There's still very much a kind of blockheaded attitude among male fantasy authors and fans that "I'm writing medieval fantasy so it wouldn't be realistic to have women exist as anything other than male fantasy objects or sideshows."

Notwithstanding of course that the novel might well have dragons, or magic, or whatever the hell else, and so there's no reasoned justification for that one element of "realism" to remain. This isn't the same as saying a fantasy novel set in a medieval-esque society should in some way be barred from considering the position of women in medieval times - but if that's not going to be a plot point then it shouldn't be dwelled on or be made a focal point.

It's hard to explain this but quite obvious when you're reading something whether the potentially objectionable content is simply in for voyeuristic effect (simply using casual sexism as a thing on a checklist to show how mature your setting is) or whether you engage with it as a theme and plot point (and thus are inviting consideration of the position of women in a patriachal society). The former case, when sexism is included "because it's realistic" is almost acceptance of it (defenders of fantasy cite its big advantage as throwing realism to the wind, so anything included must be a considered choice).

In short it's all a matter of tone; making the conscious decision to feature depictions of casual sexism or racism in a piece of genre fiction and then not engaging with them as anything other than evidence of how "gritty" your setting is can easily be seen as tacit acceptance of these things

Game of Thrones has the strongest female characters I have ever encountered in literature and on television. I appreciate that's not what this article is getting at, although the title is a little misleading, but it's totally unsurprising to me that it has such a large female following...

I dispute that fantasy should "throw realism to the wind". Having a world where dragons or goblins exist doesn't mean that people should behave differently. Take the illegality of slavery in the GoT world. What economic circumstances caused the abolition of slavery? (We can assume it wasn't the influence of benevolent religion, as that never counted for anything in our world.) Presumably George R R Martin has thought all this out. I'd hope so, anyway, or he's not doing his job.

And accusations that Game of Thrones' producers have steered away from scenes of rape contained in the original books, while amping up the consensual sexual content, continue to dog the show.

Game of Thrones' only real crime is storytelling far more complex than mainstream critics have come to expect from fantasy.

I'm a fan of both the Game of Thrones show and original books but its willfully blind to suggest that the only crime is complex story-telling.

HBO have ramped up the t&a because this appeals to one of the target demographics (teenage boys of all ages). I have no problem with sex on screen and it hasn't stopped me enjoying the show, but this is clearly a commercial decision and, even as a fan, I have to admit that at times it simply gets in the way of the story. A number of scenes involving Littlefinger's prostitutes have frankly served no purpose than getting some breasts on screen while again emphasising what a shit he is.

I don;t think its a coincidence that the last series got better towards the end as they reduced the amount of sexposition and increased the amount of story.

Fighting back, and getting loud -- women have been marginalized for a long time. So have geeks and nerds. So you can imagine that women who are geeks and nerds are pretty damn sick of it. And when we get it from our own gender -- telling us what to read and what not to read, what to watch and what not to watch, etc -- that's even worse. When Gina Bellafante posted her insulting and frankly ignorant review, it made a lot of us angry enough to do something about it, whether that was rally support for our favorite fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror media (films, books, TV, etv) or remind people of the countless women who not just read "boy books" but WRITE them (FFS, Ursula K LeGuin's books are required reading at many universities).

My girl friends and I were angry too. We started a book review website, www.bookshelfbombshells.com, to show that women read *everything*, across all genres. And we started getting more involved in local geek culture events without having to break out the Slave Leia costume. And we got louder about feminist concerns in the US outside of things like books, comics, and games. A lot of us have been swinging virtual swords for a long time. We've finally reached the point where we're not afraid to weird some real ones, too.

I thought it had now been covered that the rape story was misquoted, as the press release done by E3 has specifically stated:

This is where Lara is forced to kill another human for the first time. In this particular section, while there is a threatening undertone in the sequence and surrounding drama, it never goes any further than the scenes that we have already shown publicly. Sexual assault of any kind is categorically not a theme that we cover in this game.

Does it really matter? When I'm playing FIFA12 I don't expect the players to look like me.

