Yes, agreed with this.

The nudity in Game of Thrones has no raison d’être other than to perhaps attract a few more viewers, or to keep a few. It has nothing to do with the storyline at all.

However, the nudity in Westworld is disconcerting, dehumanizing. Creepy. It’s about as sexual as an autopsy — which is exactly the point. It’s necessary to the story, and to the world, to demonstrate that the corporation running Westworld doesn’t see the hosts as even quasi-human and that they have no human rights to dignity and to privacy — or even to be warm.

It is (as stated in the show) that corporation’s explicit policy that hosts when not in the park must be unclothed precisely so that the workers see them as programmable meat, as pieces of machinery or furniture. As not people. Because people wear clothes. It is one of our defining features (in many senses) and raiment of various types is one of the crowning achievements of human technology.

Therefore it’s very disconcerting to see the hosts driven around by a technician with a tablet, and strolling blankly past people in regular office attire while completely nude and utterly vulnerable. This is the metaphor of what’s being inflicted on the hosts’ minds and how helpless they are to prevent it — and it’s a damn good one.

Best screen use of nudity for actual story purposes really ever I think. (And no, it’s not just women though many of the host characters are women so you will see them naked. But if you want plenty of penises on a mainstream TV show, Westworld is also for you. But warning: it’s not sexy at all in either case.)

John Goodman was terrifyingly perfect in 10 Cloverfield Lane. He deserves an Oscar nomination.

I don’t really care about Oscar nominations, but both John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead are perfect in that film. And I love that it pokes two fingers in the eyes of the lit realism camp (which is why it and Goodman didn’t get nominated, truly).

Even when you know mostly where the film is going, it’s still a great and chilling journey.

Many men got and continue to get I’d assume the message quite young that it’s wrong to be attracted to express any interest in women at all. I can’t believe this is just accidental, as it seems to have happened to a lot of us. It certainly was the message I received loud and clear from feminism even in a hick town in the early 1990s. Many other men I’ve talked with about this got the same memo.

Part of this is just both higher-class women and men’s policing of the “basket of deplorables” like me to avoid undesirable attention and mainly to delineate class and other boundaries.

I won’t go into the sociology further here, but what this sort of feminist messaging means is that the boldest, rudest and most sociopathy-tending men will continue to willfully approach women aggressively with no real consequences while those with some politesse and conscientiousness will restrict themselves from doing so. (For instance, I was in my 20s before I was confident enough to ask a strange woman for her phone number without feeling like I was sexually harassing her. Think that Caleb the Fratboy Rapist feels those same pangs? If yes, please explain why.)

I support feminism fully — but too much of Amanda Marcotte style feminism exists to bolster existing structures of power and to demonize undesirable men (while giving a pass to people like Caleb), and that is what I’m reacting against.

I know it’s not deliberate but in reality men who actually respect women or at least won’t rape them the first time they have a Coors or two get the message that “Desiring a woman or even liking her is evil and bad” while Caleb is implicitly supported in his realization that whatever he does is all good because he is the right kind of guy. Sadly it appears to me that this message comes in loud and clear from mainstream feminism as much as anywhere else.