In that sense, the thing being revealed in Melisandre’s big reveal is much more than age, and much more than simple artifice. It is deception in the name of seduction. Melisandre’s illusion is an extreme form of the kind of practical magic that many mortal women are expected to engage in, every day: to do everything in their power to appear young and beautiful, for as long as they possibly can. But her reveal—and the schadenfreudic delight the show takes in its pans, in every sense of the word, of her body—also suggest the other side of the Melisandrian trap: the judgment women will face for the effort. To attempt to appear youthful is to conform to one social expectation and to violate another. It is to assert and to acquiesce, both at the same time.

So Melisandre’s reveal—the public artifice versus the private reality—is also the sort of thing that is called to mind when, say, sitcoms make jokes about the horrors of women being seen (by men) without makeup. Or when Us Weekly gleefully revels in catching stars in the same state. Or when a Redditor responds to a before-and-after picture of a woman wearing makeup with the comment “This post shows to not trust one’s looks.” It is tied to the retrograde assumption that women—via makeup and hair dye and Spanx and the Bombshell! After Dark Lace Add-2-Cups Push-Up Bra and what have you—ritually and routinely deceive by way of pretending to be something other than what they are.

Which is also to say that the discord of that jarring goooong in Melisandre’s age-reveal is uncomfortably harmonious with the culture beyond Game of Thrones—one that is awkwardly negotiating what “graceful aging” actually entails. It’s a culture in which the privileged have access to plastic surgery and Botox and anti-aging serums and potions. A culture in which shows like Younger explore what age actually means when technological advances have made one’s actual age less immediately obvious, and in which shows like Cougartown and Hot in Cleveland and their many, many counterparts wrestle with the complicated collisions of “women” and “age” and “sex.”

It’s also a culture that found a character on another of last night’s HBO season premieres, Veep, firing an employee with the explanation that “you’re as useless to me as a 40-year-old woman.”

The “woman” there, coming from the guy it did, was redundant. Because what Melisandre’s reveal also suggests is how gendered aging—that otherwise extremely universal human activity—has become. If you enter “old woman” onto thesaurus.com, the dictionary first helpfully suggests, as a synonym, a “female marriage partner,” or “bride”; a few clicks away from that, though—if you’re trying to find a word for an older woman on her own terms, rather than a guy’s—you get “bag,” “battle-ax,” “biddy,” “crone,” “harpy,” “shrew,” and “vixen.” You get the whiff of the same thing Game of Thrones suggests with its gong-and-fire-laden presentation of Melisandre’s real, wrinkled body: the suggestion that age is not just a stage of life, but a state of mind. That age—for women, at least—is a personality trait, and a distinctly negative one. That an “old woman” is only slightly removed from a harpy/shrew/vixen. (Thesaurus.com on “old man,” on the other hand? Suggested synonyms include “head of the house,” “parent,” “patriarch,” and “lord.”)