So by now we’ve all read that dreck from Ginia Bellafante posted over at NYTimes, about Game of Thrones. If not, you don’t have to waste your time, I’ll just post a highlight here.

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

Whether or not the fantasy genre solely consists of “boy fiction” as described above, whether or not it is saturated with straight-male-fanservice (just like scifi and videogames and anime and the internet a lot of other things I happen to like), is not something I’m going to cover here. It’s been discussed, at length, by people who say it better than I could.

People are angry about this review. But some people might say, sheesh, guys, it’s a review of an HBO show. It’s not like we’re seeing yet another instance of people legislating women’s bodies, stripping women of opportunities, or abuse, or erasing, or all those other really super-ugly things that totally happen every day. It’s some commentary about a fantasy show based off a fantasy book on cable TV that just declared Girls Aren’t Nerds.

And yeah, that’s true. But know what? This crap still matters.

“Girls don’t read fantasy.” Broad statement. Fifty percent of the world’s population refuses to do something because their chromosomes are better matched. It’s no different from statements like “Girls don’t care about cars” (one of my bad-day therapies is to stare at classic muscle cars) and “Girls don’t like violence” (I played rugby).

It paints an entire populous as being a monoculture, which is dangerous, because when we’re all one thing, we’re less human for it.

“Girls are…” “Girls don’t…” “Girls love…” “Girls hate…” Imagine this switched to be some other group of people. People of color. People of another nationality. LGBTQ people. The disabled. Is it still okay? And why was Bellafante so quick to define an entire person based on one facet of their lives? Because she’s just that fucking lazy?

Rigid gender roles are, in every single instance we encounter them, dangerous. And frequently wrong, to boot. They are restrictive and limiting and often times damaging. They make decisions for us before we can make them ourselves. And when we subscribe to them, when we push them on others, when we say you can or cannot do this thing for the sole reason that you were born a certain way, we’re running the risk of losing out on someone’s incredible contributions, because we labelled them, put them in a box, and never let them out.

And as to the statement that Bellafante has never met a woman who rabidly loves her some fantasy? Well. It must be very lovely to live such a sheltered life, where you never encounter those different from you, or those who challenge your notions of the world. Far less conflict, I assume. Though I can’t imagine the food is very good.