Statement by Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director of NCOSE
Washington, DC – The creators of Game of Thrones are in a legal dispute with Pornhub, a popular pornography website, because sex scenes from the TV show are appearing on the site. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) affirms the pornographic nature of Game of Thrones and calls on the show to publicly announce it will no longer create such scenes, and to apologize to victims of sexual exploitation.
“I never thought I’d see the day when I would agree with Pornhub,” said Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, “but the categorization of Game of Thrones’ sex scenes as pornography is completely correct. Further, data from Pornhub shows that the website experiences a decrease in traffic during Game of Thrones’ airtime, and that Game of Thrones related searches jumped nearly 370 percent on the day of its premiere. It is undeniably clear that this HBO series is pornographic in nature.”
“Season six has so far depicted fewer scenes of sexual violence after fan backlash over its gratuitous rape scenes last year,” Hawkins continued. “Yet, the show is still steeped in ‘breast-fests’ (baseless depictions of topless women) and recently showed full-frontal male nudity. Overall, explicit and demeaning depictions of rape, incest, and sexual violence have become synonymous with the Game of Thrones brand, and small changes to a few episodes are not enough to change that. That is why we are calling on Game of Thrones creators, and HBO executives to formally apologize to the real-world victims of the sexual violence and abuse, for turning graphic depictions of sexual violence into mainstream entertainment.
Due to its history of sexually exploitative programming, including Game of Thrones, HBO is a member of the 2016 Dirty Dozen List. You can learn more here: https://endsexualexploitation.org/hbo/