I don't know about you but I thought most women into this stuff had beards....

Isn't the point of a grimdark setting to create a nasty Hobbesian world and let the story flow from character's attempts to survive in this adverse setting? A world full of moonbeams and rainbows might tick all the right PC boxes, but I doubt it would lend itself to compelling drama.

And @R042, having dragons, magic and other unrealistic elements is not a free pass for Fantasy to disregard everything else. If anything, the point of Game of Thrones-type worlds is to take typical 'airy' fantasy tropes and ground them in a more realistic setting.

There's still very much a kind of blockheaded attitude among male fantasy authors and fans that "I'm writing medieval fantasy so it wouldn't be realistic to have women exist as anything other than male fantasy objects or sideshows."

Not sure it's fair just to single out male writers and fans, many of the complaints are addressed at female writers and fans as well. This article mentions Charlaine Harris & Anne Bishop, and I think few need introductions to the controversy around Stephanie Meyer Twilight novels. The article also mentions the ongoing Catwoman controversy at DC (which surprises me that it is Judd Winick writing it but there you go) but Anne Nocienti has been been involved as well, where her first Green Arrow story involves Oliver Queen having a foursome with a set of genetically engineered triplets. Not saying I agree with all the criticism but there are some female authors and ardent fans who are just as guilty. I've often seen some people claim that certain books couldn't possibly be written by a woman as no woman would ever write her female characters like that, even though they are.

@R042 - The 'it's realistic to have women being raped because that happened a lot in medieval times' is the most tedious argument I agree. And you're right, its very easy to tell when its an integral part of the drama and when its just there to titillate the sexually frustrated readership. The best response is "you're not fooling anyone" when authors try and pull that.

@MaurizioGuadino - I don't know if I would go as far as 'strongest' female characters, I think other shows / books have done more for female representation. But, I do believe the storytelling is strong enough that it can carry these weaknesses. And yes, I can also see why its attracted a big female fan base.

@TheLastSpartan - unfortunately I don't think much Fantasy can deplot the 'its realistic' argument credibly. Are the slave maidens of Gor realistic? Not very.

@5432hun - conceded, the show is guilty of 'sexposition'. Not going to try and win that argument.

@dmnikithser - I think as the new demographic of geekdom shakes out, women are going to be far from a marginalised group any more. Looking at indicators like the most recent Hugo and Nebula award lists, you can see the growing presence of women on every level of fandom. Not that I'm contesting your point at all, in fact its all the more important that the chauvinist holdouts in geekdom understand that THEY are now the minority.

A world full of moonbeams and rainbows might tick all the right PC boxes, but I doubt it would lend itself to compelling drama.

If you read what I wrote you'd see I addressed that.

There is a difference between writing which considers "compelling drama" and "attempts to survive in an adverse setting" and writing which simply makes setting assumptions as a matter of course and in so doing accepts them. Depicting nasty stuff for its own sake is bad; making the "compelling drama" out of reactions to it (either the characters' or the readers') is another.

Case in point; Guy Gavriel Kay's "Under Heaven", which is so matter of fact in depicting a horrific society that the reader is at times forced to do a double take because they're beginning to become as desensitised to it as the characters. It does this almost entirely without depicting such brutality; the mere fact it has become banal enough to be talked about in matter-of-fact terms as a threat does, to me, a far greater job of depicting a nasty world than any number of depictions of maidens in peril from lusty knights.

Indeed, the best and most chilling depictions of societies that are inherently bigoted or evil don't luridly depict the evil, but instead show how the characters do not respond to it in the expected way.

Most of the criticism of this "darkness" is about the lurid way in which it's depicted; the way in which it becomes the focus beyond simply being a phenomenon in the setting. If an author wants to show how society has become inured to something, there are better ways of doing so than depicting it in all its glory.

I still think the whole Lara thingy as less to do with obscure geek culture and allot more to do with Stieg Larssons millennium trilogy.

