Doctor Who, Sexism and Criticising Popular Things

I have become everything I feared; I’m writing a blog about Doctor Who.

This relates to the 2011 Christmas day episode and the debates about sexism that it sparked, but so many common arguments came up that it provides a pretty good template for discussing prejudice in entertainment in general. Bear with me while I tackle the specifics of the episode:

In (very) brief: Some alien trees want to migrate to a new planet but they need a living vessel capable of transporting them. The Doctor, and some children, are too ‘weak’ for this purpose, but the children’s mother is ‘strong’ and able. What people have primarily taken issue with is the essentialist view of gender in the episode and the way in which the woman becomes powerful by conforming to her prescribed role, as per the patriarchy, of mother. Much of this is expressed by the Doctor when he works out why (according to the migratory trees) ‘She is strong’ while he is weak:

’Weak and ‘strong’; it’s a translation! Translated from the base code of nature itself. You and I, Cyril, we’re weak but she’s female! More than female, she’s Mum! How else does life ever travel than mothership?!

This pun lies at the heart of the conceit of the episode, but the Doctor’s epiphany is a little flawed. Life travels in all sorts of ways that are totally irrelevant to motherhood. Cells divide, plants are pollinated (in a program in which two characters are sentient trees, this isn’t a facetious comment!) –  of course, Doctor Who is not written for bacteria or trees, or for seahorses (the males give birth) or for any of the alien species in Doctor Whowhich transfer life without a concept of motherhood, so we can forgive its anthropocentrism.

Even among humans likely to be watching the program, though, these statements (which are presented not as opinions but as a factual explanation for the action) are grossly reductive and genuinely insulting. Firstly, let’s accept that men can get pregnant and give birth. Gender is not a simple binary of male and female, and people identify (if at all) in a multitude of ways based on many criteria. To define gender exclusively by reproductive capacity is to reduce people to a biological function, rather than a personal identity.

Now, the attitude to women. The Doctor declares that to be a mother is to be ‘more than female’. Whilst it may be true that (good) parenthood requires many skills and strengths of character, to suggest that women who are not parents are somehow lesser beings is patently ridiculous. The idea that women are somehow incomplete without children, as well as being degrading and damaging on its own, is part of a broader patriarchal idea of social roles; parenthood is the job of women. My knowledge of Doctor Who is fairly sparse, but I’m pretty sure he’s a father; why couldn’t he be the vessel for the trees? Why is the female ‘stronger’ (translate, ‘better equipped’) for this? Why not ask ‘Where else do we feel at home than fatherland?’ It’s because there is an idea in our society that women are somehow inherently nurturing, caring and protective (in a way that men aren’t). This serves both to push women into lifestyles and employment based on these attributes (nurses, teachers etc) and stops them being taken seriously in other fields. Though we may pride ourselves on not being overtly sexist, this essentialism means that our prejudices about gender still define most social relations.

To some, this does not look like sexism. After all, a woman saves the day when the Doctor is incapable. Things are, naturally, more complex. Sexism is not always about men being good and women being bad; it is a set of prejudices about men and women which dictate certain appropriate attributes and roles for them. Women are, ultimately, to bear and rear children. Having a woman become heroic is good, but to have her be heroic by conforming to her patriarchal role of motherhood (literally, as she protects her children, and metaphorically, as she becomes a semi-willing vessel, a ‘mothership’, to carry life) is not progressive. Again, I stress that the issue is not just that characters think these things; it’s that reality in the show is constructed to make them true. This is a form of that most insidious prejudice, ‘benevolent sexism’. Sincere attempts to portray women as strong and powerful (which this episode probably was) can end up reinforcing prejudices which are ultimately damaging if they lack a critical awareness of those prejudices (which this program certainly did).

When I made these points during the program, I was met with a series of arguments which may be familiar to anyone who has criticised a well loved work. It was unfair to call the show sexist because, I was assured, there are strong female characters in other episodes, or because there were positive examples of fatherhood in other episodes, or because there were bad mothers in other episodes. This stemmed from an assumption that, if I identified sexism in one episode of Doctor Who, I must be condemning the whole program as sexist: specific criticism met with general defence. There was even talk of ‘forgiving’ the show, as if it could only be judged as a single entity, its constituent parts indivisible.

We do not need to view things in terms of condemnation or praise; we need to acknowledge something has problems and watch it maturely. This is well addressed in the blog How To Be a Fan of Problematic Things, though of course it extends far beyond geek fandom. The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play, but that doesn’t invalidate its value as a work of art. Triumph of the Will is a masterpiece of cinema, despite being Nazi propaganda. We all enjoy things which have bad politics, but that doesn’t make our politics bad, unless we fail to be critically thoughtful. The danger comes when people attempt to defend every aspect of a work because they are somehow invested in it. To say that an episode of Doctor Who had a sexist plot line is not to say that Doctor Who fans are sexist (unthinking loyalty to a television program regardless of the concerns of people offended by it, on the other hand, does reveal a bad set of priorities… )

So, then, the final concern when criticising and critiquing popular entertainment; is it appropriate or necessary?

