I enjoy looking at women’s breasts but only in late eighties ASCII art that could be viewed via a terminal. Anything else is pretentious.
Could be, too. If there was strictly an evolutionary reason, you’d think that there wouldn’t be cultures where nude beaches are no big deal.
/me looks off in the distance towards Europe
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Personally I think people like GOT for the very fact that it isn’t politically correct.
It doesn’t follow the rules. It feels like a little bit of anarchy.
Where would it be if it was a perfectly balanced moral compass. Crap.
And all this talk about lack of willies versus female full frontals has always been a fallacy.
The female equivalent of a penis shot is not just naked but with the legs open showing all the bits. Groomed fluff is not the same.
How many legs open shots have their been?
Gee, it’s almost like sex sells, and a fantasy world can be any people want it including somewhat modern standards of beauty.
You’re worried that a show with dragons has “historically inaccurate” pubic grooming? That’s a bit like complaining about geological inaccuracies in Narnia.
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Is that best viewed on an amber or green CRT? I’m just wondering about the aesthetics.
I don’t understand this claim. So far, I disagree with it; full frontal is full frontal. Just because the actual genitalia is covered in one case and part of the genitalia (not “all the bits”) is not covered in the other case doesn’t suddenly mean that they’re inequivalent.
And that’s all aside from the whole “male gaze” set up, which means that given our patriarchal social context, visual imagery of equally naked people still objectifies women and subjectifies men. In heterosexual terms, if a naked man is depicted in some subservient relation to another person, he’s not “where he should be” – he’s emasculated. If a woman is depicted in some subservient relation to a man, she’s right where she should be – she’s “properly” feminized. And if she’s depicted in a dominant position to a man, that’s an overturning of the norm, and she’s an abnormal woman.
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Please note that I’m not arguing against the OP’s thesis that extras are used as eye-candy in Game of Thrones. I am questioning a couple of the other points in the OP and in the thread.
Every human body part (save the appendix and maybe one or two other vestigial internal organs) serves a biological function (even body hair did before clothing). As far as I know, humans don’t have any plumage, i.e. external body parts evolved solely to attract mates. Without biological imperatives, the human body is just another animal. For example, a turtle may be a beautiful animal, but it’s only sexually attractive to other turtles wired to find the turtle body attractive.
Why would the mammary glands be any more immune to becoming attractive to humans wired to be attracted to women than hair or the buttocks? They are in a rather visible location. If evolution were going to attract to aspects of the female form, would not breasts be as logical an attractor as any?
Question: Unless you’re wired to be attracted to women, how can you know whether it’s nature or nurture? On the idea that it must be nurture because not all cultures make uncovered female breasts taboo, I’ll point out that displaying any body part was normal going far enough back in time, yet it’s a tenet of modern biology and the LGBT rights movement that being attracted to men or women is innately wired and not something that can be learned or unlearned, which would seem to me to suggest that covering up doesn’t create appeal (though perhaps it fetishizes it).
Related to that I have a more general question. I was under the impression that the male penis wasn’t attractive, in the same way as female breasts and some other body parts are to humans attracted to women, to humans wired to be attracted to men. I’m basing this impression on the general ridicule with which pictures of such tend to be received online, as opposed to pictures of female breasts. Though breast imagery is sometimes criticized by diverse ideological groups for various reasons, few seem to suggest it is in fact unattractive, where that seems to be the prevailing view of penis imagery. However, since I’m not wired to be sexually attracted to men, I don’t know if the penis is in fact unattractive to humans who are, which is why I ask. I got the impression that the “man-candy” aimed at those groups, condescendingly or not, came in the form of the body-sculpted chests (such as seem to be de rigueur in every superhero movie and TV show) and toned buttocks.
Edit to add: I realize this is the second time this month that I’ve replied at length to one of your posts. Apologies if it seems like I’m singling you out. Among the frequent veteran BB posters, the points you raise are frequently among the most interesting to discuss.
