Rape in Game of Thrones and ISIS -- realistic medievalism?

Jeff Sypec examines in his blog the idea that rape in Game of Thrones is a positive element in George R.R. Martin's fictional version of the Middle Ages -- more realistic because more brutal. At the same time some ISIS supporters claim Islamic authenticity for their mistreatment of non-ISIS women and girls. Is there any truth to this?
Jeff, who is quite an intelligent guy, looks at this question from a number of different angles. For instance:

Even though [Amy S.]Kaufman [author of "Muscular Medievalism" in the 2016 issue of The Year’s Work in Medievalism,] isn’t blaming Game of Thrones viewers for ISIS, her article won’t sit easily with many fantasy fans. I appreciate that she isn’t just sniping on Twitter; she’s drawing a sober, thought-provoking analogy. I like her strident contrarianism, and I think she’s right to wonder what the pop-culture ubiquity of Game of Thrones actually means. Even if you’re certain the answer is “not much,” why not ponder it further anyway? As I write this, my TV is advertising “Game of Thrones Night” at Nationals Park in D.C., complete with t-shirts and a chance to “visit an authentic Iron Throne.” If someone mugs for a selfie with a TV-show prop on a fun night at the ballpark, what is it they’re trying to be a part of? Why do they need to believe so badly that fictional violence gets us closer to the “real” Middle Ages?
“The medieval era is the dumping ground of the contemporary imagination,” Kaufman writes, “rife with torture, refuse in the streets, rape, slavery, superstition, casual slaughter, and every other human vice we supposedly stopped indulging in once we became ‘enlightened.'” It’s worth asking what we miss seeing in the Middle Ages if we’re invested in only this view. Despite what George R. R. Martin believes, his dark, despairing fantasy isn’t any more “authentic” than the Disney-princess version, nor is it less harmful. Observations like Kaufman’s always bring me back around to a blunt conclusion by medievalist and Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey: “There are . . . many medievalisms in the world, and some of them are as safe as William Morris wallpaper: but not all of them.”

It might be worth reminding both Jeff and Amy that the idea of the Middle Ages was invented specifically to serve as a background for recent progress. A very large number (if not all) the depictions of the Middle Ages will always be negative in many respects.
I am pleased by the excellence of Jeff's blog post. He's a survivor of what us (habitual classifiers) will probably call the Golden Age of Blogging. (There is no Golden Age of Twitter, sorry.) Nice to have such a meaty discussion.
Image: Jeff's from Maryland, and the state flag is a welcome reminder of an earlier age of medievalism.  Jousting is, or has been, the state sport.

Just about...

I passed 2500 published posts on this blog sometime in the last month. Imagine!

Passed a million page views...

Sometime in the last two or three days this blog passed 1,000,000 page views. And that's just since I changed the name and hosting arrangements about three (?) years ago! Huzzah!

Are you ready for the country?

...cause it's time to go!

I will not be blogging for the next two weeks, unless I post some more today.

Favorite posts, 2010

Just click here!

This blog's top 5 posts, according to Blogger stats

The legend of Saladin
Not quite Christmas, but wolves anyway
More from Kyrgyzstan
Memories of Catal Huyuk
Blue sunset?

They are all there not for my deathless prose, but for the pictures, none of which originate with me. (The wolves, alas, are no longer accessible, except by searching for the image via Google.)

Change of title

When I first started writing this blog in 2005, I was using it mainly to communicate with my undergraduate students in history. That year, as for most years before that, I was teaching what might be called "early history." (Ask the average academic historian if before 1800 counts as early history; the average academic historian teaches modern history and will certainly agree with that characterization.) Furthermore, I was just about the only person at Nipissing University teaching early history. So calling the blog "Early History" reflected both my interests and my teaching role pretty accurately.

A lot of things have changed since 2005. Nipissing University now has other early historians, doing a variety of "early" courses and doing them well. Second, my regular course on the history of Islamic civilization has become more and more important to me. Although a good half of the course concerns events before 1800, both I and my students tend to be very interested in connections between earlier Islam and defense of the 20th and 21st centuries. So this interest drags into the blog a lot of very recent material. Finally, I continue to have a world history/world history of democracy orientation when I think about both the long-term and the immediate present. I do restrain my temptation to comment when it comes to recent material -- believe it or not! -- but things that are truly important I put it without apology. Like the space stuff, or the torture stuff.

Thus if a new reader came to this blog without being able to see the title, he or she would probably not say "This is a blog about early history." That reader might see it as a blog about all kinds of history and its connections to current events.

So I see it. This is pretty much a blog about one historian's view of world history, one I hope will be useful to all sorts of people, including my students in Islamic history and my medieval fourth-year seminar this fall.

Image: another tedious imperialist (Cecil Rhodes) bestrides the world, or at least Africa; on the other hand, that Cape to Cairo telegraph line, that's cool.

Half a million visits

Today this blog passed the half-a-million visits mark.

Favorite posts, 2009

Will McLean, who has more good ideas than most people I know, has just inspired me to select my favorites among my own posts of 2009. Just click here.

Image: a British gold quarter-sovereign from 2009.

Blogging history

Jeffrey J. Cohen, over at the blog In the Middle, is running a series of "blogging histories" by medievalists. This could serve as an introduction to blogs you haven't run across yet. Blog history #1 (Cohen's view of early days) is here; mine, #8, is here.

Muhlberger as blogger

Over at Medievalists.net, Peter Konieczny has posted an interview with me about my blogging activities and why I do them.

Anyone who wants to witness my moment of fame should scoot on over.

Of course Peter has lots more there, too. Give the site a look.

