“You might want to look away now, we’re about to critically examine a children’s Christmas television special.”
Just finished watching the Doctor Who, and I have some strong opinions on it already. Oh dear.
They are:
a) The Doctor trying to ‘take care’ of things was adorable.
b) Bill Bailey and his crew needed much more screentime. Great actors, funny dialogue, and wasted potential.
c) The attempt to tackle sexism made me seriously hate the writer (who I just found out was Stephen Moffat. Oh, Moffat, why do you have to disappoint me?).
The story began with a woman who can’t drive, and continued to crash every vehicle she came across in the episode. Then in the middle, the story decided to make it very clear that the alien race view females as ‘strong’ and males as ‘weak’ – a cute little cultural twist that I liked, and it worked well with the story. These aliens made a big deal out of how much of a strong person the car-crashing woman was, and everyone present generally nodded and agreed ‘oh yes, the strongest woman ever because she is a mum and that is wonderful’. Shortly afterwards, this ‘strong’ woman started gushing about how she met her husband: he followed her home every day from work, even though she didn’t seem romantically interested in him, and eventually she gave in and married him.
So this strong, admirable woman was blackmailed into a relationship? What.
If you’re going to write a story about how strong women are, it helps if you put a strong woman in it. Just an idea.
(EDIT: ‘even though she didn’t seem romantically interested in him’ originally read as ‘even though she didn’t care for him’, this was reworded for clarity.)
She didn’t care for him? Given that that was just before she started crying that she didn’t want to see him dying, and just after the bit where she started thinking of him to bring them home, I’m going to say that she did. Yes, it’s a bit “oh, really?” but there’s nothing to suggest that she doesn’t love him.
Hi M,
“She didn’t care for him” is referring to when he was following her home – there was no indication of romantic interest there. I completely agreed that she loved him in the ‘present day’, but when he was stalking her home from work every day she didn’t seem attracted to him. He was just the random bloke who kept following her home until she ‘gave in’.
I’ve updated the post to try and make that more clear.
In the pictures, she does smile at him once she notices he’s there. It is weird to us, at the least, but not necessarily… that.
My view is just one way of looking at it – it didn’t come across as odd to you, but to myself and many other viewers the interaction felt creepy. A lot of people had no problem at all with the scene, which is a fine opinion even though it’s different from mine, so we can agree to disagree on this point. :)
I still love the show as much as ever and hopefully you do too!
Wow. I came here assuming that you were going to comment on how sexist it is to say males are weak while females are strong, and instead you are saying it was sexist against females? Standard feminist victimization doctrine….
Kind of depressing that you seem to be the first male commentator, and you come along with a reply like that.
Would you rather the story told us “men are strong, woman are weak”? You have every other movie and TV show ever made to tell you that, don’t whine because this show said the opposite for once. It had some reasonable logic behind the choice (the trees needed a mother vessel/mothership to escape, men can’t physically be mothers) so I wouldn’t call it sexist. Not that ‘trees need mothers’ makes much sense to begin with, mind you.
I never said the show was being ‘sexist against females’. My point that was their attempt to say “women are strong” was poorly done because the actual female character they focussed on wasn’t that strong.
I would disagree with your comment, “You have every other movie and TV show ever made to tell you that..” How many ‘girl with the dragon tattoo -esque’ films have we seen in recent years? With the strong female assassin ect and the stupid men? How many Boot’s adverts?
I wont disagree that there is a lot of sexism against women on television, but it does seem that sexism against men on television is viewed as more acceptable, and that comment of yours is completely untrue.
You lost me when you tried to say that Boots adverts are a strong portrayal of women. It’s an advert trying to sell products to women, by appealing to women. Compare it to the ‘Yorkie’ adverts or a TV promo for football. They are trying to attract a certain audience, nothing more.
“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is an extremely anti-female book and film. It was originally titled “Men Who Hate Women”. It focuses on violence, murder and rape of women. I sincerely hope you haven’t seen or read it, and are making the misguided assumption that because it contains a woman, it’s a movie designed to appeal to women.
I appreciate you trying to join in the discussion, but please do not think that because women are being portrayed on TV they are being portrayed realistically or in an equal light to male characters.
