I’ve been re-watching the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who. I’m doing this because I want to remember why I fell in love with this show in the first place, and also because I do this every year. This time around, I’m noticing things in the Steven Moffat-penned episodes that I didn’t really notice before. “The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances”, “The Girl in the Fireplace”, “Blink”, and “Silence in the Library”: these episodes are hailed by many as some of the best episodes of the RTD era. No doubt, they’re all very good; Steven Moffat has a knack for mystery and suspense, I’ll give him that. But now I’m noticing elements in these episodes that trouble me as a viewer and a woman. The way Moffat treats his female characters is horrendous, and I’m really surprised I didn’t see his pattern with River and Amy from a mile away.
In case you have been living under a rock for the past seven years, Moffat is Kind Of A Douchebag.
Anyway, this is a pretty interesting piece that brings up some points about Moffat’s sexism that I hadn’t heard before. The discussion in the comments is also good, with some strong rebuttals and great counter-arguments.
The Unapologetic Afro-Indigenous Radical Feminist: The Glorification of White Crime
Take a facet of crime, and then look at television shows/movies that feature those criminals as protagonists.
White mobs.
White pirates.
White serial killers.
White political corruption
White drug dealers
I mostly want to talk about this as a TV phenomenon, but pick a crime, any crime, and Western media has probably made a movie/TV series/play/etc. with a white person that romanticizes the criminal activity. No matter what, a white person can do whatever terrible crimes and still have a TV/movie fanbase that loves them.
When you see black or brown people committing crimes on screen, you are to see them thugs and criminal masterminds and people to be beat down.
When you see white people committing crimes on screen, you see a three-dimensional portrait of why someone might commit that crime, how criminals are people too, and how you should even love them for the crimes that they commit because they’re just providing for their families or they’ve wronged or they’re just people and not perfect. This is particularly a luxury given to white male characters, since there few white female criminals as protagonists.
If and of the above shows were about black or brown folks, there would be a backlash of (white) people claiming that TV and movies are romanticizing criminals and are treating them too much like heroes and that it will affect viewers and encourage violence and “thuggish” behavior. And yet fictional white criminals get to have a deep fanbase who loves these white criminals, receive accolades and awards, get called amazing television that portray the complexities of human nature. Viewers of these characters see past the atrocious crimes and into their humanity, a luxury that white characters always have while characters of color rarely do. The closest that mainstream TV has come to showing black criminals as main characters is probably The Wire, and even then, the criminals share equal screen time and equal status as main characters as the police trying to stop them.
The idea that crime can be so heavily romanticized and glorified to such a degree is undoubtedly a privilege given to white characters. The next time you hear someone talk about Dexter Morgan or Walter White in a positive way, it may be an opportunity to rethink how white people can always able to be seen as people no matter what they do, while everyone else can be boiled down to nothing but a criminal.
Get out of my head, y’all! I’ve been thinking all like this about Breaking Bad specifically versus The Wire or even New Jack City.
And Dexter? Now maybe the analysis is out there and I haven’t run across it yet—and please send me the link(s) if they are there—but I haven’t heard a feminist critique of the Dexter’s serial killing as sanitized because he offs “bad people,” when the reality about quite a few serial killers’ victims are women. The last feminist analysis I read about male serial killers in US pop culture is Jane Caputi’s Age of Sex Crime from waaaaaaay back in 1987.
THIS SHIT IS IMPORTANT
(Source: daughterofmulan)
How Moffat Ruined Doctor Who For My Little Sister
[DOCTOR WHO SPOILERS AHEAD]
Submitted by holycheeseandcrackers
Right, so, anyone who follows me knows that I am Not A Moffat Fan.
I have absolutely no expectations or high-hopes for the new season of Doctor Who, (he’s put me right off Sherlock, I probably won’t even watch the new season of that), and to be honest, I am exhausted with pointing out his poor writing, his use of queers as punch-lines or to ‘sex things up a bit’ and his horrendous portrayal of women. Not to mention the fact that he has utterly destroyed a show that was a part of my childhood, hugely important to me, and influenced my further explorations into fantasy and sci-fi. I have made and reblogged countless posts about how disappointed and angry I am, and at this stage I really just feel like ignoring everything until someone more competent replaces him.
I can remember the exact moment that I realised how bad the writing in Doctor Who had become:
“I don’t get it, one minute she wants to marry you, the next minute she wants to kill you!”
“She’s been brainwashed, it probably makes sense to her. Plus, she’s a woman. Oh, shut up!”
That scene was like two slaps in the face for me. First I am told that the Doctor (my Doctor) now considers my sex to be irrational and over-emotional. Then, after that, I am told that I am not allowed to complain about this. I am not allowed to say anything. I am told “Oh, shut up!” in manner which suggests that if I protest, I clearly just don’t have a sense of humour.
