It seems like the debate over whether George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy saga, A Song of Ice and Fire, glorifies sexual assault is bubbling back up overseas. My thoughts on this subject are manifestly on the record (and will be even more so when Beyond the Wall, the book of essays about the franchise to which I contributed, comes out on June 19), so I won’t revisit them.

But thinking this over the other day, I realized something I hadn’t considered before. At least in the novels, with one exception, perpetrators of sexual assault and domestic violence aren’t allowed point of view chapters. Tyrion and Theon might be considered exceptions, but the sexual assaults in which they are participants—the gang rape of Tyrion’s first wife Tysha and Ramsay Bolton’s assaults on his wife, the false Arya Stark—are cases in which they are both also victims, forced into non-consensual sex through threats to their lives. We learn that Robert Baratheon committed marital rape through his widow Cersei Lannister’s memories, experience Daenerys Targaryen’s submission to her huband, Khal Drogo, through her perspective.

Vitcarion Greyjoy, who given his participation in the raider culture of the Iron Islands has probably committed rape, is the only exception to this rule—in his point of view, we see him have sex with a slave whose tongue has been removed. We also hear Roose Bolton tell the story of how he assaulted Ramsay’s mother, but not from his perspective, and not in a way that supports his worldview. But for the most part, the novels privilege the stories of assault victims, and of people who feel the collateral damage of sexual assault. Perpetrators don’t get the same space to justify themselves. Victims’ stories largely get to stand uncontested. It’s an interesting structural decision, and I think a revealing one.

I’ve been reading former NBC programming chief Warren Littlefield’s Top of the Rock, which is an extremely entertaining oral history of the creation of Must See TV, from Cheers to Will & Grace. There’s a lot to digest in it, from Noah Wyle’s first threesome to the question of why the networks don’t really launch shows in the summer any more. But I have to admit, I’m finding it most amusing as a chronicle of things that television network executives and standards and practices divisions are afraid of. Here’s the complete list:

1. Anyone Who Might Possibly Get Angry About Something: “NBC’s head of programming at the time was a man named Paul Klein. He had a background in audience research and had come up with the strategy of LOP, which stood for Least Objectionable Programming (I’m not kidding).”

2. The Lord’s Name taken in vain, storylines about clergy sexual abuse (the negotiations leading up to Seinfeld): “Based on the day-to-day negotiating that we were required to do with broadcast standards— you can’t use the Lord’s name in vain, you can’t say ‘penis,’ priests don’t do that to kids on our network, et cetera.”

3. Married couples having sex on kitchen tables (Mad About You): “Paul and Jamie had sex on the kitchen table or something. You don’t do that at 8:00.”

4. Maxi Pads (Friends): “Don objected to a Maxi Pad joke. Ross couldn’t throw out his ex-wife’s Maxi Pads. He was using them as arch supports. Okay, Don was uncomfortable with Maxi Pads.”

5. Penises (Friends): “The rules kept changing. For the first three years we could say ‘penis.’ Then we couldn’t say ‘penis.’ Then we could say “penis” again.”

6. Contraception (Friends): “They’re masturbating on Seinfeld, and we can’t show a condom wrapper.”

7. Medical terminology (ER): “Don Ohlmeyer had strenuous objections to the style and content of the show. He thought there was too much blood and far too much technical dialogue.”

Bonus Thing Television Critics Association Press Tour Participants Were Apparently Afraid Of: the female orgasm. “I got a question about the appropriateness of the opening scene of Sisters, where they sit in a steam bath and discuss orgasms. ‘Warren, is this acceptable for network television?’ I thought about that for a second and said, ‘Corporately, we believe in orgasms.’”

Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, the second novel in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, feels somewhat slighter than its sly, immersive predecessor, Wolf Hall. Some of that is simply a scope question: Wolf Hall covered more years of Cromwell’s life and the realms, and focused on the more momentous question of whether Henry would really break with Rome. Once we know he’s done that, his struggle to justify divesting himself of another wife is less tense, more quickly accomplished. And Cromwell, who has lost his children, his wife, put the possibility of affairs and remarriages aside in favor of service to the state, is a narrower man. To a certain extent, Bring Up the Bodies is a story about a man who shapes history losing tangible contact with his own life, his place in England.

When the novel begins, Cromwell “has counted the provision carts rolling in; he has seen kitchens thrown into turmoil, and he himself has been down in the grey-green hour before dawn, when the brick ovens are swabbed out ready for the first batch of loaves, as carcasses are spitted, pots set on trivets, poultry plucked and jointed. His uncle was a cook to an archbishop, and as a child he hung about the Lambeth Palace kitchens; he knows this business inside out, and nothing about the king’s comfort must be left to chance.” But by the end of the book, he’s holding himself back, wondering “If he had a ladder he could go up and look at the state of the leads. But that would perhaps not be consonant with his dignity. Master Secretary can do anything he likes, but the Master of the Rolls has to think of his ancient office and what is due to it. Whether, as the king’s Vicegerent in Spirituals, he is allowed to climb about on roofs… who knows?” His visceral urges are subsumed by the history he’s increasingly in charge of creating.

