Sure. Just realize if you put yourself in an adversarial position the offer to send wine if an address is provided can come off as a bit creepy.
Well instead of being ‘witty’ or ‘creepy’ about it I should have kept it direct and simple. “I noticed that you are mocking our comments on twitter. I think that’s poor form, and I’m pointing it out.”
I think you vastly overestimate male intelligence…
This is a legit criticism, though. Women as series nudity props is something HBO has done for a long time, and probably should be stopped or greatly reduced by now. I remember watching the HBO series Dream On in college and it got to be a drinking game – at what point in the show will there be boobs? Because there were always some included in each episode, in a way that felt … required. Why would that 1990 requirement need to carry forward to 2015?
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I don’t think the author understands what “nudity” is and what “genitalia” are:
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Male “full frontal nudity” is rarer on film because male genitalia is visible. I.e., Full frontal nudity for a woman doesn’t display genitalia. To achieve the equivalent with a woman, she would have to … um… “display her bits” a bit more aggressively. This hasn’t happened on the show.
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There have been many many bare-chested men on display on the show. Not sure what the author’s issue is with women in particular in this regard.
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Therefore, due to #1 and #2 above, there actually has been far more male nudity presented than female nudity and with more exposure.
I’m so glad we’ve had all these infrequent/new posters around today to explain how the vulva doesn’t count as genitalia, and having it exposed doesn’t count as nudity.
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I don’t think the author knows the difference between fantasy and historical fiction, or for that matter, much about historical grooming patterns and beauty standards.
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Grooming standards have run the gamut planet-wide… forever. Pick one set of standards for your own fantasy novel. Or make it up.
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Can it be over-emphasized that this is a fantasy and not historical fiction. Heck, have you heard the accents of most of the characters? Why are so many characters speaking with British accents? Why? Well… just cuz. And they decided they needed to be consistent. They could have gone with Brooklyn accents. shudder It would have been awful, but a nice change of pace… for one episode.
Please post photos of the vulva exposed in the game of thrones. Now count the times that has happened. Now count the number of times an exposed penis has been shown.
We’ll wait. 
And yes, it just barely counts as exposed genetilia. The nudity is reasonably well balanced between the sexes on game of thrones… though a bit more tilted towards more male nudity.
And I actually frequently comment… but never once here, I don’t believe… As I am sure that is true of many others.
Are you going to explain what a merkin is next? Because, you know, us out here in the digital sticks really have never heard of any of this before.
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The author hasn’t.
way to deflect. congrats.
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Um. I was commenting on the author’s article. I am not sure what you are poking at.
Well, I would say that if you were uncomfortable taking on a role those individuals asked of you, then that’s every bit a valid a criteria as whether or not they chose to take on the role they did. My only caution would be not to assume that, just because someone might choose to be submissive or subservient in a certain aspect of a relationship, that you are therefore only left with the options of being dominant or backing out of the relationship. Who’s to say you can’t be egalitarian and someone else be submissive? I personally would approach each other and the relationship on your own terms and just see how it evolves, instead of assuming certain Procrustean roles must be paired in order for something worthwhile to develop from it. It’s not like your doing something where you need a clear chain of command to get through the day.
I think you guys need to get over the “is showing a bit of female pubic hair the same thing as showing a penis, is showing a bare male chest the same thing as showing breasts” equivalency argument. There are no wieners, er, winners in that line of argument.
The strongest criticism is in the article, and the most defensible, is the throwaway female characters used as T&A window dressing. Are there an equivalent number of throwaway male characters presented as objects for us to gawk at in each scene? Or, deeper still – is this kind of stuff even necessary?
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I would say no, not an equivalent number. They aren’t wholly absent, but they’re relatively uncommon.
