A Scandal in Fandom: Steven Moffat, Irene Adler, and the Fannish Gaze

[jblum]

The thing about the latest round of "Is Steven Moffat sexist?" that's currently flapping round the blogosphere, is that if within the same week you can manage to get accused of hating women by a Guardian blogger, and simultaneously accused of championing women and hating men in the Christmas special by the Daily Mail ... you're probably doing

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[ext_945914]

Gail Simone, when writing about the Women in Refrigerators problem in comics, said something really important about her experiences speaking with the writers of the comics that made her list. She said, in a nutshell, that every single one of them could come up with a narrative justification for why that particular woman had been stuffed in the fridge. But the problem wasn't the individual stories, or the strength of their individual justifications. The problem was that all of them, independently, had elected to stuff women in the fridge: that there was a *culture* of women being killed and depowered in comics, and that even though the culture, and not the individual stories, was the problem, the only way to address the problem was, ultimately, at the level of individual stories

[kattahj]

The thing with patterns, though, is that there can be more than one of them simultaneously, and sometimes contradicting ones. I found your post baffling in that it suggested that Matt Smith's Doctor was any ruder to his companions than any of the previous ones, and frankly insulting in that it suggested that the only reason fans could still stick around was for the men).

Moffat has some largely problematic ideas about women, yet he simultaneously writes female characters that I love with all my heart. (Though I admit that this doesn't cover Sherlock, which I've mostly found "meh" on all counts, but I've loved pretty much all women in four of his other shows.) This to me is no stranger than that Aaron Sorkin could simultaneously write fantastic female characters in West Wing and keep undercutting them with sexist remarks, or that Joss Whedon can be a feminist and still have no surviving female characters older than forty

[penguineggs]

As a project last year, when Toby and I started rewatching all the new Who episodes from Rose onwards (we're still in the middle of this, BTW), I decided to take notes, episode by episode, on how the female characters fare.

That's interesting, because I've carried out an analysis of all sixty RTD episodes and although you state that "female extras die roughly in parity with male extras" at the point to which you've watched, in fact across the whole sixty things are very different. My analysis concentrated in particular on Self Sacrificial Deaths (SSDs),a category I defined as follows SSD: Self Sacrificial Death. M/F is used to indicate whether the self-sacrificing person is male or female (if known). This is used where a) the person concerned made an informed decision to put themselves in a position of maximum danger to give other people a chance to escape/succeed in their mission and b) they in fact died (irrespective of what happened afterwards). As a result, Captain Jack’s death in “The Parting of the Ways” is included, but not

[londonkds]

Via various links: my problem with RTD's portrayal of women in Doctor Who is the number of his personally-written episodes in which women aged over thirty who are not primarily housewives are monsters and/or powercrazed villains, and the lack of any positive characters of that nature: Cassandra, Blon Slitheen, Harriet in "The Christmas Invasion", the Matron in "New Earth", Yvonne Hartman, the Racnoss Queen, the Plasmavore, Miss Foster, Miss Hartigan, the prison warders in "End of Time". Not to mention Suzie in Torchwood and Col. Karim in "SJA: Death of the Doctor".

It makes me very reluctant to agree with anyone who declares Moffat to be a misogynist while lauding RTD for the unprecedented woman-friendliness of his Doctor Who.

[penguineggs]

Agreed, and it isn't just Suzie in Torchwood; I think we'd had three female serial killers by the time we reached episode 5 (Suzie, Lisa, Cerys) and then we got Janine, suggesting that this tendency starts young.

And, bringing this back to the original subject of the essay, this is all part of the filtering and elliding process. For example, no-one seems to have batted a eyelid about the (authorial, filtered through the Doctor) sympathy extended to Zed, the acting ship's captain in The Satan Pit/The Impossible Planet who is using slave labour to carry out lethally dangerous and unpredictable excavation operations which the Doctor regards as all part of the glorious curiosity of human nature even when they let Satan loose on the universe, leading to the death of all the slaves and several other members of the ship's company. By contrast, in 42 Cath, the female ship's captain, is constantly yelled at by the Doctor for her choice of refuelling using a planet which she had no way of knowing was sentient, and which is characterised by

[londonkds]

I was sticking to stuff RTD was personally credited as writer on, but yes, those as well.

[jblum]

Again this seems to be overlooking chunks of the evidence, though: for a start, Kath McDonnell isn't "constantly yelled at", the Doctor screams at her during one particular incident while he's being possessed and tortured by the solar creature... a fate from which he has to be saved by his young female companion, incidentally.

It's also rather a point of the Ood story that the Doctor's moral judgement and understanding of the situation is flawed -- as shown in "Planet of the Ood", where he finally understands that they're actual slaves and is appalled. "Impossible Planet" is, after all, a story about how even the Doctor doesn't actually know it all. One of the advantages of the new show is that it repeatedly challenges the idea that the Doctor's judgements act as some kind of infallible moral center. (Arguably in this case he's so blinded by the romance of people looking into the abyss at the edge of knowledge -- as shown by his own willingness to jump into the pit -- that he fails to think about the consequences; their failings

[londonkds]

Cath isn't just told off by the Doctor in that scene, the entire thrust of the episode is to hold her personally responsible for everything that happens in the episode, and she's finally given a "redemptive" death that is presented as the only way for her to redeem herself but could have been avoided if she'd survived five seconds longer.

[jblum]

Via various links: my problem with RTD's portrayal of women in Doctor Who is the number of his personally-written episodes in which women aged over thirty who are not primarily housewives are monsters and/or powercrazed villains, and the lack of any positive characters of that nature...No, guys, this is turning into exactly the sort of "any evidence that disagrees with me simply vanishes" kind of discussion I was getting frustrated by above

[londonkds]

But it is a pattern when over three-quarters of the episodes that RTD had his name on as scriptwriter have a very specific type of character as villain, and many of those that don't have big name returning bad guys previously established in the series. (And "Gridlock", which you mention specifically, is a rare Doctor Who episode with no identifiable villain at all in the sense of somebody acting maliciously

[penguineggs]

I feel desperately sorry for Queen Victoria as she's portrayed in Tooth and Claw because that's an episode where Ten and Rose are constantly, childishly rude to her even when people are dying around them; where she's desperately afraid she's been infected by lycanthropy and that, too, is treated as a joke by the Doctor (with the line about "well, that explains the Royal Family").

[surliminal]

Also (just to throw into a long gone argt one of my own pet hates here), who says gender positivity (whatever that is) has to be assessed by how many female air pilots or goddesses or um vampire slayers there are in a series? isn't it about something a little less moral-plus-pointy, like agency and independence? I'd rather see a series full of female serial killers than one full of female oh housewives.. (though again a female housewife like some I know who teach their kids to crochet daleks or bake green alien cakes or generally NOT BE DULL would be fine)

[esotaria]

If Sherlock were only making Molly cry by making her feel unintelligent - if her clothes, her weight, her boyfriend, her eagerness for relationships, her makeup and appearance and lipstick never came into it - then yes, I would concede that his rudeness to her is equal to that he levels at the others.

For me what's really troubling is that he does all of this and Molly still has a crush on him. Which wouldn't bother me if there were a greater diversity of women in the program. Of the three recurring women in the program, two love Sherlock despite him being fairly awful to them, and the one who doesn't - Sally - has (I believe) had very little screentime after the pilot.