Emilia Clarke Weighs in on Game of Thrones Sexism

As Game of Thrones gears up for its sixth season, the talk surrounding the show has settled into the two perennial topics of discussion: an observation of how many characters die in the series, and a debate over whether or not the series is sexist. This week, EW published an interview from last year with Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen, and the brief interview snippet focuses heavily on the latter topic.

Critics who argue that GoT is sexist point out that some of the series' females characters are treated very poorly, sex and nudity are prevalent, and sexual assault regularly turns up in the series' plot lines. Other commenters counter that argument by  observing that although the culture of GoT's brutal fantasy world is often cruel to women, some of the series' female characters are among the strongest and most formidable people in the GoT universe.

For her part, Clarke takes the side of the not-sexist camp.

"There are women depicted as sexual tools, women who have zero rights, women who are queens but only to a man, and then there are women who are literally unstoppable and as powerful as you can possibly imagine," she says.

In other words, women in GoT are not one-dimensional, just like they aren't one-dimensional in the real world.