Last week, neo-socialist enfant terrible Laurie Penny weighed in on the show with a confused rant of its own epic proportions, which seemed to conclude that despite being violent, sexist and racist it was OK to enjoy the show in the same detached ironic way you might enjoy, say, a political protest.

Confused rant...sounds like Laurie Penny writing on just about anything.

R042

There's still very much a kind of blockheaded attitude among male fantasy authors and fans that "I'm writing medieval fantasy so it wouldn't be realistic to have women exist as anything other than male fantasy objects or sideshows."

Quite right. and there's the additional point that most of those who talk about 'realistic' medieval attitudes to the medieval world actually have very little idea of what medieval attitudes to women actually were - having got most of their information from other faux-medieval fantasies (Tolkein, Victorian interpretations of medieval texts, fairy tales, etc) The 'medieval world' was vast and varied, not to mention spanning around 1000 years and may different cultures: there are fascinating stories about women to find there. Even look at 'proper' medieval texts - not at fantasies about ladies in castles - and you can also find active, political, complex, sexually independent women. The context might be patriarchal, and they're usually not as well developed as the male characters, but there's still plenty to find.

'Realistic' usually just means 'conforming to my own prejudices and fantasies'

The Lara things odd in that the makers have gone out of their way to make her more human and that includes fragility. They have changed her physique to be more real. Yes she survives an attempted sexual assault but I don't get why that means she shouldn't emerge as a strong character this is an origins story before she is the badass we know later in her life.

Different tools in the toolbox. Sometimes a writer might want to underplay the nastiness, sometimes they might want to shove it in the reader's face. The important thing is they have the freedom to do this. And the freedom to sometimes get it wrong in a clumsy, cack-handed fashion.

I've read too many articles recently that seem to favor a chilling effect - creators must only create the "right" kinds of books/games/films.

This attitude should be fought. Vigorously.

Requires Only That You Hate:

Hating up Richard K Morgan? Huh. I like his books. Not read the fantasy, mind you. Altered Carbon was good, I thought.

Gaiman? Yes, he's a little samey, but it's still entertaining stuff.

Bacigalupi a racist? Maybe. Certainly written some stuff which doesn't look good.

I'm concerned that the fact that they hate a lot of authors I rather like means I'm not a very critical reader.

@cbarr - that's the problem though isn't it? Building the kind of two dimensional charcter that has an 'origin story' and is a 'badass' and then tacking on an emotional trauma like attempted rape to give the sham appearance of depth. Sexual violence is to important an issue to be used as fuel for crappy video games. If the Tomb Raider makers want to make a charcter with depth, they need to think much harder than they have.

I did love Beukes and Butler (one of my first scifi loves, in fact) though. And Le Guin. So maybe I'm not a total lost cause.

Everytime someone points out that some really quite gruesome things happen to male characters in TV and videogames (in GoT for example that Targeryn fella, whas-his-name gets killed by having molton gold poured over his head) the view from some quarters is that it whatever trauma the male characters (or pixels) suffer it cannot possibly compare to a woman being raped. Rape is a terrible thing but I don't understand why it can't be compared to other terrible things that happen to fictitious characters (regardless of gender).

It's not censorship to request that authors that want to engage with topics like rape, institutional sexism and the like do so in a way that actually engages with them in some useful way rather than uses them as items on a checklist of how dark and mature your setting is.

Actually, the molten gold thing bothered me. Gold can't melt that quickly, can it? It has a much higher melting point.

I'm probably focusing on the wrong elements of the show, I admit.

I read once that the difference between pornography and art was in the close-ups. I think that sentiment seems to apply here. Setting a world against a background of patriarchal dominance and cruelty is fine if the objective for that background isn't merely titillation. If it is part of the wider message that the writer is trying to impart, so be it. To indulge in it for its own sake, however, can hardly be said to have artistic merit.