By the Doctor. The Doctor said that. I can’t even imagine 10 or 9 saying anything like that. It was like the Doctor had become Moffat’s mouth-piece.
After that scene, I literally just sat there, practically in shock, going Oh, wow. That one cut deep. Oh wow that was bad.
So when I watched Asylum of The Daleks, I couldn’t even be bothered. I could not. Even. Be. Bothered. I watched as the pointless, nonsensical plot meandered along, not even able to gather the strength to wonder
- Why the hell there are suddenly shitloads of Daleks,
- Why the Doctor has a new nickname (The Predator) that is also apparently age-old that we’ve never heard of,
- How Skaro has magically appeared again,
- Why Moffat thinks we all have the attention span of five-year-olds (a continuing theme)which means he has to break up an important couple off-screen and then BOOM reunite them in the same episode before it even sinks in and we can actually Give A Fuck (Again, a continuing theme – Moffat, I am not going to Give A Fuck about Mels if you cram her down my throat in a montage, and then shoot her, and then have her be River Song all in the space of ten minutes),
- Why Amy’s only concern with the whole children thing is ‘oooh poor Rory’ and not ‘actually I was trapped by a freaky cult and forced to give birth against my will so yeah, no, won’t be doing that again’ – Seriously, when she said “I can’t have children” I IMMEDIATELY assumed she meant that it would be mentally too traumatic for her.
- Why the hell Moffat thinks he can smugly claim that he represents queers in the show when he keeps pulling shit like “I went through a phase” and then has the character say that they only mentioned their girl-on-girl experience because they’re flirting.
- How the fuck Rory thinks that it is healthy, and not at all passive-aggressive to say “I love you more! We both know it!”. Seriously, that is some fucking Mr. Nice Guy TM behaviour right there. I previously liked Rory, though he had his flaws (e.g. his constant inability to trust Amy when it came to the Doctor), but that was a disturbing insight into the way his mind works. He clearly ‘keeps score’ of the things they both do for each other, and that is just wrong. 2,000 years, Rory? You weren’t ASKED to wait. You didn’t HAVE to. But now you’re going to hold that over Amy’s head as Proof I Love You More And You Can Never Top That forever? After everything Amy has been through? Jesus.
- Plus there was the weird implication that if Amy did love Rory less, that means she has less love in her for the Daleks to erase. So if she can’t love Mr. Super Perfect Rory, she can’t love anyone? What about her family, her friends? Get over yourself, Rory.
- So many other things. Too many other things.
And to be honest, I wasn’t even going to bother complaining about it. I am just shit sick of Moffat, and his failure to listen to any criticism whatsoever, and his brushing off of the concerns of the show’s fans.
But then something happened that has made me very angry, and I feel the need to share.
UGH ALL OF THIS
OH MY GOD I FORGOT ALL ABOUT THESE
WHAT ARE THESE WHY WERE THEY NOT A PART OF MY CHILDHOOD
aw, robinita hood. love that the voice actors are POC too. these make me so happy, wow!
I have seen 3/4ths of these. Dear white people, I submit to you: You have NO idea how HAPPY I’d get when these came on t.v. How OVERJOYED I was to see people, even cartoons, that looked LIKE ME. Representing stories I’d grown up with, where I got to be the princess. Where brown and black people were happy. Where brown and black people overcame to triumph. Color, to children of color, DOES matter. The success and impact of these episodes from HBO show that. Fairy tales for EVERY child MATTERS.
awesome.
WELL THESE LOOK FANTASTIC
I can’t believe I never knew this show existed holy shit
(Source: marydoodler)
FANTASY!
The very word brings to mind the impossible, and is so wildly popular because it involves taking a piece of our world and juxtaposing it with literally anything your imagination can come up with. We’ve done this for thousands of years, telling stories of how the warrior slayed the dragon, how the enchantress trapped the magician, how it was the poor orphan who was the Chosen One all along.
It’s a genre where literally anything can happen, and where most things have, because the imagination of humanity is vast and deep.
So why is it that when a non-White actor or actress is cast in a Fantasy movie or TV show, so many people flip their collective lids?
Well, most Fantasy Fiction stories are set in Medieval Europe, or Britain, or a place that’s clearly based on such.
You’re correct, Devil’s Advocate Voice. There’s still a Eurocentric base to the Fantasy genre (which in itself is weird, given the aforementioned vast, deep imagination of humanity.)
And certainly, for example, the SyFy show Merlin obviously takes place in a fictitious version of Britain. It’s the millionth re-telling of a classic piece of the public domain, but it seems to be playing by the traditional storyline for the most part.
