Sky content director dismisses complaints about sexual violence on Game of Thrones

Today in how not to impress people, the content director at British broadcaster Sky—Gary Davey—has decided that the best way to handle the charges of excessive sexual violence against women that have been leveled at Game of Thrones lo these past six years is to get defensive, insisting that, because men die on the show, it’s okay to depict women getting raped on the regular.

According to the Belfast Telegraph, Davey made his remarks at the Edinburgh international TV festival. One reporter asked him if he thought that Sansa Stark’s rape by Ramsay Bolton in Season 5 was used as character development, as some critics have alleged. His response:

"I think that is nonsense. I think that is there is an awful lot of violence to men. For anyone who has watched the show, it can be a very violent show. I don’t think the violence to women is particularly highlighted, it’s just part of the story. The rape happens, it’s party of the story, it was in the book. We are now past the book and the story is evolving."

Casey Bloys, HBO’s new President of Drama, recently answered similar questions at the TCAs earlier this summer, and it went just as badly.

As a female fan of the series, it’s perfectly okay to admit what we see with our own eyeballs. Whether or not we think the violence against women on the show is justified by the plot is one thing. But pretending it’s not happening, or dismissing complaints about it as silly, is to miss the point as much as those who demand that it not happen at all.

Davey further justified his stance by pointing to how the series was performing in the UK. “It’s interesting that this year with season six of Game Of Thrones, which was very intense, out of the seven million households that watched, we had three complaints.” Once again, lack of complaints and through-the-roof ratings don’t mean that the issues don’t exist.

Fantasy is how we work through the issues of our modern-day world at a comfortable distance. Violence against women, especially in war-torn societies, is a issue that many countries face. Game of Thrones deals with our level of comfort and discomfort with that fact by bringing to the fore how badly women are treated in Westerosi society.

Also, these terrible moments our female characters live through are designed to show how much harder their struggle is than the men around them. When they find success—as Cersei, Dany, Arya, Yara, and Sansa all have—it’s all the more powerful.

For his part, Davey denied that there are plans to move away from violent scenes now that the show has run out of source material, so we’ll likely have more opportunities to discuss these issues.