Of course, the maintenance of history is the business of all Englishmen of the class Cromwell has ascended into:

If you would defend England, and he would – for he would take the field himself, his sword in his hand – you must know what England is. In the August heat, he has stood bare-headed by the carved tombs of ancestors, men armoured cap à pie in plate and chain links, their gauntleted hands joined and perched stiffly on their surcoats, their mailed feet resting on stone lions, griffins, greyhounds: stone men, steel men, their soft wives encased beside them like snails in their shells. We think time cannot touch the dead, but it touches their monuments, leaving them snub-nosed and stub-fingered from the accidents and attrition of time. A tiny dismembered foot (as of a kneeling cherub) emerges from a swathe of drapery; the tip of a severed thumb lies on a carved cushion. ‘We must get our forefathers mended next year,’ the lords of the western counties say: but their shields and supporters, their achievements and bearings, are kept always paint-fresh, and in talk they embellish the deeds of their ancestors, who they were and what they held: the arms my forefather bore at Agincourt, the cup my forefather was given by John of Gaunt his own hand. If in the late wars of York and Lancaster, their fathers and grandfathers picked the wrong side, they keep quiet about it. A generation on, lapses must be forgiven, reputations remade; otherwise England cannot go forward, she will keep spiralling backwards into the dirty past.

But Cromwell’s gained particular power to define England. When Anne Boleyn asserts her permanence, Cromwell’s reaction is to consider is power to rewrite her narrative, as well as changing the condition of her physical body, her estate: “Not so, madam, he thinks. If need be, I can separate you from history. ” Contemplating his role, Cromwell considers himself:

The overlord of the spaces and the silences, the gaps and the erasures, what is missed or misconstrued or simply mistranslated, as the news slips from English to French and perhaps via Latin to Castilian and the Italian tongues, and through Flanders to the Emperor’s eastern territories, over the borders of the German principalities and out to Bohemia and Hungary and the snowy realms beyond, by merchantmen under sail to Greece and the Levant; to India, where they have never heard of Anne Boleyn, let alone her lovers and her brother; along the silk routes to China where they have never heard of Henry the eighth of that name, or any other Henry, and even the existence of England is to them a dark myth, a place where men have their mouths in their bellies and women can fly, or cats rule the commonwealth and men crouch at mouse holes to catch their dinner.

But Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are fascinating correctives precisely because while Cromwell helped erase Thomas More from the world he lived in, More eclipsed him in history, cast a shadow over Cromwell’s memory. Just like Wolf Hall was a red herring, a novel about Henry’s passion for Anne negated by the final sentence, an itinerary stop at Jane Seymour’s family home, this trilogy is an explanation of why the books need to exist in the first place.

I am so sorry to hear of the loss of Ray Bradbury, who as well as writing some of the first, most influential science fiction I ever read, but who helped teach me how to write. Zen and the Art of Writing, his book about how he became a writer and came to understand creativity is a book I constantly go back to when I’m stuck, especially for Bradbury’s poetry. Here’s one to start with:

Not smash and grab, but rather find and keep;
Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep
To detonate the hidden seeds with stealth
So in your wake a weltering of welath
Springs up unseen, ignored and left behind
As you sneak on, pretending to be blind.
On your return along the jungle path you’ve made
Find all the littered stuffs where you have strayed;
The small truths and the large have surfaced there
Where you stealth-blundered wildly unaware
Or seeming so. And so these mines were mined
In easy game of pace and pounce and find;
But mostly fluid pace, not too much pounce.
Attention must be paid, but by the ounce.
Mock caring, seem aloof, ignore each mile
And metaphors like cats behind your smile
Each one wound up to purr, each one a pride,
Each one a fine gold beast you’ve hid inside,
Now summoned forth in harvests from the brake
Turned anteloping elephants that shake
And drum and crack the mind to awe,
To behold beauty yet perceive its flaw.
Then, flaw discovered, like fair beauty’s mole,
Haste back to reckon all entire, the Whole.
This done, pretend these wits you do not keep,
Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep.

I was on CBC yesterday discussing the ethics of allowing young children to participate or star in reality television programming, and one of the things I’d considered raising as a point is that we’ve generally agreed that 13 is the age at which it makes sense to allow children sign up for social media networks and start crafting their public personas. And then I got into the office to discover that Facebook is contemplating ways to get children younger than 13 on the site through accounts linked to their parents’ profiles.

I can see a model of this that would work to protect children’s privacy if Facebook could meet a couple of conditions. First, I think they’d need a fine-grained opt-in system that parents would have to complete in full before activating a child’s account. The problem with most parental controls is that you can access the service without enforcing the controls. TVs and computers come equipped with V chips, but you don’t have to either opt out of using yours or turn it on and set it in order to use the internet or cable, and I’d imagine a lot of people who intend to use them never get around to it. Facebook’s access for children under 13 might only continue giving them access to applications, rather than giving them the option to build profiles and start broadcasting information about themselves. But in either case, Facebook should build in as much parental involvement as possible.

I also wonder if this move could spark a conversation about a two-tiered social environment. I’d imagine at least some parents would recoil from the idea of letting Facebook and other sites collect user information about their children. If Facebook wants to get them in as customers, they might have to reach a compromise where parents pay for their children to access apps as an alternative to monetizing children’s use by collecting data on it. I don’t know exactly what the model might look like, but I can see a social web that works that way and not just for children, with ad experiences getting increasingly customized for non-paying users.

Of course the next stop for Hannah Giles, James O’Keefe’s collaborator in the ACORN sting, is a web reality television show in collaboration with her family:

Her father’s attempt to sell the show by declaring “We’re going to show you young people who don’t do acid, who don’t do ecstasy, who have a rip-roaring good time, and you know what? They maintain their traditional values. I don’t know if that’ll appeal to the little metrosexual who’s tweezing his eyebrows” might need a little work. But as attempts to sell conservativism through the narrow tranche of pop culture that is reality programming, this isn’t the world’s worst pitch. Piety and withdrawal from the world may be hugely spiritually compelling, but they don’t exactly hit reality show beats the way guns, karate demonstrations, and firmly-articulated-if-not-precisely-mainstream worldviews do.