Are any of you watching Game of Thrones? Have you seen the ‘extended breastfeeding’ scene in episode 5? (Not there yet, then look away, look away, this post is probably going to be full of SPOILERS from the first season). And if you have seen the scene, did you laugh?
Because isn’t the mother, Lysa Arryn lots of people’s bad idea of a quintessential attachment parenting type*? First of all, she’s quite mad, and I mean the full use of that word – unstable, angry and eccentric. Then you have the fact that her parenting style seems both permissive and suffocating; her breastfeeding son (is he aged 6 or 13, the Internet is uncertain?) is a spoilt brat with a serious streak of cruelty in him because she has such trouble denying him anything. (You know, I don’t think she’s ever cried him out). Also, she breastfeeds wantonly in public and as you can see from above, she does not cover herself while she does it. And finally, she has also lost her husband, so I think you can assume that her ‘attachment parenting’ may be precluding her from having a normal adult sex life, too.
Speaking of sex, can I quickly add something general here about the sex scenes in Game of Thrones? I don’t particularly like fantasy, it’s not my genre – so I’m there for the politics, the zombies, the shots of horses galloping across expansive scenery and the HBO sex. Several men who had already watched the first season promised me that this was honest to goodness HBO television and that I could be assured of lots of fun adult content, including sex and violence. And that’s true, it is ‘adult’, which I like, but the sex scenes, what a disappointment. This is a boy’s own porn adventure. So porny, so cliché. They forgot to mention that. And I may be feminist but I can roll with a bit of objectification of women in my TV viewing and yet this seems distractingly one-sided in its focus on hetero male fantasies to me. For example, the doe-eyed white innocent being not only raped by a ‘swarthy brute’ but also later going through a college lesbian stage with her handmaid in order to learn how to better please him? And then, the most gratuitous sex scene ever happens during a scene where a male character (Lord Littlefinger) essentially fills you in on his back-story by way of a monologue delivered to camera. This monologue is occasionally interrupted by him issuing orders to two women he is training for his brothel who are having sex together in the background (and sometimes foreground). There can be no mistaking the centring of the male gaze in this scene because not only is the man in the scene entirely in control of these women – he’s fully clothed while they’re naked, and he tells them exactly how he wants them to have sex and when to change positions – but then, when in all their excitement they invite him to join them (see, hot faux lesbians not real lesbians), he actually sharply dismisses them. What a rude prat, and yet choices are so limited that he is my favourite character; I always gun for the Machiavellian types in a political drama.
OK, I get it that these are feudal times and not feminist times, and that women were often little more than breeders and sex slaves in that era but all the same, the sex scenes and sexual relationships depicted in the show could be just a little more even-handed. I mean, I can do sex and unequal power no trouble, I love True Blood. But something has going wrong when you have a cast of handsome men, as in the case of Game of Thrones, and yet none of them are filmed in such a way as to make them appear all that hot for me as a female viewer.
Or is this just me?
Anyway, now go read some analysis of Game of Thrones by people who actually love fantasy; it’s much better. Racialicious on the sexism and racism in the show (“swarthy brute” etc), and then here is Overthinking It on the sexism and ‘the rape that was consent in the book’ scene, and lastly, here is AfterElton on the only male gay sex scene so far.
P.S*. Also, don’t you love this says-so-much-about-the-world comment from here? “That’s the entire point of the scene, you’re supposed to see that Lysa is utterly deranged and there’s no better way to do that than showing her breastfeeding an 6-7 year old.” People torturing other people to death in the show, and other people in incestuous relationships with their siblings and yet ‘extended breastfeeding’ is the sign of true derangement.
P.P.S. Game of Thrones as feminist propaganda? Try here.
blue milk 
I hated Littlefinger’s monolog. That was totally made up for the show (it’s like, two cobbled together conversations he has in the book; in the book I don’t think he ever actually USES his brothels as anything other than a source of revenue).
Lyssa is a problematic character, and a lot of GRRM’s male gaze/privileged male view is plastered all over her. BUT. There are reasons leading to her behavior, and it’s not just anti-breast feeding screed.
Her father forced her to abort a wanted baby when she was younger, because the father was of the wrong social class. Perhaps because of that, perhaps because of other meddling (being poisoned to prevent conception/successful pregnancy), perhaps because of just bad luck, she went on to have a string of miscarriages and still births with her (much older, not physically demonstrative) husband (which was an arranged marriage, after a failed attempt at One True Love with another dude). Her family of birth (parents, siblings) don’t seem overly fond of her, her husband wasn’t overly fond of her (not abuse or anything, just… distant and dedicated to his work) and her babies (which she wanted, and which were her JOB to produce) kept dying. Except one. And that one is weak and often ill and has seizures and may not live to adult hood.