I think what he was trying to say in that last paragraph is that people take sexism towards men much more lightly than sexism towards women. If the episode had the girl being too ‘weak’ to pilot the ship, but the boy could, and The Doctor had yelled “Men are strong, women are weak!”, there’d have been an uproar. Say women are strong and men are weak, and it’s not seen as sexism; instead, as anti sexism (because being sexist to the other gender somehow supports equality), or as you put it, “cute”.
I think the problem is that when people talk about sexism, it’s nearly always about how women are put down by men, so the term sexism automatically makes people think of poor innocent women being victimised by thuggish idiotic men, which is rather ironic.
Thomas never said anything along the lines of wanting men to be the hero of the hour this episode, as you somehow seem to think. He said the comment was overall sexist, and he was right, but you seemed to think he expected constant male superiority. For example, if someone complained of women getting unequal pay, would a suitable response be “oh, I supposed YOU’RE wanting higher pay than men?” Of course not.
This episode, as with a lot of the new Doctor Who episodes, is being overly obvious in forcing political correctness down our throats. For example, gay couples are frequent (not a problem), but each time it feels more like “LOOK WE’RE FINE WITH GAY PEOPLE” instead of just having gay couples. We never get “LOOK AT US WE’RE STRAIGHT” couples. We get strong female characters like River, Amy and the Egyptian Queen, then weak males next to them (The Doctor is made to look like a fool next to River, Amy totally dominates Rory, and the hunter guy is overly in-your-face sexist and made to look like a fool next to the Queen). If this was the other way around, people would be in uproar about sexism, but turn it around and suddenly it’s glorious for tackling a problem that was sorted a long time ago.
Genuine sexists towards women are rare now. It’s no longer socially acceptable. What little there is left is being cleared up. The point has already been made that treating women as inferior is wrong. We’re not going to get anywhere by suddenly making men look stupid next to strong women.
To avoid sexism of either gender, it would have been better not to mention anything about being weak or strong, just to have some other reason. Even just being a mother is enough, but there’s no need to focus on the gender being the aspect, and having it be a matter of strength. It’s honestly getting repetitive and slightly offensive to have all these strong women dominating all the men without a single dominating male to back it up. If it was mixed up (have some strong men over women and some strong women over men) with the focus being on the characters themselves rather than focusing on genders, it would make it much better in my opinion.
“Genuine sexists towards women are rare now. It’s no longer socially acceptable.”
I’m afraid I disagree with this statement, and I consider it slightly naive. I don’t see much sexism in my life (thankfully!) but the same isn’t true for a lot of other women in similar circumstances to me.
But your comment was well-put and balanced, so I hope we can agree to disagree. You make a lot of great points, especially on them trying to hard to force points when they could be doing it subtlely.
As to how Madge met her husband, from what I understand that sort of thing used to be common, a lot of the older married couples I know have similar stories. I don’t see how it possibly be called blackmail. We can’t really hold history up to our standards and expect it live up to them. In fact most old “Romantic” stories have that basic premise that love is when a man loves a woman and then convinces her to love him. However, Moffat should have really pulled something a little more original out of his hat, it really does feel a bit sexist mainly because the story borrows from tired old gender role based stories where women are only strong “in their own way.” Although, I guess it’s good that they pushed the message that parenting is an important job. I think the “bad driver” thing was meant to make her more relatable, audiences like flawed characters. I really did like when she pulled a gun on the crew though, that was gutsy.
Also, I don’t think Moffat was even thinking about sexism when he wrote this, he was probably trying to write another trite feelgood for the family to watch.
Fair point on the old-fashioned habits – I’m mostly looking at it from a modern viewpoint, where following a girl home until she agrees to date you would be grounds for a restraining order.
Thing is, I could easily have excepted it as a cute courting ritual, if they’d shown some hint of her finding him attractive – a 2-second shot of them exchange glances, her referring to him as ‘the handsome young man who walked me home’, any little hint like that. By not showing any romance, it came across as creepy.
Regarding it not being about sexism – I think Moffat intended for the story to be about that, with the amount of focus he put on men being ‘too weak’ and then hammering in the point with ‘woman are weak, men are strong’. It felt very deliberate to me, but your mileage may vary.
Thanks for your intelligently-put and balanced comments, Max. :)
I think we were supposed to assume that she was romantically interested in him. If she was blackmailed by him into marrying him, she wouldn’t be so distraught at his death (if anything, she’d feel free). If he was the type of guy to be blackmailing, he wouldn’t have been so cared about or shown to be a brave and loved man. It doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination to think she found his determination cute, and I highly doubt he literally meant he’d follow her home until she agreed, he’d have been being cheeky. You can tell from the way she said it that it was a good memory, and something she liked about him.
