‘Mockingbird’ is the seventh episode of the fourth season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 37th overall. The episode opens with words that portray the imbecilic way we sometimes see women. Tyrion, after Shae’s lies at his trial unhinged him, talks to his brother in the dungeon:
Jaime: ‘You fell in love with a whore!’
Tyrion: Yes. I fell in love with a whore. And I was stupid enough to think that she had fallen in love with me’.
It is precisely because we are so hard-wired to desire the woman’s body so much that we frequently enter a state of genuine psychosis while trying to possess her. The only way I can think of to remedy such a great asymmetry of instinct, insofar as they see us as providers, is to return to the values of the time of Jane Austen. Only in this way could the hypnotic magnetism that women apparently wield—a biological program of our brains, actually—could be offset by social norms.
Away from King’s Landing, in the Riverlands, we see a feminist scene: the girl Arya kills another man with her Needle, a man who had told her obscenities in a previous episode. But I wanted to focus on another aspect of what happened at the Riverlands: the Hound’s confession to Arya about his past. Just as the story Shae told Varys—her mother’s betrayal—helps us understand how she turned into an evil woman, in this episode we hear another story that explains the Hound’s perennial angry mood: his father also betrayed him horribly. I don’t want to tell the details but from my own experience (cf. what I wrote about my uncle Julio in my autobiography) I know that this is a story that makes sense.
Left, another iconic woman in the series: the highly masculinised Brienne who is constantly mistaken for a Knight. Here we see her from behind leaving a cozy medieval inn after having her meal there.
Since the white man is making psychotic use of technology, my dream is that after the extermination of the Neanderthals à la Turner Diaries the surviving whites will go through a long historical test without technology, going through modest inns like this one, with an extremely small world population, while learning to develop their souls as Solzhenitsyn did. Given the treachery rates of the 20th and 21st centuries, only if they passed that test could they afford to relight the fire of Prometheus.