boobies is, if it makes you uncomfortable you don’t have to watch, there are plenty of shows that don’t go down this route. There’s plenty of male objectification in the show as well btw. Humans are sexual objects, so there’s nothing inherently wrong with sexual objectification. It only becomes a problem if that’s all there is (though even then, in certain cases that’s perfectly acceptable too, it’s all about context), but as the OP points out this isn’t the case here.
Powerful people have been using beautiful people as props for their own amusement since the first powerful person. People have enjoyed seeing naked beautiful people since the first beautiful person. Brothels have featured people who take off their clothes when entering a room since the first brothel. None of this seems odd or out of place to me. Writing to complain about nipples and trimmed bush in a show that features brutal decapitations, human immolation, incest, rape, infanticide, and a circus of murder seems really odd. But hey, if complaining about naked people brings you even a tiny amount of pleasure, then go for it. Just remember that many of us enjoy naked beautiful people and would like to see more of them in our daily lives.
Perverts have the right to be pandered to just like everyone else.
How about more nudity, both male and female, but less gratuitous violence? I’m much more comfortable with naked humans bodies hanging about than the general bloodbath.
It has always seemed to me to be more hypocritical to insinuate nudity while hiding bodies, instead of being straightforward about showing it.
Hint #1: all people are nude under their clothes, and we don’t really need to be so concerned about the times when those clothes are off. Hint #2: men like to look at naked women, and its not a character flaw. Presumably, if the country wasn’t so unrelentingly prudish about bodily functions, nudity would cease to be remarkable. Hint #3: women like to look at men too.
In the fantasy world of GOT, we accept flying dragons and torture and murder as part of the narrative. Is nudity really all that remarkable?
No hypocrisy, it’s just your puritanism that is hurt.
I love the whore scenes
I tried to watch it and while I appreciated the arc of Danyres - very surprising - the overkill of the nudity was a complete turnoff. I have seen other shows where there are both men and women flashing lots of flesh and that I don’t mind (such as Spartacus). But I just couldn’t handle how it’s supposed to be this intensely cold climate, so the guys are all bundled up in furs and crap, and the women are all apparently immune to cold, cavorting around naked or nearly so. The male cast in general is not all that cute and trends older. The cute men wear too many clothes. Get the men more naked and I’d be all good.
“You can go full frontal, you know! This is television, you can do whatever you want. And do it. I urge you to do it… I represent the pervert side of the audience. Everybody else is on the serious drama side. I represent the perv side of the audience. And I’m saying I want full frontal nudity in this scene. So go ahead and do it.”
It’s good to be thought of?
One of the interesting things about watching Mad Men in its first couple of seasons for me was that an older friend of mine, sadly since deceased, who had been in corporate culture during the mid-1960s told me that Mad Men got it pretty much right. It really was that debauched, if not more so.
It was interesting to me that people really did behave that way; that in trying to titillate, the Mad Men producers were hewing pretty close to historical reality, although probably in excess. And in watching the show, then talking to my friend after, I got a glimpse into his world when he would have been about the same age as the character Peter Campbell.
So now, after having read the quote above, the next time I watch some outrageous cable TV comedy about crass, sexist television execs I’ll get to have that same frisson of insight into the television world – there really are people who think like that.
And yet a great deal of thought and work goes into the armor, weapons, etc.
Data point: even if we were to entertain the idea that male and female nakedness were always equivalently and comparably objectifying, GoT hasn’t (contrary to Caroline’s suggestion) even shown full male nudity, has it? (Unless the dicks of Westeros are so horrifying they cannot be remembered)
cf. HBO/BBC’s Rome, which was full of dicks, dicks everywhere, dick dick dick dick dick.
Given how many shows fail the Bechdel test, I really don’t understand why a show with such strong female characters is being attacked. It may not be perfect, but it’s so much better than the status quo. “The perfect is the enemy of the good”.
We do seem to be getting a better ratio of female to male nudity as the show progresses. It seems that the complaint is that there’s no gratuitous male nudity of extras in the show. That should be easy to throw in given the many armies in the show…
Seems you missed the word “hypocrisy” in this post’s title. Boobies to ogle is fine if there’s also a lot of succulent-looking, full-frontal man flesh to ogle as well. But in GoT, there’s not. I think that’s called “sexism,” no?
There’s been at least one male full frontal shot, if not more. And there’s been nearly as much male ass as female tits 'n ass (male tits not being particularly shocking we can count both as being equivalent I think).
I also find those damn dragons historically inaccurate…
No, because you’re wrong. There have been male full frontal shots, in fact there have been more shots of male genitalia than female genitalia (of which there have been none that I can recall, just occasional bush).
You must have put season one out of your mind - bias, such as confirmation bias, can do that to any of us. I agree the treatment of men and women is unequal, however, there was full frontal male nudity in season one. (Haven’t seen the rest yet…)