That said, art is a very subjective thing. Promoting chauvenistic or, worse, misogynistic ideals is generally (I hope!) a Bad Thing. But, as in the case of the 'sexposition' (word of the day, btw) in GoT, that still doesn't mean that people of either gender are necessarily not going to like it. I think perhaps this is what has struck me most about the current tide of anti-chauvenistic sentiment determining what people should and shouldn't like in relation to female representation: It's motivation is anti-chauvenist. It seeks to oppose the negative representation of women in (traditionally) male-dominated media constructions. It's not, really, feminist, in terms of suggesting positive representations or even musing on just what those might be. I fully agree that representations of women are all too frequently over-sexualised or otherwise marginalised. I'd be much more interested in hearing about suggestions as to what ideals shou

If it is part of the wider message that the writer is trying to impart, so be it. To indulge in it for its own sake, however, can hardly be said to have artistic merit.

This is what I'm trying to argue right here. The depiction can be as explicit as needed; but the more explicit it is the more difficult it surely is to make it work.

ld be aspired to in these media without compromising their viability as entertaining fictions.

(continued from last post....)

As a young teen I loved fantasy as it was the only offering that had strong female characters. Authors like Tamora Pierce, were just brilliant and worlds away from sappy Sweet Valley and its ilk. Frankly I despair of some of the 'fantasy' that is currently being written.

Maybe because rape is a reality, and the possibility that it may happen to one, at any point in one's life, is often a thought at the back of many women's minds.
Probably every woman knows someone who has been raped. Many many women have been raped. It's a serious lifetime issue for women.

Molten-gold poured over one's head? Not so much.
I know it's just the example you used, but you are comparing fantasy horribleness to real-life horribleness.

Hi Damien - That's true about Gor. But bear in mind I was saying what I think fantasy ought to do. We can't tar the whole genre with the excesses of a few. And when I say fantasy should be real (as all good fiction should) I am certainly not trying to excuse exploitative lingering over those aspects that are included merely to titillate the fanboys.

Sexual violence is to important an issue to be used as fuel for crappy video games.

Sexual violence is certainly taboo and hasn't really been attempted, as far as I'm aware, as part of video game characterisation. It has been used as motivation for revenge, usually on the part of the enraged male who steps in and gets muscular and violent, in a few games. However if video games ever are going to evolve into an art form that is worthy of critical merit then they are going to have to find ways to deal with such taboos, sooner or later.

And characterisation in general.

My 2 cents here. I think the very language here is on some level part of the problem. To elaborate, until recently (the last 5~10 some odd years when Geek culture became "cool", though I'm one to believe that while there are rightly more women getting into geek culture, much of the huge expansion (especially among young men from traditionally "ungeeky" demographics) is clinging to being a Geek as Tech billionaires and Silcon Valley become the highest social icons, but I digress) much of the tropes and behaviors that are now rightly or wrongly maligned in geekdom were commonplace, unchallenged, and just the normative material of geekdom. Now, all of a sudden the every present eye of the media, popular culture, and critics are all slamming away at geek culture, tearing apart anything they find worthless and decadent.

And partially, this a good, outside criticism makes for a breaking from stale tropes and cliches, and old entrenched injustices. But on the other hand, much of it is almost as bigoted as the material they attack. For example, as a black nerd, I was up in arms when Ultimate Spiderman had Peter Parker die, and replaced with a Latino-Black character, not because I'm some Uncle Tom or whatever label I could be attached with, but because I like and identify with the struggles of a the poor, New York jew that was Peter Parker. But, if you read the mainstream media criticism, it was all people bashing "Racist, Basement dwelling, white males", when old-school Marvel fans of the female, and minority kind weren't so happy either because, hey they just killed off a favorite character, regardless of racial, gender, and socio-economic background.

What I'm driving at is the hamfisted treatment of nerd culture as JUST this place that minorities and women want to get into, but these old grumpy, white men want to keep to themselves. That's frankly not the case, and its insulting to people like me to treat it as such. Is the nerd community disproportionately white and male? Yes. However, it isn't totally so, and one must acknowledge that. And neither is it this regressive chauvinistic backwater, especially when you have comics like X-men that have been dealing with serious issues of race, government power, etc. for decades at this point and old school sci-fi by the likes of Heinlein that dealt with politics and science in a more thoughtful way than you can get in most media today.

