“ The show has already come under fire for its sexism this year, especially in regard to a now-notorious rape scene, where the wicked queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) is raped by her supposedly good-hearted brother-slash-lover Jaime (Nickolaj Coster-Waldau). Some were quick to condemn the show for departing from the books; Sonia Saraiya noted that the show had an established tendency to introduce scenes of violence against women where they weren’t present in the original text.

Other critics, myself included, have pointed out that Game of Thrones’ tendency to use violence against women for cheap shock value is omnipresent throughout both the show and George R.R. Martin’s original writing. For example, while some fans argued that the TV series’ unambiguous rape scene between queen-in-exile Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) and the now-deceased Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa), began as an ambiguously “consensual” encounter between the two characters in the books, others maintained that it simply condensed the book’s existing timeline, where, after a “consensual” wedding night (if you can ever call a sex scene between a little girl and the adult man to whom she’s been sold “consensual,” which, for the record, you cannot) Drogo begins routinely raping Daenerys until she somehow hones her sexual prowess to such an extent that he begins treating her nicely. Not only is the message of this plot line spectacularly retrograde in both versions—ladies! If you want your spouse to stop abusing you, just get really really good at giving him orgasms!—it’s arguably less offensive in the TV version. After all, in the show, Daenerys is played by an adult actress, and we’re not forced (as we are in the books) to confront the fact that an adult man chose to write with palpable, leering eroticism about the “stiffened,” “aching” nipples and copious vaginal “wetness” of a 13-year-old child. ”