A Scandal in Fandom: Steven Moffat, Irene Adler, and the Fannish Gaze
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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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 his subsequent deaths in “Utopia”, “Sound of Drums” or “Last of the Time Lords”; and more generally, deaths in the line of duty, however heroic, such as that of Ross in “The Poison Sky”, have been omitted. For the purposes of this analysis the Face of Boe is treated as a) male and b) separate from Jack Harkness, though both these contentions are open to some doubt.
the proportions are 14:8 in favour of female SSDs. Interestingly, the percentage starts to shift radically about midway through series three, at which point it was running at approximately parity, and the last RTD era male SSD is Luke Rattigan; after that it's 100% women all the way, and this also leaves out two female attempted SSDS - Jenny in The Doctor's Daughter and Agatha in The Unicorn and the Wasp which are narrowly averted.
Furthermore, if one carries out the same exercise by analysis of antagonist, if one looks at the following plot lines
a) Alien disguises itself as human female;
b) Alien intelligence possesses human female;
c) One or more human female characters allies herself with hostile alien forces;
d) Alien antagonists are explicitly gendered female;
e) Female leader fails to handle a crisis effectively
twenty-one episodes (out of the total sixty) use one or more of plot-lines a) to e), and a further eight feature human-impersonating aliens, possessed beings or quislings of both sexes. There is one example of a possessed male - Toby in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit and two of solo aliens in male form: Victor in Love and Monsters and Reverend Golightly in the Unicorn and the Wasp.
Love and Monsters is, of course, the "woman as sex toy" episode, for which I fail to see any narrative justification whatsoever.
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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.
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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 the Doctor as all part of the lethally short-sighted nature of human greed.
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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 are his failings.)
And of course, in "Impossible Planet", it's not just the guy in charge he's giving a free pass to; no one seems to mention Ida Scott, the smart, competent, sympathetic archaeologist (played by a 36-year-old woman) who the Doctor bonds with over his intellectual discussions, who comes out of the story looking better than anyone else, and who the Doctor says he hopes he'll be seeing again. (RTD told Keith Temple to write her into "Planet of the Ood", but there wasn't room.)
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...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.
Remember, RTD is the guy who turned Sarah Jane Smith into a stalwart defender of the Earth under her own power (creating a series around her!) and turned Jo Grant into a die-hard activist who handcuffed herself to Robert Mugabe. In episodes he wrote himself.
Then there are the obvious counter-examples to what you're pointing to: women who carry the moral authority to pull the Doctor's reins in, from Queen Victoria to Adelaide Brooke (to Sarah again in "School Reunion"), not to mention Harriet Jones. (Again, note what I said about fandom not really doing ambiguity -- the point of Harriet's head-on collision with the Doctor in "Christmas Invasion" isn't that she's a power-crazed monster, it's that she and the Doctor are both going over the line -- and, as reinforced when we return to her story in "Last of the Time Lords" and "Journey's End", arguably she was right.)
When it comes to featuring loads of women over 30 in a variety of roles, both positive and negative, RTD has by far the best track record of anyone in Doctor Who -- as showrunner (and head-writer doing most peoples' final drafts), he was responsible for everyone from Joan Redfern ("Human Nature") to Ida Scott ("Impossible Planet") to Kath McDonnell ("42") to the Cassini sisters ("Gridlock") to Lady Clemency ("Unicorn and the Wasp") to Francine Jones to Donna Noble. Try to think of another era of Who which had anywhere near that many older women in their cast -- his seasons regularly had more in one year than Letts or Hinchcliffe had in their whole runs! Before RTD there hadn't been a single regular or semi-regular female character in Who over 30 since Barbara Wright. RTD cast four, including Donna -- five if you count River Song. (A role which could have gone to Kate Winslet, according to "Writer's Tale", but they ended up casting her nearly fifteen years older.)
This really does tie in directly to the sort of issues I was talking about in the essay above -- people spot a pattern, and then everything that doesn't fit their chosen pattern just disappears. And I really do think it'd be possible to deduce the shape of another "the woman" from all these data points, another missed sweet-spot -- there's clearly a very specific image of a sort of powerful woman hero who Russell never wrote, or presented as too ambiguous rather than clear-cut (a la Harriet), which is triggering these blanket condemnations despite everything he did do...
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RTD did write female companions well, but that overlaps with another of my huge problems with his work which is a sort of "apostolic succession" approach to morality. Only people who have been properly initiated by the Doctor are allowed to be properly heroic, anybody who tries to be heroic or at all proactive without being OKed by the Doctor first turns out to be misguided or more usually a self-centred villain, whether they're male or female.
"Fandom doesn't do ambiguity" - I'd put that as RTD making vague gestures to ambiguity that sound ambiguous when you retell the stories, but in the actual experience of watching the episodes don't work. Because every time the Doctor does something dodgy the episode is guaranteed to end with a long close-up of David Tennant's lower lip trembling while one of Murray Gold's most sentimental themes slams in to try to force the audience to accept that Ten is a poor woobie beaten up by the universe who just wants to be loved. Compare "The Girl Who Waited" where the episode doesn't just put us in Rory's PoV to be appalled at the Doctor's ruthless and deceptive actions towards him and the two Amys, but actually stays in that PoV right up to the end. (Also, in the light of your argument about Queen Victoria as a righteous critic of the Doctor, compare the ending of "Tooth and Claw" where our last shot of her is a speech about creating Torchwood that is overtly politically unsympathetic in dialogue and has framing and music to point that up. And of course later on in Doctor Who and Torchwood it's quite clear that for most of its history Torchwood was a deeply malevolent organisation that occasionally saved the Earth as a distraction from its main job of robbing and murdering innocent alien passers-by and accident victims and dangerously meddling with Things That Man Was Not Meant To Know.)
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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").
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