'Thrones' porny and exploitative

If you read one book this week

'The Son' by Jo Nesbo (Harvill Secker) R280

Taking a break from his troubled detective, Harry Hole, Nesbo gives us a labyrinthine and violent revenge saga about a charismatic young convict with a heroin habit who stages an unexpected prison escape to find the gangsters who murdered his policeman father. Dark and amoral, this is fast, gritty reading with twists and turns galore.

The issue

Sigh. I suppose we must talk about Game of Thrones. George RR Martin's six-novel A Song of Ice and Fire series is possibly the greatest fantasy saga of the last 20 years, and has been reissued to tie in with all the fuss of the fourth season of the spinoff TV series. The books are, I'm told, filled with plenty of Byzantine intrigue and dynastic struggle and, though dark with little in the way of comedy or romance as a foil for the at times unremitting nastiness, they have none of the porny rape culture excesses that have come to characterise the TV series.

GoT may be more-ish viewing but most of its explicit content is exploitative and dehumanising; the nude scenes, complete with women with Brazilian waxes in faux Middle Ages knocking-shop milieu, seem there only for the benefit of adolescent males whose attention might otherwise have wandered when the plot got too "talky". (Not for nothing has Saturday Night Live parodied the show with a sketch that featured a 13-year-old boy as a consultant whose main concern was stuffing each scene with as many breasts as possible.)

According to Everyday Sexism, a powerful and at times shocking book by British journalist Laura Bates, misogyny is on the rise - and not just in popular culture.

Bates began her crusade in March 2012: "It was just another week of little pinpricks: the man who appeared as a I sat outside a cafe, seized my hand and refused to let go; the guy who followed me off the bus and lewdly propositioned me all the way to my front door; the man who made a sexual gesture ." She set up The Everyday Sexism Project, a website where women could post their experiences. By the end of last year, she had more than 50000 postings and the website was active in 20 countries, including South Africa.

While the book has drawn some flak for its lack of "practical solutions", it is the submissions from ordinary women that reveal sexism's cumulative force. As Bates told the Daily Telegraph: "You can't dismiss 50000 people who are all experiencing the same thing." Everyday Sexism was as uncomfortable a read as it was laudable, the newspaper's Hannah Betts concluded.

The bottom line

"Pakistan, not Afghanistan, has been the true enemy." - The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 by Carlotta Gall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)