So she clings to her little dude, and it’s NOT healthy, and it harms both of them… and while there are a LOT of shitty fathers in the books none of them are as obviously shitty as she is, because they don’t breast feed and infantalize their kids (two separate issues). She sticks out more as a shitty harmful mother because OMG! A woman! Who isn’t a perfect mother! And don’t you know breasts are only for sex???!!? Which is more a product of our society than GRRM. I mean, seriously. There are some AWFUL fathers and father figures in the books. Most of the husbands are just appallingly bad (Robert Baratheon, you drunk wife-abuser, I am looking sternly at you).
The books have issues. While GRRM does touch on feminist concerns (he spends a LOT of time pointing out how unjust The Patriarchy is toward women and anyone who isn’t rich and connected… poor folk get killed, maimed, or exiled for relatively minor crimes while rich folk don’t get any punishment at all, for example; he points out how women have NO power under chivalric systems and are at the mercy of men entirely, despite the fact that they are portrayed as being protected and valued and powerful), he isn’t perfect about it.
Someone commented online, and I forget who it was, that the tv series would be better if it was on a different cable channel because HBO== gratuitous tits. While there is sex and violence in the books, the story and characters might be better served if the channel involved wasn’t able to just slap nipples on everything to spice it up; if they’d had to work at it a bit more. I vastly prefer the books to the show because they are more nuanced and over all even handed, and the reasons people do what they do are more apparent. But I appreciate that the show is getting people who haven’t read the books into the books, and getting people who don’t read fantasy to read fantasy.
If you’re disappointed in the lack of male eye candy, does that mean you have not seen the chest-shaving-scene? Which is a bit of weird that was created entirely for the show, possibly to address just the imbalance you’re talking about. But if so, it’s… a pebble compared to a mountain.
Yep, seen the manscaping homo scene and I kind of groaned at the time thinking wouldn’t the gay men in GOT be bears and not this kind of stereotype, but after reading the analysis at AfterElton (linked to above in my post) and seeing that many gay audience members loved the scene I’m willing to be happy about it too, who am I to disagree?
Yeah. Book Lysa breastfeeds a younger child (somewhere between 4 and 6), in the presence of her sister in her bedchamber. In the HBO version of events all the kids (theoretically) have been aged forward a bit – 7 year old Bran is 10 in the show, 15 year old Robb is 18 or so, etc. So the age of little Robin there is theoretically older than his book incarnation, but it’s hard to tell how old that particular boy is supposed to be (or maybe I’m just a wretched judge of age, totally possible). And of course she’s nursing on the throne, which actually seems a little empowering and cool, but I think it’s meant to show that nobody in her court will stand up to her ladying up the joint.
Per point two, I consider myself pretty sex positive but yoooowza do the HBO sex scenes drag. It’s definitely a test of endurance to sit through them, at least for me, and I can only endure it with much eyerolling. The worst (and longest) of them aren’t in the books. The book sex is occasionally accidentally funny but way easier to breeze over. I’m hoping the ratio of lady nudity to dude nudity (and sexy to unsexy; we get pseudo-lesbians making out forrrrever vs. what, 3 seconds of awkward Hodor?) just for the sake of equality. Sheesh.
I don’t think A Song of Ice and Fire is a particularly feminist work, and lord knows it could be worse, but I was hoping HBO might help push it further in the not-so-sexist-direction … instead it went the other way, bleh.
Love your analysis both, thank you so much for commenting.
“I don’t particularly like fantasy, it’s not my genre – so I’m there for the politics, the zombies, the shots of horses galloping across expansive scenery and the HBO sex.”
Yes, to ALL OF THAT! I’m definitely more of a fan of the fang than of fantasy. “True Blood” is also one of my current obsessions, although (SPOILER) as of late, it has regrettably fallen into some of those tired, ‘hot lesbian’ tropes. I think Queen Sophie-Anne’s request for Bill and Eric to just fuck each other made me a fan for life.
“But something is going wrong when you have a cast of handsome men, as in the case of Game of Thrones, and yet none of them are filmed in such a way as to make them appear all that hot for me as a female viewer.”
AMEN again, sister! What I would have given for a Khal Drogo/Jamie Lanister sandwich. Throw your female fans a frickin’ bone, HBO and GRRM!
