This post contains spoilers through the May 6 episode of Game of Thrones.

There’s a lot going on in tonight’s episode of Game of Thrones, but many of the developments shared a common, nasty thread: the lack of real control people have in Westeros over their bodies and sexuality, whether they’re high born or low, in King’s Landing or Beyond the wall. For a number of the female characters, there’s an ugly coming to terms with what men believe is valuable about them, and with their ability to control what’s so crudely reduced to a commodity. Cersei cannot save her daughter Myrcella from the same kind of arranged marriage she found so odious, and tells her brother Tyrion, who has brokered Myrcella’s marriage into Dorne, that she hopes he becomes vulnerable by loving someone as Cersei loved her daughter so she can wound him in the same fashion.

Joffrey, if he hasn’t demonstrated how much he hates Sansa by stripping and beating her before the court, only reinforces how little he values her continued well-being by telling his guards “Let them have her” after Sansa is chased off by men who mean to rape her. It’s the Hound, a man who insists he stands apart from chivalric tradition, who returns to save Joffrey’s ostensible lady, telling Tyrion when the Hand thanks him, “I didn’t do it for you.” There’s pleasure, it seems, in not reducing a woman to a womb, to a piece of dismembered meat as the rampaging crowd does to a septa in Joffrey’s entourage. And the fate the Hound saves her from is a shock to Sansa, even after everything that’s been done to her by the man who was once her ideal. “He hated me, the man who hit me,” Sansa tells Shae. “I saw it in his eyes. I never met him before, but he wanted to hurt me.” And it’s the former prostitute who’s left to explain to Sansa the intersection of seething class rage and misogyny. “You are everything he will never have,” Shae explains to Sansa. “Your horse eats better than his children.”

Dany isn’t assaulted the way Sansa is. But as she tries to first command and then bargain her way into the ships and armies she needs to launch an invasion, she’s presented with a stark economy in which the currency is units of her body—a night in her bed for a ship, a lifetime for untold riches. “Does he think I’ll whore myself for a boat?” she asks bitterly. The spice merchant who cuttingly informs Dany that “I admire your passion. But in business, I trust in logic, not passion” may be turning her down, but he’s at least doing her the compliment of asking her to bargain with something other than her body.
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I’ve never been exceptionally compelled by the provocateurism of hip-hop group Odd Future, particularly given the collective’s penchant for disturbingly unempathetic talk about rape. But the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica has a profile of Earl Sweatshirt, a member of Odd Future whose mother sent him to school in Samoa just as the collective was taking off, and who has now returned to the United States. And there’s an interesting anecdote about both that rape talk, and Earl’s time away:

As part of the Coral Reef curriculum he also performed community service, spending time working at Samoa Victim Support Group, a center for survivors of sexual abuse, including children.

“That was a pivotal moment,” he said one afternoon at Bristol Farms, a supermarket near his manager’s office. One of the things Earl Sweatshirt had been prized for as a rapper was his extreme imagery, bordering on vile. “You can detach imagery from words,” he said, adding that he “never actually pictured” the things he rapped about. (“Lyrics About Rape, Coke, And Couches Will Be Blaring In Your Ears,” was how “Earl,” the album, was advertised on Odd Future’s Tumblr when it was released in March 2010.)

By the time he began working at the center, “I had already come to the conclusion that I was done talking about” that sort of subject matter, he said, but coming face to face with young people who had suffered in that way was overwhelming. “There’s nothing that you can — there’s no — you can’t evade the — there’s no defense for like — if you have any ounce of humanity,” he said, the feeling swallowing the words.

Sensitivity and sympathy aren’t just things we inherently have. We learn them, often most effectively by directly facing other people’s pain. And I’d be really interested not just in hearing what Earl talks about when he’s set that old attitude and subject material aside, but to see him make music about that process of growing into sympathy, and into greater experience of the world.

io9 has a great interview with Brit Marling, the writer and star of low-budget sci-fi movie Sound of My Voice, which, as I told y’all on Friday, I liked very much. I wanted to pull out part of the interview where she talks about how frustrating it is to come up against the same obstacles and challenges for female characters—particularly the tendency to use sexual assault as a default major obstacle for a dramatic heroine:

When Zal and I write [the two wrote Sound of My Voice together] sometimes you find yourself in a passive position. And you have stop yourself: “I set out to write a story about a strong woman acting with agency. And now here I am having her be sexually assaulted by somebody so she can achieve something else.” You have to tell yourself to stop.

And you realize that so much of this stuff is the same narrative being recycled over and over again, because a lot of it is happening unconsciously. We consume, we watch, we take it in, we create, it’s this negative feedback cycle. When I see things like Bridesmaids I get really excited. That film was really subversive and widely consumed and entertaining, but also saying really interesting things on female friendships and weddings. It was making fun of it all, that was refreshing, I hope we see more of that…

As an actor, that’s why I started writing. I came out to LA and I would read these things, you are hard pressed to find a script where the girl is not sexually assaulted or raped or manipulated or a sex toy — an object of affection. It’s always about the way men are looking at her. And cinema, traditionally has been about how men are looking at women. I do think we’re breaking that up now with more female directors, I think we’re starting to see the female gaze.

I think this is right. I should say that I have no problem with works that deal with women getting raped that are explicitly about examining the consequences of sexism. One of the reasons that the arc of Sons of Anarchy where Gemma is raped is so powerful is that it’s about the way she and everyone else around her deal with their internalized sexism: the men who rape her think she is a weak spot for the motorcycle gang she’s affiliated with, Gemma thinks her husband will put her off because men need to “own their pussy,” and her husband seduces her back to disprove that assumption. Similarly, as I argue in this book chapter I have coming out about A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones, I really believe a lot of that series is about tying together sexual assault and monstrosity.

But rape doesn’t only happen to women, and it’s not the only thing that happens to women. You can lose your job, your house, your car, your kid, your best friend, your business, your family, your faith, your following, your office. If men are reaching for the worst thing that can happen to women and choosing rape out of a deficit of imagination, then that’s having a character be sexually assaulted for shock value. If you want to tell a story that’s about the worst thing that happened to a specific woman character, you should be thinking very specifically about her and less about your and the audience’s default answer to a question.

My decision in the Morning New’s Tournament of Books is finally live, so I can reveal that I picked Teju Cole’s Open City over Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, and I can finally discuss both books without tipping my hand about what—or how—I’d be judging.

There’s a fascinating discussion in comments about the key event in the book. Julius, a somewhat depressed psychiatrist who is the main character in the novel, spends much of the book reconnecting with Moji, a girl he knew when they were both growing up in Nigeria. But towards the end of the novel, Moji reveals her real motivations for getting to know Julius as an adult: Julius sexually assaulted her when they were young teenagers, and she’s wanted to see if he remembers his actions and feels regret or remorse. Commenter Neighbors73 raises an objection that others brought up as well: “I guess I’m the only one who is still struggling with the idea of a 14 year old boy forgetting he’s a rapist?”

I can understand why some readers might find this jarring. But to be perfectly honest, I don’t. The power of that conversation between Moji and Julius lies in its dissonance, the fact that an event that was shattering for one person was forgettable for someone else. And this is the kind of thing that can happen when we don’t treat boys and girls equally about what consent means. It’s just as important to teach boys that no genuinely means no as it is to teach girls to say no in the first place. Putting sole responsibility on women is a sick joke when men can override their lack of consent.

And when we don’t teach boys what consent genuinely means, and why obtaining it is critical, this is where we get these horrendous differences in memory. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that someone would forget a one-time sexual encounter in a lifetime of them if that’s the way their lack of knowledge and empathy lead them to read an assault. And I find it all too plausible that a 14-year-old could rewrite what for a woman was a lifechanging sexual assault into a routine, and barely-remembered hookup at a party. Julius didn’t forget assaulting Moji because he’s a sociopath who can easily put a rape out of his mind—he forgot assaulting Moji because he doesn’t understood himself to have assaulted her in the first place. This doesn’t absolve him of moral responsibility, then or now. In fact, it shows him to be more globally detached and inconsiderate than we’d previously seen. It’s a revelation that forces us, and Julius, to revisit everything we’ve come to understand about him.

We’re a couple of weeks away from the second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, and I’m pretty excited to announce that SmartPop is putting out an essay collection about A Song of Ice and Fire that will drop shortly after the season concludes. Called Beyond the Wall, the book’s got a big essay from me up front about sexual assault and mythmaking in the world of the books that’s built on a number of our conversations here, but that goes substantially beyond them. If that’s not your jam, there are contributions from Elio and Linda, who run Westeros.org, and essays on book collecting in an e-book age, and the genre wars—in other words, it’s wide-ranging and I’m pretty psyched. Details on the book’s release are here. And I’m talking to the book’s publicists about maybe doing a party for its release here in Washington, DC, so keep an eye on this space for information about that as well.

Because I was at SXSW last week, this open thread is a twofer, for which I’m sort of glad, if only because it gives me a chance to comprehensively discuss the political acumen of Mr. Boyd Crowder. This post contains spoilers through the March 20 episode of Justified.

Perhaps the biggest question in contemporary liberalism is whether it’s possible to forge a populism that brings together the white working class with people of color and immigrants. Boyd Crowder is probably not the person to answer that question, given the blowing up of churches and the white supremacy, but his behavior in these last two episodes suggests that in a world where we could run him against Rand Paul in Kentucky, we’d have one hell of an entertaining race on our hands.

His confrontation with Sheriff Napier at the debate is epic. After Napier tries to suggest that Boyd should be disregarded because his status as a felon means he can’t vote (a nice example of Justified drawing drama from real laws), Boyd calmly unloads on him. “”I didn’t come here to vote,” he explains. “You think Shelby’s the only man in this room been done by a coal mining company?…You talk down to me because I been in trouble with the law…[Starting with a picket line where] I know that you weren’t there Mr. Napier. There sure were a lot of men there who looked like you. Men standing on the company side. Laughing at all us hillbillies who were just trying to stand up for what we believed in.”

That summation of the balance of power gives way to some hilariously unorthodox electioneering. Ava’s decision to go contrary to Johnny’s wishes and the core of her and Boyd’s business, killing Delroy to save his girls may have been rather thrilling in the moment. But it doesn’t mean she’s exactly a feminist, just that she’s willing to run whores for a somewhat more innovative purpose than the vicious junkie she murdered. “The girls, they’re excited to practice their constitutional right to vote, and to give a free handjob for every vote cast for our friend Shelby,” she explains. “They’ve already given blowjobs to a couple of boys Napier was counting on to haul for him and convinced them to take the day off.” And Boyd is smart enough to realize that if shots, sex and populist appeal aren’t enough to pull off the election, that you can never go wrong knowing your electoral law as well as your voters.

Speaking of prostitution, we get a look inside the deeply troubled mind of Robert Quarles tonight in the wake of his defeat. When Wynn Duffy finds out his partner in crime has been popping Oxy, he asks “How long have you been taking those? Mr. Quarles, maybe it is time you leave Kentucky.” “I got nowhere else to go,” Quarles explains to him. And when a young man barges in on them with a gun, threatening to kill Quarles for torturing Brady Hughes, Quarles talks his way out of the standoff by exposing himself as a raw nerve end.

“My father was a heroin addict. He wasn’t necessarily an evil man. But he couldn’t kick his addiction, couldn’t keep a job either,” Quarles explains.Luckily for my father, he had a very pretty little boy. And plenty of men were willing to pay for my company. What is your name?…That’s what it was like for me, Donovan. For many years. And then one day a man named Theo realized what was happening. You see, Theo believed deeply in family…Theo ushered me in, where inside, on his knees, was my father. I was fourteen years old, and I understood what it meant to honestly be free…Hurt him. No, son, I never hurt him. I did everything I could to help him. And then I set him free.”

I’ve been debating with myself all season long whether I think the decision to make Quarles a sexual sadist adds to or detracts from his character. I tend to think the details, even these ones, are a bit formulaic. But I do think there’s something interesting about sending Raylan, in a moment when he’s a bit of a mess, up against someone who’s crazy. These are, in their own ways, two mythic figures facing each other at a moment when they’ve both been badly hurt. It’s Batman v. the Joker in Kentucky. In this land where hollers replace dark alleys, Raylan’s as close as you get to aristocracy, someone with a sense that peace is owed him and he’s going to take pleasure in wresting it from his rogue’s gallery.