Doctor Who fandom: where multiple intelligent women is ZOMGMISOGYNY!

[lizbee]

Quote that turned up on my Tumblr dash yesterday:

“What Doctor Who character do you think of when I describe this: “She is a beautiful, smart, teasing, flirty, confident woman who can do things the Doctor can’t”. Did you think of Amy Pond, Sally Sparrow, or River Song? Or did you think of the new character in this episode, who is exactly the same as all of these other characters? Objectively bad writing. She already has that idolising look, self-described genius to boot … I’m sick of this. You can just picture Moffat salivating. “A WOMAN! A brilliant sexy WOMAN! HOW EXCITING!”

(source)

Guys, I have a confession to make.

I, too, salivate at the thought of brilliant, sexy female characters.

I mean, not literally, but it makes me pretty happy.

I know. I'm sorry.

Worse, I also don't think that Amy, Sally, River or Oswin are interchangeable, on account of how they all have different personalities, manners of speech and ... are different. (Said weaver: "I keep forgetting that you’re only allowed to have one confident and successful woman per show. Silly old me.")

(I am reminded of the time someone kindly informed me that it is offensive to portray River as having a career and a personal life, because it's unrealistic. Sorry, girls, back in your boxes -- either get a divorce or quit your jobs, but stop trying to have even part of it all!)

Incidentally, when you say, "She is a beautiful, smart, teasing, flirty, confident woman who can do things the Doctor can't," this is who I think of first:

Comments

[terajk]

From reading what you've said about them both this week, methinks the Doctor Who fandom and the Sherlock fandom have things in common. Unpleasant things. (I wonder if "who can do things the Doctor can't" is the operative part of that sentence.)

[lizbee]

Well, they do share an executive producer! Who has a special talent for saying really stupid and sexist things in interviews (apparently he gets nervous and the connection between brain and tongue is severed), but for some reason that doesn't translate (much) to his female characters. (He totally has a type, which is Sexy, Confident and In Control. I ... can't really see this as a bad thing myself.)

But a lot of Sherlock fans seem to have come from Torchwood fandom, that being Doctor Who's unspeakably terrible spin-off. And TW fandom was not a friendly place to female characters.

[wolfy_writing]

What Doctor Who character do you think of when I describe this: “She is a beautiful, smart, teasing, flirty, confident woman who can do things the Doctor can’t”. Did you think of Amy Pond, Sally Sparrow, or River Song? Or did you think of the new character in this episode, who is exactly the same as all of these other characters?

How dare he stereotype women as smart and talented and having unique skills that can even occasionally outdo the male hero! What about the tragically underrepresented helpless and passive women who are valued by the male hero because they're pretty and sweet? It's not like they're in any other media!

Also, there's a bit of a difference between Amy and Oswin in terms of intelligence. Also personality, backstory, appearance, eventual fate, relationship with the Doctor, and practically everything else.

I am reminded of the time someone kindly informed me that it is offensive to portray River as having a career and a personal life, because it's unrealistic. Sorry, girls, back in your boxes -- either get a divorce or quit your jobs, but stop trying to have even part of it all!

What depressingly low expectations.

[lizbee]

What about the tragically underrepresented helpless and passive women who are valued by the male hero because they're pretty and sweet?

There was a response on Tumblr along the lines of, "Yeah, where are the realistic women, like Rose?"

(Of course, Rose, at her best, had the emotional intelligence the Doctor lacked and sorely needed, and could flirt with the best of them. But just because Rose and my sister are hugely alike doesn't make Amy - or me - unrealistic.)

[such_heights]

THANK YOU YES. I mean, it's a fair shout that Moffat does have a broad type when it comes to the female Who characters he creates, but it's a GOOD TYPE and it certainly doesn't make them all the same person.

I, too, like self-confident, intelligent and inventive women. I will turn in my feminist card right now.

[lizbee]

We are bad people. We need to get back in the kitchen and make some sandwiches for men, like proper feminists.

[sabotabby]

I highly approve of Oswin. And the other brilliant sexy ladies. But I disapprove of the Defanging of the Daleks and it kinda killed the episode for me.

[lizbee]

I expect they were only defanged because of misogyny.

[nonelvis]

Hmm, a beautiful, smart, teasing, flirty, confident woman who can do things the Doctor can’t?

[nostalgia]

Well, before the Moff-era all the women were properly ugly, stupid and incapable of tying their own shoelaces without supervision.

[nostalgia]

I couldn't quite believe people were reblogging that quote with approval and saying "ZOMG FEMINIST" when it clearly shows a discomfort with the show having a good number of interesting and capable women. I mean, really, how does it make sense to make Moffat the misogynist one in this specific instance? It's a bit like when people complained about Rusty making "gay references" only with the added bonus that by this logic that would make him homophobic.

[wolfy_writing]

It reminds me of that study that found that if women make up more than thirty percent of a group, many people will see it as being dominated by women. I mean to get anyone complaining about the number of interesting and capable men on a show who could occasionally outdo the female hero, they'd have to write the guys as doing the vast majority of the rescuing, solving problems, and accomplishing stuff.

[recessional]

The thing is, there are things to crit Moffat/the show in general on, like how somehow all these brilliant women end up showering the Doctor with adulation/changing the world or their lives in his favour/whatever.

The fact that there ARE brilliant women is . . . .not one of them.

[lizbee]

Yeah, and that's the inherent tension in the whole concept -- in fifty years, I think only Liz Shaw and Romana have managed to avoid that trap.

[aberration]

I have my issues with Moffat and Doctor Who, but what weirds me out about this is that my own issues almost exclusively concern narrative, not character. For instance, I love River Song, but I dislike that in the end it seems her entire life revolves exclusively around the Doctor, capped off by being imprisoned for a crime she didn't actually commit, just so the Doctor could get off the radar, and apparently she only occasionally slips out to have adventures with him? (In my head, she obtained or the Doctor gave her her own TARDIS-thing, and she's an intergalactic outlaw rather than a prisoner, so whatever.)

And it's like - I have no problem with critiquing media, I do it all the time. (I do think there are points where people get so invested in the notion that their feelings must be objectively right that they start engaging in logical fallacies/poor critical thinking just so they don't have to accept the notion that maybe something just isn't their cup of tea. But that can be a messy line to get to.) But I do feel uncomfortable attacking women characters. That doesn't mean I particularly like how they've been handled or where their stories go - a character I still lovingly cling to was the subject of my biggest rageexplosionblowup at any media ever, after all. But I guess I feel like, given the amount of straight up misogyny women characters are subject to from fandom anyway, people who are nominally speaking with feminist purpose would be careful about engaging in rhetoric like calling women characters "interchangeable," or "confident" in a disparaging way, or hating on the characters themselves :\

(Also, I have to say - I am not really getting why I'm supposed to be thinking much of this dude's opinion as opposed to side-eying it a lot, but whatever.)

[wolfy_writing]

I'm also kind of bothered by the increasing Doctor-centeredness of River's story. I mean some of it's things that I'd be fine with if it wasn't combined with all of the other stuff, but there's more and more of it, and I'd really like more indications of her having a life that's her own.

And that's very different from "How dare she be so awesome?" (Or "It's unrealistic for her to have a relationship and a life!", which is weird because "Has an archeology career and a husband" is one of the few things about her that's actually possible.)

[lyssie]

It's funny, because I was thinking about how there were a lot of redheads in the episode (which is very shallow of me, sorry), but how Oswin was brunette, and on top of that, they were all quite quite different personalities and drove the plot in different ways--and that it was nice to have intelligent, capable women (and capable men, Rory and Eleven are no slouches, either).

But I suppose I'm interrogating the text from the wrong perspective and should just assume that the overwhelming majority of women should be standing around twisting ankles and shrieking (which is what many people think Oldskool companions did, oddly enough), or constantly asking what's going on (which, to be fair, was the reason for companions, but that's never all they've done).

Which is a long-winded way of saying I'd rather have the show full of Moffat's favorite type of woman than not. I can find all the screaming stupid women in other media shows, thanks.

[risti]

Let's imagine, for a moment, that Oswin was Oswald. A quirky, charming, flirty genius in a fetching uniform who happens to be a young, good-looking male character.

Do you think anyone would have a problem with his character?

Aside from perhaps calling him a rip-off of Jack Harkness

Who, come to think of it, was introduced by Moffat.

[rj_anderson]

I have nothing to add to all the sensible and intelligent things that have already been said, but I enjoyed this post and the comments thoroughly. Just so you know.

[sqbr]

Wow, yeah, I have my issues with Moffat, and that episode in particular, but "too many smart and confident women" isn't one of them. I also saw a review of the ep which went from "I am sick of Moffat making so many of his female character's lives revolve around babies" (a legit criticism) to "Clearly Moffat thinks of women solely as baby makers" when Oswin was right there.

[elisi]

It's funny... I was watching the episode, and as Oswin did more and more things that were smart, brilliant, flirtatious and terribly clever, I thought to myself: "Gosh. People will HATE her."

And so they do...

Although that comment is hilarious.

[kerri]

Wait, people think it's somehow not feminist to like having multiple intelligent, confident women in a show??? I think my brain just broke. -_-

[silverhare]

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

[magister]

Well, yeah. I haunt Doctor Who forums from time to time (GAllifreybase and the Doctor Who section of Roobarbs, to be precise) and there have been many complaints about how Moffat keeps writing intelligent women and how they're all the same and IT'S NOT REALISTIC. This tends to come from the same group of people who complain that "since the show came back, it's not Serious Adult Drama like it was under whoever was the Doctor when I was 7". Honestly, there's people out there who claim that Planet of the Daleks is the peak of emotionally intelligent drama.

Anyway, I'm in the camp who finds it a bit depressing that Moffat creates intelligent, independant women and then makes them dependent on men. River - everything she's ever done increasingly seems to be because of the Doctor. And in Sherlock, there's Irene Adler who he makes less independant than Conan Doyle's original from 120 years ago. There's a depressing interview with Moffra (sorry, but I want to see a giant moth with the head of a Doctor Who executive producer.) in The Guardian from January, where he talks about how Irene getting Sherlock to rescue her is a feminist victory.

[drakyndra]

I kind of feel like I've landed in Opposite World.

Were these people not in fandom when people were trying to start a petition to make Sally Sparrow a companion because she was ~so much more interesting~ than boring everyday types like Martha or Rose? Or when half of fandom decided Martha was boring because she was exactly like Rose (where were the people defending RTD's ability to make them sound different then)?

Yes, Moffat has a type. So did RTD and like every other writer on the damn show.

ETA: Plus, the amount of people who called out for wanting a new companion who wasn't just a young modern day human woman, and have now seemingly changed their mind since Oswin - if she comes back - will be brilliant, from the future, and while human have some definite alien links.

[infiniteviking]

Thank you. >3

[mme_hardy]

Ohhh, Barbara. Mmmmm.

[frabjous]

I literally LOL'd out loud when I saw that come up on my dash.

OH NOEZ NOT BRILLIANT SEXY FEMALE CHARACTERS

seriously wtf.

[yukinoomoni]

Who is this person?! They're stupid.

And I agree with you. The more sassy, sexy, intelligent, strong and awesome women we have in the media, the better. We're finally seeing them, after so many decades of having to put up with trashy, idiotic, simpering fools, and someone is whining?

i just i don't what

[liviapenn]

Worse, I also don't think that Amy, Sally, River or Oswin are interchangeable, on account of how they all have different personalities, manners of speech and ... are different.

And the thing is, there are ways in which Amy and River are similar, but that MIGHT have something to do with them being mother and daughter! And we know that they hang out and spend time together, and presumably a lot of those times come earlier in River's timeline than her appearances in various DW episodes. So if they have a similar sense of humor or way of expressing themselves sometimes, I think that would fall more under *good* characterization than bad.

[ladymercury_10]

It's the "does things the Doctor can't do" that really gets me. Because all of the companions do things he can't do, and THAT IS THE POINT OF THEM. Else, why have any other characters at all? The Doctor would never admit this, of course, but it's why he goes and gets them. Actually, wait, he does admit that he needs them to see the wonder of the universe, which is something he has trouble doing because he's gotten old and jaded. But Rory can be more compassionate, and Oswin has the time and the patience and the hookup to learn to hack, and Martha can be more level-headed and humane, and Amy can be more daring and out-of-the-box, and Sally can pick up the puzzle more quickly than he can because she's been living next door to it and playing those games all her life, to take an incomplete sample. That's not the same. Oh, but I guess Rory's a boy and Martha's RTD's. But anyhow. And River, who is everyone's favorite to pick on, is meant to be quite similar to the Doctor, and it's less that she can do loads of things he can't and more that they have very similar baseline skill sets so it's quite obvious when one of them has a skill the other doesn't.

Yes, the sassy, can-do female character can be a trope at times. And I suppose there are some similarities among those characters. But they aren't the *same*.

[ashfae]

I thought of Romana! Doctor Who has a looooooooong history of thoroughly kickass female companions, since well before Moffat came on the scene. This is part of why the show rocks!