Back to the Lysa Arryn of the TV show (SPOILER), she’s not really, truly crazy though, right? Based on her conversation with her sister in a later episode, and the line of reasoning she gives for denying Lady Stark’s request, Lysa suddenly seemed extremely wise; as though there had been a Hamlet-eqsue method to her madness all along, and as if she had been performing ‘slightly insane’ as a means of protection – successfully I might add.
Have only just read the first book, haven’t seen the series yet but in the book the child is 6 and there is no mention of breastfeeding. His mother is extremely protective – but when the Lannisters are your enemy who wouldn’t be? – and the child comes across as extraordinarily spoilt but so does Joffrey and some of the Stark children so I think it is just the way the kids are written. It doesn’t surprise me that they have shown Lyssa as doing extended breastfeeding, it fits with her character so far but I don’t like the implications that seem to go along with it.
The other HBO shows managed not to have such sexist sex in them. I really enjoyed how Big Love treated sex, and I love True Blood – it’s got just as many sexy man bodies as it does sexy lady bodies.
I gave up on Game of Thrones after the second ep. I didn’t like any of the characters, and it was the last straw when they killed off the dog and the little boy, in the same episode as a woman gets raped and then tries to seduce her rapist – I just wasn’t enjoying watching that.
Here’s the thing that bugs me most about the extended breastfeeding scene: A Game of Thrones has several male characters who don’t meet expectations for being all courageous and warlike. When it’s a character like Sam, whose main familial relationship is with his father, we’re supposed to sympathize with him. Being craven is his nature, apparently–just like Tyrion’s born a dwarf–and both Sam’s and Tyrion’s fathers come off poorly for not accepting that. But when we meet the sickly young Robert, we’re supposed to deplore his weakness and look down on his mother for not manning him up?
I noticed the ‘extended’ breastfeeding trope too, and without the back history that we would get in the books (I’ll read them after finishing this 1st season), those scenes stick out to me as a classic “crazy, mothering, physically inappropriate, woman empowered in The Wrong Way” rendering of the woman’s character. It didn’t help me buy into the storyline that she is Insane – I was too busy wondering if this is just a simplistic caricature made even more stereotyped.
Re the sex scenes – I have to admit I have fun with the X rated scenes in HBO shows – they’re part of the fun of watching them – as long as I remember to turn off the part of my brain that says “what about if I found MALE bodies and sexualities attractive?” The chest-shaving scene was a bit of fun, but I agree – a pebble compared to a mountain. And the Littlefinger scene stuck out like a sore thumb (sorry about the pun) – other scenes at least sometimes use the female body to signify something – e.g. the tremendously tacky topless sexy dancing at early Dothraki (sp?) scenes. Those scenes irritated me, but I could see what message the simple narrative was presenting, so, okay, I could deal with it. But to just have two Whores (and you know they aren’t women, they don’t even have sexualities, they’re just his Whores) going at it to create Hot Lesbian Action for noooo storyline progression whatsoever – that made me MAD. There’s eye candy fun HBO sex scenes, and then there was pure, 110% pointless objectification. I know it is a pretty non-existent line for me to draw, but it was there in my mind at least. And that scene crossed it.
And THAT’S why I needed to reply on your blog, not on Twitter 🙂
/rant
I just remembered another part in the first or second ep that bothered me – there was a scene where some dude was at a brothel, and he had about three women approach him giggling in a TOTALLY RIDICULOUS way – they weren’t laughing *at* anything – they were just making a noise so that the audience could recognise that they weren’t real people, they were just whores.
Agreed on all points, except one: “feudal times” is no excuse. This is fantasy, not history.
I just want to point out that attachment parenting isn’t permissive parenting. They are very different approaches to child-rearing. The parenting style portrayed is almost a parody of what some mistakenly believe results when a family practices the attachment philosophies. Rather it is a great example of permissive parenting and what this kind of lack of structure and discipline does to a family. It almost seems like the author sought to bastardize the shift from brick-wall parenting to connective parenting by dressing up permissive parental behavior as being ‘attachment’ by highlighting extended breastfeeding as a mental sickness, among other things. It is a twisted view of a positive way to interact with children if done appropriately.
Wolfmama – I completely agree, I hope my post reads as making that point because I am a little obtuse and nobody gets my jokes, it seems. I am both an attachment parenting type and an extended breastfeeding type and I epecially hate the way some people think attachment parenting is permissive parenting.
Oh gosh, if you like this show, you’d love the one my mom watches. I’m pretty sure its called “Sparticus”. Its basically soft core porn to the theme of the movie “300”. Hahah. 🙂
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