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I’ve always found it creepy how HBO’s adaptation took the (already rather bleak) world of George R.R. Martin’s ASoIaF and added even more rape and child-killing. I guess cramming the show full of extraneous female nudity is part of that uncompromising artistic vision.
Strangely enough, it only makes me uncomfortable because I don’t understand the purpose - this stuff’s not refined enough to be erotica and not satisfying enough to be pornography. There were a couple of scenes involving Littlefinger’s brothel that looked so incredibly silly, I was certain they must have come straight out of some teenage boy’s fantasy.
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Green is the proper color. Harrumph!!
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That’s a tired and witless argument and you know it. If a woman is walking down Wilshire Boulevard without a stitch on beneath her navel, she’s going to run afoul of the law just as fast as a shirtcocking guy. If you show the unclothed pubic region of a woman in a movie, the MPAA will slap you with an R rating about as fast as if you show a flaccid adult penis. If you show an erect penis, you’re in NC-17 territory like you would be with what my sniggering junior-high buddies referred to as “Wide-Open Beaver Shots.” Limp dicks are about the same as the mons venera when it comes to shocking Mrs Grundy into calling the FCC.
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I’d argue that would be the equivalent of an erect penis, which this show has yet do depict.
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I wonder how powerful this societal influence is anymore. I mean, there certainly must be a zillion studies that back this theory up, but I have no memory of ever subscribing to these archetypes. When I think of “subservience,” I’ve always imagined actual servants, or slaves, of both sexes. And dominant or powerful women (in official positions of authority or otherwise) have never struck me as conceptually strange or unnatural. The controversy surrounding powerful women has, since I was a kid in the 70s, always come across to me as the dying gasps of out-of-touch fuddy-duddies… except for the fact that here it still is, forty years later.
I’m the son of a strong-minded and strong-willed woman who grew up during the Great Depression, raised seven children, and was a successful professional woman later in life when most of her kids had mostly grown up, and the “free-to-be-you-and-me” cultural context of my 1970s Southern California upbringing made me confident (or at least optimistic) that we would have moved past all this… but then when I was nine and again when I was twelve and I saw the ERA fall apart, it finally started to hit home that the well-entrenched foundations of the patriarchy weren’t about to quietly die out.
But man, I still don’t see the cultural reinforcement on this kind of man-dominant, woman-subservient imagery. I mean, I know it’s there, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never felt that it worked on me. I have never enjoyed seeing women degraded or forced to be subservient… in fact, I’m a bit turned off when they volunteer to be subservient. Dominance and submission do not interest me in the least, and I’ve only been comfortable around imagery that promotes an equal social standing among the sexes.
The sexual power dynamics in GoT don’t turn me on; they’re as repulsive as the violence. But the show works for me nonetheless on several levels, as a physical and societal and cultural horror show.
I do not dispute that your summation of the male gaze is accurate. But it does not reflect the way I look at other people, and it never has, and I have a problem understanding any men who would get off on that dynamic, or subscribe to the idea that a woman’s “place” is subservient to men. Jesus, what an underevolved viewpoint.
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So, if Jon Snow starts using a cell phone to communicate with… whomever, that’s cool, because: dragons?
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/me vomits
Cant wait 'til they run out of books upon which to base this tripe.
no, not at all. One does not need to be exposed to be objectified nor does exposure automatically mean objectification.
Then it’ll be Wild Cards.
That would be ridiculous. Reception north of the wall is practically non-existent even if you’re willing to pay the roaming charges.
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Some day there will be a show with more naked men than women and men will rise up in self-righteous fury, and their roars of indignation will shake the country … or not.
actually breasts are erotic because the only places they are seen is in sexual contexts. This contrasts to other cultures where breasts are seen as a normal part of everyday life. They have simply been desensitized to them to a point where they can appreciate them but are not in anyway obsessed by them like in our culture. Sort of like women in regards to men’s chests, which can also be seen in sexual as well as non-sexual contexts. It has more to do with culture than evolutionary psychology.