Sexual violence is to important an issue to be used as fuel for crappy video games.

This is essentially the problem people have with the storyline that they think there are subjects video games shouldn't cover. I disagree with this anaylisis we haven't scene how they handle the situation and I don't believe that video games as a medium should be shackled as they currently are by social conservatism. As a realitivly new art form they are still finding there feet and the way in which they engage with subjects and the audience. Sex, violence and the extremes of human experience and emotion are well worn tropes for art and have being throughout human history. The extremes of human behaviour and of human emotion have played out time and time again. The idea that video games as an interactive medium shouldn't be capable of tackling these subjects seems like a false one of those who wish art to remain static and safe. For the past 50 years the TV has being a passive form of entertainment and video games transform it to something that is interactive as with theatre, painting and reading the safe box in the corner of the room demands more when it requires interactive thought and proceses video games offer that change. Just as theatre has covered these difficult subjects and directors move actors so players can move their characters in stories that they are engaged with that hold both a physicality and teh capacity to hold a wider dimension then most television requires. So I think these are subjects that should be on the cards for video games as they are for other story telling.

Sexual violence is certainly taboo and hasn't really been attempted, as far as I'm aware, as part of video game characterisation.

Mafia 2 you have to fight of a prison rape and FEAR 2 ends with your character being raped. Video games are takiling more and more subjects and stories and are engaging in more ways with stories of the extremes of human experience. They are moving away form the hero trope and the early stories of lust and revenge no longer do they just repeat epic poems storylines.

I don't disagree with any of this; there was a very good editorial on the subject on the site Eurogamer recently which argued similar.

Its conclusions were that there was no reason why games should not consider any subject, but instead that as the video game industry currently is it is incapable of doing so in any useful way. If anything this outcry will hopefully not lead to censorship but some kind of move within these male-dominated media to finding ways of exploring serious issues that don't seem exploitative and trivial.

Oh dear, I forgot to connect to my initial point on language. The point of my diatribe was that the popular, and critical re-examination and re-formation of geek culture cannot and should not be depicted as some sort of fight, holy war, etc that these sorts of cultural disagreements are manichaeistically conceptualized as. It should be a debate, a discussion, and the infusion of new voices.

As someone who has been in the trenches of "non-traditional geekdom" for much longer than the current media explosion, it just doesn't work. If one comes in "swinging your sword" and with a holier-than-thou attitude, no matter how justified, it always fails, and ends up with division, mistrust, and a lack of cohesion which would be a sad, ironic end for geek culture which was a bastion for the people who didn't fit in other places. While a few years ago, I'd be with you all fighting in the forums and on the blogs, time has really taught me that you cannot shame, browbeat or otherwise force people out of old habits, especially if you're making veiled insults at the "breaded white guys". Outside of the screaming bigots/ideologues who make up a portion of any community, most people are surprisingly reasonable and most don't even realize they're doing something offensive, and willing to listen to new ideas and voices.

But when it becomes finger-pointing, blaming, name-calling, and personal insults then no matter how noble the cause, you will fail miserably.

TL;DR - You can't win a culture war/culture battle via any other method than attrition. You can win a cultural debate easily.

I don't see games as being exploitative or trivial but as a medium in its infancy still trying to find its feet and voice that the stories remain basic varieties of the early epic poems in that we get the illiad in war games over and over again and even in Mario.

My nearest public library seems full of books with female authors, protagonists and themes - like Kate Elliott (Cold Magic and Spirit Gate), Trudi Canavan (Magicians Guild and others). No lack either of books that preach against sexism, homophobia etc. - say L.E.Modesiit. And that leaves out all those that did not look good enough to pick up (I don't do vampires for instance). If you want 'female-friendly' books, they are out there. Other people like other kinds of books. Why not try to promote the things you like, instead of campaigning against those that are not to your taste?

What was the problem again?

Read China Miéville. His female characters are great.

I would recommend the Wheel of Time books as fantasy literature with strong female characters.