What’s that you say? The role of Guinevere is played by a Black actress?
And there’s a contingent of people on Tumblr who like to fan-cast Sophie Okonedo as Helga Hufflepuff from Harry Potter?
This is all historically inaccurate, you say? Well goodness me, don’t we have ourselves a pickle here.
Let’s pretend for the sake of argument that it’s completely not weird to have magic and dragons but definitely weird to have Black people in fictional versions of Medieval England.
Let’s do that for a second. Are we doing that? Good.
Because Black people have totally been in Europe, and England, for a really long time.
There exists this strange belief among otherwise well-educated people that from the time hunter-gatherers migrated from Africa and settled in their respective niches throughout the Earth until Europe got a bug up their ass about exploration in the 1400’s, nobody went anywhere. Everyone remained at home, in pure ethnic isolation.
Go Google a map of the Earth, specifically the Old World. Look at how close Africa is to Europe, and how Europe and Asia are connected. They’re connected so closely one might even say they could be considered one continent.
Isolationism has happened before, but mostly on island nations because inland isolation is difficult to enforce. There’s been so much movement and war and enslavement and migration through these continents that listing every major inter-cultural event would be impossible, so here’s a bit about Rome:
The Roman Empire, at it’s height, ruled the Mediterranean sea, much of North Africa, Western Europe, the Eastern bit of what’s now the Middle-East, and left a bunch of walls in Britain. Rome is fun in this context because often, the people they conquered were absorbed into Roman society, climbing high in the ranks of Roman nobility and military. Like this woman here, who was at least partially African, and was found buried with clear markings of being a noblewoman. In York, England. Hmm.
And they weren’t the only ones to do crazy things like move around a continent. The Huns originated somewhere in the Steppes of Central Asia and went on to tear Europe a new one, eventually giving the entire country of Hungary its name. The Scandinavian Vikings sailed around the known world, taking slaves from literally everywhere and trading them, as well as goods, with the Arabs. The Muslim Arabs themselves took advantage of the power gap after the fall of the Roman Empire to spread across Eurasia, absorbing the knowledge of the ancient Greeks and developing a center for learning in Baghdad that rivalled anything the Europeans were doing at the time. The Moors of Northern Africa get talked about a lot in conversations like these, and not for nothing. They waltzed into Spain and stayed long enough that their culture infuses Spanish life to this day. (Almost everyone read Othello in high school. I wonder if the English thought it was pandering for Shakespeare to have the main character of a play be African.)
And if you think for one second that these armies came in, killed whatever standing army was there, and then left nobody behind to rule the roost, and that these conquered people, who were at least second-class citizens of their new nation, didn’t travel for trade? Then there’s no hope for you and we should just turn back now.
Now answer me this:
- Do people like to have sex?
Yes. Yes people do. The vast majority of humans throughout history have enjoyed having sex. Sometimes, ethnocentrism and racism has kept people from inter-ethnic lovin’, but if you think that was the rule rather than the exception you’re underestimating the overwhelming desire humans have to get laid. Aforementioned Othello went into how Othello and Desdemona secretly got married, because per-marital sex was way worse than interracial marriage in Renaissance Italy.
Additionally, there were several conquerors and marauding armies, on every side of the equation, who ignored and/or promoted rape as a tool of war. For example, the Mongols did so much of this whilst pillaging across Eurasia that Genghis Khan, by himself, has about 16 million descendants today. The idea of consent meant basically nothing to most people at the time, given the extremely low status of women.
So, inter-ethnic sex was had, consensual or not, and heterosexual sex generally meant babies back then.
Ok, sure, says the Devil’s Advocate Voice, there were people of other ethnicities in Europe and Britain. There were interracial children. But certainly this wasn’t the norm, right?
I’ll give you that, because census data from the year 1000 AD is pretty sketchy.
But if you acknowledge that it did happen, that non-White people did exist in Europe, did work their ways up into nobility, you can’t turn around and say that having a Black actress play Guinevere is unrealistic. You can’t say that every single representation of a non-White British or European person is somehow “affirmative action,” or unrealistic, or pandering of some kind. To pretend it is is to erase the historical experiences of these people.
If there were a danger of there being no more White people on television or books, I wouldn’t be writing this. But there clearly isn’t.
Go read this post I did on how having a Black and Hispanic Spiderman matters. If you don’t want to, I’ll summarize it: it’s important that people, and especially kids, see positive portrayals of people who look like them represented in media. It’s important that kids of any ethnicity see a variety of people doing a variety of things.