This post forever. Part of me wants to write fic about Madge being manipulated into marrying her stalker. Everyone around her thinks it’s ~romantic~ and she should be pleased by the attention, so she starts thinking she must be overreacting, and anyway she doesn’t want to cause a *scene*.
Moffat is terrible at gender. Even when he’s clearly trying to be better at it, he STILL ends up defining his female characters by their roles as wives and mothers. I was really disappointed by a lot of the gender crap in series six especially (Amy as incubator! River tamed by marriage! Two Streams Amy does not deserve to exist because she is old and therefore ugly! I could go on and on. AND ON AND ON AND ON). I’m starting to think the only way the show is going to avoid continuing to infuriate me under Moffat’s supervision is if it turns all-male. He can’t stereotype and pigeonhole women if they’re not there for him to do it to, right?
. . . *right*?
Oh hell.
Oh dear, I think I’d tried to bleach out the memory of the ‘incubator’. It’s a shame about River, I liked her first appearances as the mysterious ‘wife’ of the Doctor in the library – they had a dynamic relationship and equal footing, and it really carried the episode.
I’m patiently waiting for a female Doctor, who will be wonderful and just as complex and brilliant as every other male doctor. But at this rate she’ll just get pregnant to save the universe and then go on to have mother/daughter drama Jenny.
Yeeeeeah, we definitely don’t want a female Doctor while Moffat is showrunner. There is no way that would end well. Or start well. Or go well in between the ending and the starting.
Maybe someday.
Oh, also: I would read the hell out of that fic.
I think both the “stalking” and the “bad driving” are historical/cultural. Yes, it would have been better to have at least a hint that there was some romance, or that Madge did actually fancy the guy. And in the early 1930s, most drivers would have been men, so her “bad driving” would have been due to either the fact that she really couldn’t drive (and hence it’s a sign of her courage that she took the wheel in the first place–echoed perhaps in her later driving the Androzani vehicle), or that she hadn’t needed to drive much and hence lacked experience behind the wheel.
As I indicated in my response to your comment on my blog, the lead character in the show is male, and until he regenerates into a woman (and there’s no rule that says he can’t), he is the hero of the show, and really should be the one saving the day most of the time. That doesn’t mean, however, that the females in the show can’t be strong. I think where Moffat goes astray is that his depiction of strong women seems as if it’s pandering for sake of political correctness. Madge could be a strong woman, and yet the Doctor still save the day. I think Russell T. Davies did a much better job with getting this balance right (Donna Noble was one of the best new series companions, IMO).
As a husband and father of six kids, I like that Moffat emphasizes the value of family. In “Closing Time” we had Craig as the powerful father, and here we have Madge as the powerful mother, both driven by their love for their children. And with Amy and Rory’s story arc, I like that Amy eventually chose her life with her husband instead of chasing after the Doctor. If she wanted to be with the Doctor, she shouldn’t have committed to Rory. Now, is Moffat saying that only wives and mothers can be powerful women? That if you don’t have children, you’re not as strong a woman as you could be? I don’t think he would say that, but I can see where you might get that impression. And I don’t think it was Moffet’s intent to say that marriage “tamed” the strong women, but rather helped them refocus on what was important in life. From experience I can say that marriage and parenthood doesn’t change how strong a person you are, but it can be a very “grounding” experience. Your priorities change. That’s what I see in Amy and River. I think that’s what Moffat would say, and the extent to which this doesn’t come across in the stories is more to do with his failure to communicate that well enough.
Okay, long response… so I’ll sum up. I don’t think there’s any intentional sexism going on. In fact, if anything, I think Moffat is over-compensating for the fact that he has a male lead character. I think the portrayal of Madge was largely true of an early-1930s woman–for her time, yes, she would have been a strong woman, even with the crying and the bad driving. However, I think what I see as over-compensation has a danger of coming off as patronizing, and hence could appear to be sexist. Strong women don’t have to be mothers, wives, unemotional, or excellent drivers. But they have to be real people, not caricatures for the sake of not causing offense. And for women to be strong, men don’t have to be weak. There can be a balance. I think RTD managed to hit that most of the time. Moffat is still working on it, IMO.