Just three decades ago geek was a schoolyard insult thrown at those oddballs who could work a computer, liked books more than football and couldn't look a girl in the eye.

...and now it's a term of derision we can use for Guardian columnists. Get a life!

Confused rant...sounds like Laurie Penny writing on just about anything.

I'd never heard of this person before (probably because I stopped reading The New Statesmen before she was born!) so I checked this article out.

There is some interesting stuff in there, the "search for a good ruler" issue is one that has bothered me before, but in a sense all fantasy, science fiction and mythology involves someone special doesn't it, even when the protaganist is nominally normal. Stories about Peter Parker would be of very limited interest if he didn't just happen to be better than you and me at swinging between tall buildings.

The stuff on treatment of sex and gender isn't very good though.

I think the point about GoT is that not only does it value female characters but it values different kinds of female experience. Yes there are female badasses such as Danearys, Ayra, Brienne, Ygritte and the Queen of Thornes... Who go get, make and unmake and are active rather than passive...

But there are also characters who adopt more traditional female roles, the ladylike Sansa, Catelyn the mother of the Stark brood... Their experiences and stories are also valued rather than simply ignored.

There are those in between, the passive-aggressive Cersai who more and more often rues the day she was born female and is to some extent deeply embittered by it all.

As for rape and the rest and women being victimised it happens in GoT... But uhhhhhhh it's not easy being a man sometimes in Westeros either... As any member of the Black Brotherhood or the Unsullied could tell you, and DON'T whatever you do, BE A BARD...

That I can live with. These issues should be investigated and discussed, the Kickstarter project hopefully will be a good way of doing so and the abusers of it should be dismissed.

What will get tedious is if this "battle for geek culture" just results in uniform, bowdlerised PC-blandness.

Oi! Leave Richard Morgan out of this. The man is a god. And I say this as a woman who was quite sickened by one of the torture scenes in his last outing. I disagree that it was lazy or gratuitious, however.

Geeky Girls turn me on. :D

Sorry but I'm a girl, and I'd munch catwomans rug any day.

Please see above - I rest my case!

I think a certain group of radical feminists are being very selective and cherry picking examples of media where women are apparently "objectified".

I mean for instance, batwoman isn't just a lesbian but also an intelligent, political feminist (she was expelled in the United States Military Academy because of the "don't ask, don't tell" rule). Catwoman, on the other hand is meant to emulate a femme fatale with a dominatrix-like bitchy personality. Her "style" has nothing to do with deliberate attempts to "objectify" women but is meant represent a common comic character "motif" for narrative purposes.

You have to realize that video game / comic characters are meant to be "larger than life" to keep reader interest. How can a graphic novel convey information if the words used are considerably shorter than a book? It does this through hyperbole, exaggerated action shots / poses / emotions and character dramatization.

These companies are well aware of keeping up with diversity. Many comic book publishers including mainstream ones have superheroes of different races, different sexualities and different ways of life. Some longstanding stories do feature powerful, sexy and seductive heroines, but these heroines also kick major arse and are not "merely wank fodder". It's incredibly disrespectful to the artist to criticize their choice of making their characters look aesthetically pleasing.

It's also victimless (digital girls are not exploited) and nothing more then printed ink. I am fed up of gungho, clueless radical feminists who think us "males" just love oppressing women in the media for the sake of it. If you want freedom you must also treat those whom you disagree with respect and dignity and not just call us simple minded idiots for daring to call bull**** on this ideologically-driven moral panic. By all means attack Nuts / Zoo I couldn't give a s*** about those wank mags, but please the leave video games and the sci fi / fantasy genre alone!

can see through the attack on "video games" as nothing more than a "strawman" attempt to discredit a subculture which has made massive progress to be as diverse as possible and have welcomed women with open arms. The only problem is purely that of a historical one (less women have historically taken up "computer sciences" hence there is under-representation). [b]There is no patriarchal cyber-boogeyman! [/b]

Respecting artistic freedom and freedom of expression is qualitatively more important then pandering to dogmatic, moral imperialism.