And besides, all White people all the time is fucking boring. It’s boring and lazy and unimaginative to present one narrow view of history, and even more so to repeat, over and over and over again, the same narrow view of fictional lands that have never existed where the good guys are automatically White, and if there’s any Non-White people they’re presented as bad or primitive.
Beyond the tinge of racism that colors every debate about the “realism” of having people of color in Fantasy stories, there’s just a level of oh, I’ve read this story before, #shrug. Will the White protagonist of this Europe-analogous land triumph in the end? Will he?!? Fantasy exists because we wanted to plumb our wildest imaginations for adventures, and I think there should be a little more looking at actual history, more reflections of the lives that people really did lead.
It is 2011. Guinevere can be Black.
I just feel like I should make my own post about it because I’m really pissed off
Dear Tumblr, I am a gay male person
I don’t appreciate you treating me, and people like me, like objects
I’ve seen you find out Mark Gatiss is gay and then proceed to ask him who he ships in the show he helped co-create
I’ve seen you completely invalidate the sexualities of real people with wives and children because you think it’s cute and trendy to jokingly tell people they’re wrong about who they’re attracted to
I’ve seen you say that it’s okay to fetishize homosexuality, to homosexual people, and still think that you’re an lgbt ally
you’re not
you’re disgusting
you make me so fucking angry and I’ll tell you why
we are not accessories
we are not here for your entertainment
we are not represented by pornography, written or otherwise
we are real fucking people with real fucking feelings and you should respect them because I’m getting so fucking tired of your stereotypes and your complete lack of self control
if you’re not going to respect me, people like me, and our opinions- if you’re just going to treat us like little neat toys you can play around with for your amusement, then you are just as bad as any homophobe
and you are not my ally, you are my enemy
THIS
(Source: poachy)
Star Trek: DOIN IT RONG
OH MY GOD FUCK THIS EPISODE SO MUCH
TOS was like the first TV show ever to have an African American actress in a seriously important role - that was fucking huge. that was groundbreaking.
Next Gen did still manage to cast a few POC (though apparently almost everyone is white anyway in the 24th century ummm yeah sure that makes total sense), and wouldn’t it have been nice if they had continued TOS’s tradition of taking people’s prejudices and punching them in the face? that would have been awesome, right?
because I mean it was the 90s and this is a show about the 24th century
so you think maybe they could have deigned to start representing some other marginalized groups as well
like I don’t know
gay people or something
but instead they go almost 4 seasons without even acknowledging the possibility of gay people or gay relationships, and when they finally do it is to shit all over them
awesome thanks a lot Next Gen
great job
fuck you very much.
(oh hey and while we’re on the subject of representation I really like how there was only one female bridge crew member [unless you count Troi], and she made it through one season. oh yeah except when you kept bringing her back to kill her off again.
I checked wikipedia to confirm, you assholes: Tasha has three death storylines and two rape storylines.
PLEASE GO STRAIGHT TO HELL
DO NOT PASS GO
DO NOT COLLECT $200)
why is movie/tv birth always so clean and pretty
like you can just yell for a little bit and pop out a clean happy little human and everyone smiles at each other and goes home and drinks champagne.
WTF
the entire premise of this show is exhaustively dissecting the horrifyingly gruesome remains of brutally murdered people
and childbirth is too icky for you???
AAAAAAAGH FUCK THIS
Culture matters
Sometimes I hear people say that racism/sexism/etc in culture isn’t important or worth criticizing. ”Oh it’s just a book,” they say. ”It’s just a crappy TV show.” ”It’s just a commercial.”
This argument always baffles me. It’s like if you put poison into a fish-tank and then say “Oh well I didn’t poison the fish, I just poisoned the water.” The fish lives in the water, dumbass; it’s completely submerged in and surrounded by the water. I’m pretty sure that poisoned water is going to affect the fish.
Similarly, we all live constantly immersed in this miasma of information that we call “culture.” People are not born prejudiced. We don’t emerge from the womb knowing that all black men are scary thugs, that all Latinas are spicy sexpots, that all Indians are violent savages, that all women are weepy and frail, that all gay men are depraved pedophiles, and that all people in wheelchairs are objects of pity. We learn these things, usually starting at a very young age, and we often learn them from our culture — the books we read, the movies we watch, and the constant barrage of advertising that we don’t really pay attention to but which still manages to seep into our brains, and which shapes the way we think about the world, for better or for worse.
If you want to save the fish, you need to purify the water.
Because that’s the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren’t monsters, they’re liars.
I can’t imagine how scandalized those critics who were relieved to have something that was mild enough to not excite their kids would’ve been if they’d stopped for a second and realized what was actually going on. The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it’s up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn’t through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think.
"Ask Chris #81: Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism (via ellielamothe)
Consider my mind blown.
(Source: comicsalliance.com)