In the strictest sense, no. But again, neither is the violence. It’s an artistic choice. Is it a wrong choice? Is it a harmful choice? Maybe. It’s an entertainment, not a political polemic, educational film, social manifesto, or prescriptive life-example. It’s a serial tale of a land in which women are frequently exploited and abused, and sometimes relegated to strictly recreational/decorative roles. It’s also a world in which rich siblings fuck each other and throw innocent children out of high windows, in which the noblest and most honorable character lops off the head of a soldier who abandoned his post in raw terror when confronted with an unbelievable supernatural threat, in which cunning treachery is regularly rewarded while principled honorability generally proves messily fatal. It’s not a world any reasonable person would want to live in for long. In a vacuum, the sexposition and gratudity in GoT fit perfectly well within the show’s fantasy world.
But this show does not exist in a vacuum, and gratuitous nudity is a problem precisely because it is not unique to Game of Thrones. It serves to reinforce a perception that it’s okay for naked women to be set dressing, not because they’re sadly powerless and exploited in Westeros, but because they’re being used as set dressing in a 21st century TV show. If the whores were not so glamorous, perhaps exhibited some physical evidence of the misery of their lives, perhaps we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But no, their teeth are straight and clean, their skin blemish-free, their hair perfectly coiffed, their smiles convincing… you can almost smell the perfumes and feel the silks. It looks like a comfy life, until it suddenly doesn’t. And it’s kinda strange to me that apparently adding a few dozen naked strapping young men throughout a season would fix so much of the perceived problem, because HBO could quite easily do that without fundamentally altering the show’s aesthetic. There have been a small handful of those guys already, though only the three or so full-frontals that Brainspore has mentioned, as far as I can remember.
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I was really just trying to highlight the area of social interaction in which some people get mired and end up taking sides or behaving in a way which they think makes them sophisticated but actually proves them to be jerks.
And… I can’t really unpack the rest, let me try,
The whole point is that in game playing one isn’t asked, the assumption is that you will play whatever game using the implicit rules ascribed by the social environment. If you are a game player and if you are subtle enough to have inculcated the rules (usually subconsciously, more often just without explicit conscious planning) and are comfortable enough wading into them subversively whilst maintaining a trust that they won’t be employed in bad faith.
I think I went on at length about the complexities of my assumptions and how it related to the sphere of behavior which may arise in the lee (shadow?) of such assumptions.
Hmm, maybe a little puritanism here, maybe just a touch of naivete. Counter:
/call:
Child “Ok you win, I think I’m right but you win.”
/response:
Parent “You are not right but as long as you respect my authority, we’ll be fine”
or
Adult “I respect your opinion but it’s not a matter of winning and losing, can’t we come to a mutual understanding?”
/Counter, child
“There’s no point, I can’t do anything right anyway, you just tell me what to do.”
Etc.
The antithesis is to get them to also behave like an adult but the complex and interesting thing to do is to appear to be playing the parent whilst subverting their child-state in such a way as to switch the role into a subversion of the game which results in a meta-level of the game where implicit power-games are shrugged off in favour of strengthening the relationship.
You’ll notice that the interesting path leads to the antithetical path by way of an innate participation in and resultant cooperative subversion of the ruleset that both pays out and subverts both layers (implied and explicit) of behavior.
The issue isn’t with a call by either party to maintain a ‘Procrustean’ attitude but rather recognition of a subtle call to subvert ‘the rules’ by employing ‘the rules’ in a novel fashion. This is the sophisticated fluidity I was talking about, the thing I had been too pompous to evaluate until I did.
So thanks for the advice, I guess, I took it some time ago.
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Heh. See You Next Wednesday. I’ll say no more.
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You’re concerned people are concern driving trollies the internet? Yikes, I think even Wu Gang had a more productive hobby than that!
So you’re assumption is that other people’s comments are either posturing or personally out to persecute you, as opposed to sincere expressions of their own thoughts? I’m noticing a pattern here.
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Hey, I gotta work. 
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…with Landis?
It occurs to me that there may not be as implicit a link between See you next Wednesday and See you next Tuesday… but I’m pretty sure there is. 
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