After five seasons of rape, torture, and sexposition, the conversation over misogyny in Game of Thrones reached its peak this past season, with fans like Senator Claire McCaskill threatening to quit watching the show after one particularly brutal scene of sexual assault. Now Amanda Peet, wife of GOT producer David Benioff and star of the much-less-violent HBO show Togetherness, is speaking out in Thrones’ defense. “I think it’s really misplaced,” Peet told The Wrap of the anger towards her husband and his partner, D.B. Weiss. “They write some of the greatest female characters that are on television.” Echoing a point made by George R.R. Martin himself, she argued, ”It’s a misogynist world … but we have to experience it without thinking that people are condoning this.” Just look around the rest of premium cable, she said, to see how the problem could be much worse: “It’s much more insidious to have middling, ancillary female roles where the women are not part of the plot — where they don’t advance anything.” Somewhere in California, the sad-blow-job-givers on True Detective are nodding in agreement.
