So riffing off that last Game of Thrones episode… you know, if that show went all in Game of Thrones could make rape sexy.

Like, not hegemonically so, but it’s the only potential cultural force - powerful enough, and actually pretty in character - that could break the cordon sanitaire against openly accepting those ideas in the prestige media of our culture: that no can mean yes, or can and should be pushed past and turn into a yes, that rape can be enjoyable, that there are people it’s proper to inflict it upon, and we should be satisfied when it is.

Like I have a feeling that if push came to shove, I would put good money that says among the smart set - intelligent, well educated, upper-middle class (each of these being mostly used as synonyms for the others) - the brand identity of any of those writers, the brand identity of their platforms, the brand identity of feminism itself, is actually weaker than the brand identity of the premium cable hourlong action-drama Game of Thrones.

Like at first, they’d make a thing of furiously condemning it, or pretending it was irredemable and thus they were going to dismiss it entirely and speak of it no more, but people would still watch the show and with bright young cultural entrepeneurs stepping into the vacuum to praise or at least accept it the opportunity cost - in terms of prestige, cultural capital, eyeballs, ad revenue - would become too great and they’d break, maybe make sniffy asides here and there at the most.

After the almost uniformly negative Monday reactions from the major outlets, by Tuesday The New Republic (which traditionally exists to make this exact kind of turn) was already doing contrarian walkback.

I think if the show wanted to - just to show off their power, to pull the most discordian kulturkampf ever attempted - they could get away with it.

I mean, a few years ago Sady Doyle went in on the books and to this day she’s still licking her wounds over the pushback she got. Like, Sady fucking Doyle. Like, the fucking books.