Wired’s out to settle a myth about HBO’s “Game of Thrones”: That women don’t like the show. This assumption by some reviewers has now been debunked by statistical data. Women actually make up about 42% of the show’s audience. (Although after bloody Episode 9, judging from this reaction video, they may be running for the hills.)
Wired cites a Nielsen report revealing that approximately 2 million women are watching the fantasy show each week. While this still puts female viewership in the slight minority for “Game of Thrones,” social-media tracking from Fizzology indicates that half of the online conversations on the series are coming from women.
This comes as an answer to both the withering New York Times review of the show upon its release, which called it “boy fiction,” and a sexist article on Thrillist suggesting that a reason women supposedly don’t like the show is that it’s “hard to follow.”
Wired points out that AMC’s “Breaking Bad” actually has much lower female viewership — sitting at 36% — but that show doesn’t receive the same “not for girls” vitriol as “Game of Thrones.” This is presumably linked to the ingrained stereotype that women won’t find much of interest in the fantasy genre.
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