Pandagon

Game of Thrones asks: When does the desire for revenge go too far?

Now that Mad Men is over, I have some space freed up to talk about the last three episodes of Game of Thrones. Scott Kaufman has recapped last night's shocking episode here, so I won't be doing that, but I want to add a couple of thoughts about the themes of justice and revenge in that episode. It's common for many viewers of GoT to think of the show as more escapist than most "prestige" TV, and its shocks are more akin to a horror movie's than those of more elite, literary shows. Having read the books, I can see why it's easy to dismiss the whole enterprise that way, since George R.R. Martin favors a pulpy, overblown prose style to a more literary one. But, I think, last night's episode served as a reminder that there's something deeper going on with this show, and while the themes might be harder to ascertain than, say, those on Mad Men, they are still important and fascinating.

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How dare you feminists besmirch the good name of misogyny?!

Updated: One of the people criticized in this piece has already thrown a fit and accused me of suggesting he supports woman-killing. Now anyone with basic reading comprehension skills would see that I not only did not say that I believe any of these folks approve of woman-killing, but I explicitly labeled woman-killing as "something so bad that conservatives can't get behind it", right there in the first paragraph. The point of the piece is that they are afraid that woman-killing, which is a bad thing (they agree), might negatively impact the reputation of misogyny. I find this kind of comical, because I came to this with the pre-existing belief that misogyny is pretty bad, and am startled to see anyone trying to protect its good name from suggestions that it's associated with murder. By the way, 1.3 million women are violently assaulted by men every year in this country for not doing or being what those men want them to be, so Rodger's misogynist violence really is just the most extreme example of what relentlessly teaching young men that women exist to serve them gets you in terms of violence.

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#NotAllMen

The thing I love about living in New York City is that it often feels like, when you're feeling low (brought down, in this case, by right wingers responding to the shooting with a double down) the city conspires to cough up a moment so bafflingly strange and wonderful that you can't help but feel better.

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Masculine insecurity and entitlement are a big, tangled-up mess

I don't generally shout out stock photographers by name, but Gilles DeCruyenaere deserves special note for this work of art.

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The dangerous discourse of "the friend zone".

This is the first image I got when I did a stock image search for "friend zone". The implication is clear: Women have nothing of value to say besides, "I get to suck your cock now?"

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Music for the end of the world

I've definitely fallen off doing Friday music posts, but I thought I would revive it here because I'm happy about this mix I made of songs that are either about the apocalypse or were apocalypse-appropriate.

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Are feminists trying to upgrade butt-grabbing creeps to criminals? No.

 Is defending this really the hill to die on?

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Petty tyrants at Georgia high school want to ban girl from graduation for making a science joke

Oh high school graduation time. The kids are all excited and the parents are wavering between proud and anxious and everyone is so involved in the whole process that no one can spare a minute to pity the petty tyrants that infest every high school, who are losing yet another crop of kids to control and bully. These folks, who react poorly to their own waning youth by trying to suck the fun out of being young for teenagers, can be found both in administration and in the classrooms. Are they all people who work in public schools? No. But every public school has them. And every year, these petty tyrants watch another group of kids they've been able to push around for four years slide away from them.

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Guns: So many people obsessing over a tool so few will ever use

Loud. Expensive. Useless.

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