If millions of people watch a program, many of them children, and if few of them are critical of its political values, then that would suggest that it is necessary to vocalise criticism when it occurs to us. As for appropriate, it’s easy to be accused, when considering light entertainment, of ‘over-analysing’, ‘reading too deeply’ or ‘thinking too much’. There is a misconception that just because a work was not written in terms of conscious political awareness that it cannot be read in those terms. To follow this line of denying critical views is a form of obtuse anti-intellectualism, and those who choose to excuse themselves from thoughtful discourse should have not further bearing on it. Much more serious, though, is that to dismiss articulated critique of popular entertainment is to shut down discourse on privilege and oppression for the sake of a television program, which is unforgivable.

It was suggested to me that ‘if you look hard enough you can find sexism in anything’ (which to be honest I don’t doubt, at least in terms of artwork since everything is the product of a pervasively sexist society), the implication being that people, presumably humourless, man-hating straw feminists, comb over everything they can find looking for things to be offended about. Of course, this isn’t the case; no one chooses what offends them, or what their reaction to a TV show is. When sitting down to watch Doctor Who, it wasn’t that I chose to see the sexism in it, it’s that I couldn’t chose not to, and yet still there was a suggestion that I and everyone else who viewed it as I did should try to ‘just watch it’, to ‘just enjoy it’, and even the notion that we might be souring the mood for those who would otherwise watch quite unproblematically.

Now, I am not an ideological purist, a dogmatic crusader or a moron; I understand that a constant sense of struggling against entrenched injustice is not good for one’s mental health. What if you’re tired? What if you see sexism every day? What if you fight misogyny every time you leave the house, what if the entire direction of your life is based, beyond your control, on your gender and what if when you sit down on Christmas day to watch some light entertainment with your family you don’t want to think about feminism and oppression and offence? Isn’t it ok to ‘switch off’? Isn’t it ok to seek escapism from time to time without feeling compelled to confront injustice and prejudice?

My only answer is of course it’s ok to seek escapism, to watch things for pleasure without composing a political response. But that’s why we need to force improvements of our popular entertainment, so that it’s possible to watch them without having to confront the tiresome and horrific inequalities that define our daily lives. Art can only ever be so far ahead of the society that produced it, and is likely to be a fair way behind, and as such will always be riddled with problems which, in our ignorance and privilege, we may only be dimly aware of. If we attempt to deny ourselves and each other, explicitly or implicitly, the act of critical analysis of the art that we consume, be it by claiming that the work doesn’t warrant so sophisticated a reading or by declaring that offence taken is somehow not valid, we leave ourselves disenfranchised. If we value our ability to watch a television program unchallenged as higher than someone else’s ability to watch it uninsulted then we have probably picked the wrong side in a long established relationship of privilege and degradation. We may choose to sit quietly through the objectionable bits of a work of art, from time to time, even when it offends us, but we can’t expect other people to do so with us (even on Christmas day) and we must be prepared to acknowledge it when the things we like problematically contain things we have to hate.

Even If She’s Raped

***Trigger Warning***

In the debate between those who support abortion rights and those who do not, a certain familiar cliche will often tend to rear its head. One side or the other will offer up the hypothetical situation of a woman seeking an abortion after being impregnated by rape. It seems almost an inevitability, like a particularly grim analogue of Godwin’s Law, and there are many who are opposed to abortion except in cases where the woman has been raped. It seems simple, obvious even, that people might make this exception, but it’s worth considering the motivation behind it.

I broached this on Twitter, and @Rattlecans suggested that the kind of people who debate abortion from an anti-choice perspective don’t think of it as something that will ever affect them personally; for whatever reason, they and the women they know are not the kind of people who suffer unwanted pregnancies. Rape is the only way, they believe, that this kind of crisis might actually occur within their lives, and so they frame their discussion of the right to an abortion around that issue. This is probably a bit simplistic to be taken as a universal maxim but it’s a thought worth bearing in mind when these arguments come up.

My understanding of it is different, though. I think there’s an inherent subtext to that line of moral debate, which runs something like this: ‘Imagine a woman. She is pure and innocent, virginous, even, until a corrupting sexual force is imposed on her. She has absolutely no control over the circumstances of her pregnancy. She is blameless. Unlike other women, she should be allowed an abortion to restore her and nullify the rape.’

The problem here is that it reinforces some particularly damaging and illiberal attitudes to female sexual behaviour. It suggests that women who consent to sex (and maybe even enjoy it) have forfeited their right to sympathy and support in the event of unwanted pregnancy. It suggests that any woman who becomes pregnant without having been raped has no right to complain about their pregnancy.

The second major problem with rape exceptions is that they cast women entirely as victims, denying them the autonomous agency to engage responsibly in the sexual world. The abortion is a way of cleansing the sullied body, protecting the victim from the ravages of sex, rather than a way for a woman to take responsibility for her own medical state. Ultimately, framing one’s position with hypotheticals like this only allows for women to conform to one of two narrow roles: the victim, who is entirely passive and needs to be looked after, or the whore, who brings whatever befalls her upon herself and gets what she deserves.

