According to Renata Sellitti of Thrillist, girls hate "Game of Thrones." Her reasoning is as follows: there's too much female nudity, the incest thing is too gross for our delicate feminine sensibilities, it's gory, girls don't like medieval things and the plotline is too complicated to follow.
Sellitti admits that "lots of women who watched the series from the beginning actually enjoy it," but since they are in the minority, she offers some helpful tips on how men can convince their girlfriends to watch the show -- luring them in with promises of romantic scenes and gay characters, glossing over the nasty incest thing and the apparently troubling presence of a dwarf as one of the main characters.
I'm female, and I love "Game of Thrones." There are plenty of men out there who don't like it. There's never going to be a show that appeals to everyone. But as Amelia McDonell-Parry of the Frisky put it, Sellitti's piece is "the biggest pile of direwolf excrement I've seen on the internet this week."
I think the most annoying part of the article is the claim that women don't like the show because it's complicated. Is that because women are incapable of following a complex plotline? Or just because they can't be bothered to pay attention or do some quick googling to figure out what's going on? Some people just want to watch mindless TV -- I get that. But I don't think that's specifically a woman thing.
As for the female nudity, yes, it's pointless at times -- as cataloged and critiqued in Jezebel's weekly "Game of Boners" recap, for anyone who's interested. But I honestly believe that the female characters in GoT are just as complex as the men -- and, overall, much more clever. Alyssa Rosenberg at Slate does a weekly "Game of Thrones" "lady power rankings" list. Women shouldn't feel like they have to watch a show just because there are great female characters in it, but GoT is by no means a "man's world" in the way Sellitti seems to be suggesting. Nor is it, as Ginia Bellafante claimed her in 2011 New York Times review, "boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population's other half."
In an April 2013 interview in the Telegraph, "Game of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin admitted that he considers himself a feminist. When asked about how he felt qualified to write female characters, Martin responded: "[I]ve never been an eight year old girl, but I've also never been an exiled princess, or a dwarf or bastard. What I have been is human. I just write human characters." Human characters for human viewers, gender aside.
Let's just accept that women have a range of tastes -- the viewing public can't be neatly divided into gendered demos so that Tide and Budweiser know where advertise, respectively. Dudes watch "Housewives," women watch GoT. Get used to it.