Thirty-eight Australian women have been killed this year in violent acts. And on Monday nights we tune in to Game of Thrones to witness rape as entertainment. It's worth wondering at, writes Jonathan Green.

Spoiler alert. Trigger warning. All of that.

The rape of Sansa Stark that ends the most recent episode of Game of Thrones has caused what might even have been, who knows, an intended ripple of disquiet on the world's opinion pages and social media.

Twitter went off.

A US Senator was appalled.

For many other viewers it was also a last, difficult straw.

It's sort of easy to say. The rape of Sansa Stark. Just words. No consequence.

But of course, as is the way of television, once seen it can't be unseen. So that latest rape - Game of Thrones is no stranger to sexual violence - is part of our memories and subconscious now, for me as it is for the eight million Americans who watched, the half a million or so Australians ... and so on around the world.

Not that we should shy from the difficult or confronting, but that's not quite the issue here.

It's a quietly disturbing thing to have such ugly human extremity reduced to a deftly filmed narrative device. Just another plot point. And there is a transgression in this that gnaws at you. Suffering co-opted to entertain. And not actual suffering, of course; but might it almost be worse to recreate what in reality would be horror, simply for our amusement?

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It's this sense of gratuitous inclusion, that the violence could not have been implied or alluded ... Sansa raped on the night of her wedding to the sadist Ramsay Bolton, while Bolton's brain-snapped torture victim - a sequence of excruciating degradations so endlessly documented in the last GOT season - Theon Greyjoy, is forced to watch.

We're sanguine about it, perhaps as an act of either self preservation or shared delusion, but it seems improbable that our continual exposure to acts of extremity, defilement and violence can't have some sort of slow, steady, deep impact.

Has there ever been a human generation as broadly familiar with all manner of brutalities ... all of them offered as amusement? Yes, the difference is that they are imagined rather than real, that we are spared by the subtle sub-conscious assumptions of theatre and performance, spared by the protective psychological prophylaxis of the fourth wall.

But the unsettling point is that we have come quietly to a moment in the history of entertainment where sexual violence can be a routine element in a piece of mass-appeal, zeitgeist TV. We have been assiduously desensitised to an ever escalating ubiquity of sights, sounds and violent, painful themes that for past generations would have been the stuff of horrific human extremity; glimpsed only by some, and then shatteringly transformative. Now they are entertainment.

And what if the Sansa rape was anything but gratuitous, what if sexual violence was central to the show's sprawling narrative?

Perhaps this is where we start to draw some sense of connection between the imagined world and the real, some uncomfortable resonances.

Lucy Hunter Johnston, in the Independent, wrote of the casual inclusion of rape as a routine Game of Thrones plot device:

Depictions of rape on screen can be powerful; shocking, yes, but effective when handled correctly, and television shouldn't shy away from it. But in Game of Thrones women are raped so often it's almost routine, and the assaults are used as a lazy signal that the Seven Kingdoms are pretty messed up, yeah?

In the Washington Post, blogger Alyssa Rosenberg took the argument a step further. For her, the rape was anything but a gratuitous narrative flourish, it was part of a central theme.

...this scene felt of a piece with the way I've always understood Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire: as a story about the consequences of rape and denial of sexual autonomy.

The saving grace? That this is, after all, just television, an insidious medium full of cultural power and subtle influence, but at the end of the day we can always switch the damn thing off. Rosenberg writes:

There's no requirement that anyone like any of these storylines or that anyone who feels exhausted from spending his or her days in a world marked by sexual violence retreat to a worse one for pleasure.

There's the thing, though, "a world marked by sexual violence" ... that's our world, our grim reality.

And perhaps this is where we should be most worried by Game of Thrones and its ilk, by the casual eradication of women in Grand Theft Auto, by the sexualisation of advertising ... by all the markers that together suggest a pretty compelling relationship between a lived-culture that can be brutal, sexually violent and dark, and the entertainment that reflects and suffuses it.

And perhaps we should wonder how the stakes were raised so high toward extremity in what we could watch for what is essentially fun.

And wonder too on whether a series like Game of Thrones, a drama that teases out "the consequences of rape and denial of sexual autonomy" might not work quite so well if the culture that consumed it did not recognise elements of that narrative construct in its own acts of flesh and blood.

Thirty-eight Australian women have been killed this year in violent acts. And on Monday nights we gather to witness rape as entertainment. It's worth wondering at.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum.