BBC in crisis after they forget to add lesbian tinge to stereo typical female baddie..
Before we begin, a plea... Please do not read if you are the kind of person who posts “Why, oh why, oh why, do people take it too seriously” on forums. I have no time for wilful ignorance or unquestioning acquiescence, especially from someone who believes these are traits to be promoted.
I genuinely do not intend to watch the series when it returns. The flagrant amorality, a lead who goons around like a sexually frustrated adolescent and story lines which... Well, I have been through this already.
I understand the woman with the eye patch is returning. When we last saw her she was acting without any real motivation, her villainy was almost for the sake of it. Although there is an interesting cultural backdrop to this character which connects to one of my many niggles with the modern show.
Our society favours the girl. Before the Twentieth Century the birth of a boy was the most desirable outcome for any would be parents, be it as an heir, as a potential for income (young boys started work earlier than girls) or simply because overall social conditions favoured the male (a woman’s best hope, for security or general life expectancy, was marriage and there were more women than men in Victorian society which made this a precarious hope at best). Now, according to data recorded by mid-wives, most parents hope for the birth of a girl and our culture is orientated with images of femininity, as overt sexual images (lads mags), tools for selling via their sex (advertising) or media icons (the cult of celebrity)
The consequence of this is far from a feminist society or civilized equality. As the last century drove on the shift towards the cultural preference for the woman became mired in sexual neurosis and exploitation. We supposedly live in a civilized society but, in the centre of London, you can easily buy congress with the flesh of young woman who is, and let’s be honest about this, a slave.
Yet, to be accurate, we do not desire the woman. Our society craves the girl, the innocent and young virgin. Think of the stirs caused by Natalie Portman after Leon or, more recently, Emma Watson and Miley Cirus. As such the images we see and the icons that are created are of younger and younger women. There is a proliferation of images, movies and music all adhering to this. The BBC fire Moira Stewart, even though she is more capable of her job than many others; men will stash away a personal harem of two-dimensional magazine girls and check out Vikki, aged 19, on Page 3; the movie premiere becomes a claim to fame simply by how well would be starlets dress, or undress, their flesh for the eager cameras. I could go on, but you get the general idea.
Doctor Who, to a greater or lesser degree, has been as much a part of this as anything else. Witness the replacement of Liz Shaw by Jo Grant as an example. But the show never sexualised the links between lead and companion. The female companion was a friend, not a consort. The worst excesses of the show were exploitative, Tegan and Peri spring to mind, but it was often an uncomfortable element and eventually dropped away to the more traditional, familial role models.
However...
With the advent of the Tennant era the idea of companions as platonic companions was no longer admissible; instead the Tardis became a harem where young women would look at the Doctor with tears in their eyes and say ‘I luv u Dr.’ It is also worth noticing that the Tennant era becomes a pro-longed re-interpretation of My Fair Lady. The nice, white, middle class man takes away the young ruffian girl and teaches her to be better than her past and be in love with him. Her black boyfriend, left behind by the nice new couple, is left to marry someone of the same skin colour (for some reason the idea of an inter-racial relationship seemed too much for the producers to contend with) Even Sarah Jane became an ex-wife figure, her role relinquished to the new and younger girlfriend.
What Moffat does with the show is even worse. His scripts/stories seem to revolve around a few basic, and continually re-used, plots; the main, and most worrying, being what a tabloid could call cosmic grooming by the hero. The Doctor is not so much an adventurer in time and space but a being using time travel as a means of meeting and forming a bond with young girls who will later throw themselves at him when they reach the age of consent. Even the Tardis has been revealed as a one dimensional harlot lusting after the Doctor.
It is no surprise that the villain of Let’s Kill Hitler will be an older woman, missing an eye, and carrying a hatred for, rather than a sexual need for, the Doctor. Apparently she will be the worst war criminal in history but all she seems to have done is kidnap a member of the Doctor’s harem; until he declared war on her like a frustrated and barbaric king of legend. Now she has stolen the baby daughter of his best friends, one of whom has an infatuation with him and, less we forget, this baby daughter is his on-off girlfriend in the future. Suggestions that it may be inappropriate to describe her as worse than Hitler, based on what we know so far, are probably pointless when considering the skewed morality the show exhibits of late. The eye-patch woman is automatically excluded from the shows notions of good femininity, defined by the Tardis harem of recent years, by virtue of her difference and how, like a wicked stepmother, she constantly deprives the hero of his young, pretty female consorts. Will the episode deal with the magnitude and consequences of her villainy or simply rely on the subliminal notion that a mature, disfigured woman must be evil because she does not confirm to the main cultural theories on desirability. Shame I’ll never know.
I also understand the monsters, and the modern show has to have monsters to emphasise how anything different is fundamentally evil, will be called the Teselectas. Seriously? What a load of testicles.
I would love to see the past couple of years psycho-analysed.
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