Audience atomization overcome

You may or may not find this essay by Jay Rosen as recapitulating the obvious. The conclusion:

Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.

In the past there was nowhere for this kind of sentiment to go. Now it collects, solidifies and expresses itself online. Bloggers tap into it to gain a following and serve demand. Journalists call this the “echo chamber,” which is their way of downgrading it as a reliable source. But what’s really happening is that the authority of the press to assume consensus, define deviance and set the terms for legitimate debate is weaker when people can connect horizontally around and about the news.

Which is how I got to my three word formula for understanding the Internet’s effects in politics and media: “audience atomization overcome.”

The formation of aristocracy

This post by Driftglass is the best thing of its sort I have ever read, except perhaps for some of Phil Paine's better essays.

Someone asked Drifty (to rephrase the actual comment) why his excellent scathing analysis got so little attention when others of less talent and penetration were now on TV, even. Here is an excerpt from his reply:

Well, by way of an answer, let us remember what Jebus Himself said:

“For where two or three have gathered together in My name,
there will be a velvet rope to keep the rabble away from the cool kids.”

In all human activities, there is a velvet rope; those on the sunny side of it sometimes relish it, sometimes try to kick it down, and sometimes believe it is porous or even imaginary; those on the cold side of it know that it is as real and high and hard and topped with broken glass as any security wall girding a Mexican estate.

Sometimes the velvet rope has a sign hanging from it advising those who seek admittance that they need only work a little bit harder. A little bit longer. A little better.

A little smarter.

A little sexier.

Shinier. Sparklier.

A little more topical.

A little more scholarly.

A little less snooty.

A little to the left and a skosh to the right.

Those on the cold side of it know that this ain’t exactly 100% true.

“Better, smarter, abler” is awesome -- it can get you a guest pass to the bar and once in a great while a key to the kingdom -- but there are way, waaaay too many mopes and nitwits waved right on in as their betters dance their asses off in the foyer, year after year, to pretend that competence in any way correlates to success.

It took toxic decades of Hate Radio and Fox Network junk food to create a public desperately hungry enough for honesty and intelligence to allow a “Daily Show” or “Colbert Report” to flourish not merely as great comedy, but as the Reality Based Community’s de facto teevee news and opinion HQs.

It took the collapse of the global economy, the shredding of the Constitution and a failure in Two!Count!Em!Two! wars after eight, solid years of unrelenting, daily, epic fuckuppery by an Administration of openly sneering idiots and traitors, before Americans reluctantly sent the Party of “I Wanna Haz A Beer With You!” packing and took a hopeful flier on the Smart Guys.

As Glenn Greenwald eloquently notes here, it is a trait that runs through every institution that traffics in influence and power:

Leading candidates for [Hillary Clinton's Senate seat] seat still include John F. Kennedy's daughter (Caroline), Robert Kennedy's son (RFK, Jr.), and Mario Cuomo's son (Andrew). In Illinois, a leading contender to replace Barack Obama in the Senate is Jesse Jackson's son (Jesse, Jr.). In Delaware, it was widely speculated that Joe Biden would be replaced by his son, Beau, and after Beau took his name out of the running because he's now serving in Iraq, the naming of the actual replacement -- lone-time (Joe) Biden aide Ted Kaufmann -- "upset local Democrats who believe the move was a ham-handed attempt to engineer the election of Biden’s son, Beau, to the Senate in 2010."

Meanwhile, in Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, who was appointed by her father to take his seat in the U.S. Senate when he became Governor, yesterday warned Sarah Palin not to challenge her in a 2010 primary, a by-product of tension between those two as a result of Palin's defeat of Lisa's dad for Governor. In Florida, Mel Martinez's announcement that he won't seek re-election in 2010 immediately led to reports that the current President's brother, Jeb, might run for that seat. And all of that's just from the last couple of weeks.

The Senate alone -- to say nothing of the House -- is literally filled with people whose fathers or other close relatives previously held their seat or similar high office (those links identify at least 15 current U.S. Senators -- 15 -- with immediate family members who previously occupied high elected office). And, of course, the current President on his way out was the son of a former President and grandson of a former U.S. Senator.

Isn't this all a bit much? It's true that our political/media class in general is intensely incestuous and nepotistic. Virtually the entire neoconservative "intelligentsia" (using that term as loosely as it can possibly be used) is one big paean to nepotistic succession -- the Kristols, the Kagans, the Podhoretzes, Lucinanne Goldberg and her boy. Upon Tim Russert's death, NBC News excitedly hired his son, Luke. Mike Wallace's son hosts Fox's Sunday show. The most influential political opinion space in the country, The New York Times Op-Ed page, is, like the Times itself, teeming with family successions and connections. Inter-marriages between and among media stars and political figures -- and lobbyists, operatives and powerful political officials -- are now more common than arranged royal marriages were among 16th Century European monarchs.
...

Because at the heart of any human enterprise, there is a club, and “better, smarter, abler” alone rarely gets you in it.

Image: A recent edition of the Almanach de Gotha, traditional listing of aristocratic claims.

Best read of the day

At In the Middle.

The meter turns over today

Sometime today the Sitemeter reading on this blog will show 100,000 visits. This does not mean I've reached 100,000 people, since my maintenance visits account for a fair number of them, but it's the number I've got. And a nice round one it is.

Thanks in particular to all of those who are out there hunting for a cool picture of Saladin, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, a plate of biryani, or a sheet of Canadian paper currency. And of course, my actual readers.

Happy New Year!

1000 page views yesterday

According to Sitemeter, over 600 people came to this blog yesterday and looked at over 1000 pages among them.

Rather astonishing -- though as I've said before, and awful lot of them were looking for images that originated on other web sites.