Since this blog largely preaches to the converted, I’m directing this appeal to pro-choice readers. I understand that if you are trying to reason with someone who says that abortion is unacceptable under any circumstances, asking their feelings on cases involving rape can be an effective way to draw them away from moral certainty and make them accept that there are complex issues at play. However, not only is it a bit crass and exploitative to use hypothetical rapes to manipulate the course of a debate, but as far as I can see it’s a dead end which reinforces too many anti-choice prejudices. Abortion to avoid delivering a rapist’s child can be justified as a necessary evil, but to do so accepts that abortion in general is evil. Furthermore, it posits a kind of moral hierarchy of women seeking abortion, with some (rape survivors) as more deserving than others. Another cliche in these discussions is the woman who ‘treats abortion like emergency contraception’. This woman, because she is reckless and irresponsible, because her reason for wanting an abortion is something as unimpressive as simply not wanting to have children, is undeserving; her choice to have an abortion is far less forgivable than the rape survivor’s. It is essential to resist this kind of prejudice and not to build arguments based on the idea that some women are more or less deserving than others. As far as I can see, the only argument which pro-choice people (especially men) need to justify supporting abortion rights is this: neither I nor anyone else has the right nor the moral authority to dictate to another person the choices they make about their body. And that’s that.

EDIT: As a perfect illustration of the paternalistic misogyny that lies at the heart of this exceptionalism, @Boudledidge has sent me a link to the comments of Senator William Napoli.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO [Journalist]: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls “convenience.” He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

All Women Shortlists

All Woman Shortlisting for a party’s selection of MP candidate is an often contentious point. The justification for it is that despite women making up roughly half the population of the country, they have never come anywhere near this proportion of seats in the House of Commons. A dearth of women is a problem for many reasons, chief among them that ‘women’s issues’ are given less attention than they deserve, that there is a lack of positive female role models demonstrating a woman’s capacity to exercise power and that, symbolically and literally, our political system is revealed to be dominated by, and managed in the interests of, men (and white men, at that). As important as it is to see the hugely discrepant male to female ratio rectified, AWS seem to be an imperfect, and potentially damaging, tool.

The most obvious reason to oppose them, and one which is sufficient for many to make up their minds on its strength alone, is that refusing to allow someone to run in an election on the grounds of gender or any similar characteristic is inherently at odds with the basic values of our democratic system. In fact, Labour’s use of all women shortlists was ruled illegal in 1996 under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, and remained so until the Labour government introduced the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002 to allow themselves to continue the practice.

There is also an argument that the women elected through these lists are not respected because they haven’t had to go though the same rigours as other MPs. The Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson made her opposition to all women shortlists unambiguous with a t-shirt bearing the legend “I am not a token woman”.

To some extent, though, it is for each party to decide how they select their candidates, and as the women selected through this process still have to go on to legitimately win an election, it could be argued that this does not constitute a serious democratic shortcoming. Aside from this, AWS are fundamentally at odds with another key ideology of our democracy; the idea of representation. The suggestion is that for women to be adequately represented in the House of Commons, the proportion of female MPs must be (or at least must approach) the proportion of women in society; approximately 50%. The first response to this is to recognise that women are not the only under represented minority group*. Other groups, who are also likely to be adversely affected by ignorantly made policy, might also be justified in demanding electoral manipulation to ensure representation. Why not all black or Asian shortlists? Why not all disabled shortlists? Why all openly gay shortlists? I’m not being facetious. Why not engineer things so that there are a few more working class MPs, or better still, benefits claimants? A number of MPs end up in prison, but why not engineer things so that some ex-convicts are elected; would their experiences not be useful in informed law making? Yesterday in Parliament Labour MP Paul Flynn suggested shortlists to get more people over 80 into the Commons. There is not one (acknowledged) transgender MP. Isn’t it time something was done about that? Shouldn’t a few more of our MPs be unemployed? (Ok, now I am being facetious)

Though it would be nice to see a more diverse Parliament, all women shortlists are built on the notion that in order for women’s interests to be protected, women must be represented by women. This is problematic for a representative democracy; ultimately, if you consent to be represented by someone else in a political system you must accept that they will not share all of your characteristics, up to and including gender. (Practically, if you are lucky enough to find a candidate whose political views are compatible with yours, other concerns become secondary). Furthermore, this debate focuses on the composition of the Commons as a whole, and somewhat neglects the role an MP has in representing their own constituency. Is my sister, whose MP is female, better represented, benefiting from a greater democratic empowerment, than my mother, whose MP is male? Am I served less well by my female MP than I would have been by a male one? It is worth remembering that the women of Mid Bedforshire are represented by Nadine Dorries, who, with her views on abortion, abstinence only sex education for girls and ‘just saying no’ to sexual abuse can be viewed as one of the most pressing threats to the dignity and sexual equality of women in the current Parliament. She doesn’t even support all women shortlists, so anti-feminist is she.

All of this is to say that, within the context of our democratic system, any attempt by the major political parties to influence that type of person who is elected is fundamentally undemocratic; all women shortlists are built on a rejection of the most basic concept of representation; and that women in power are no guarantee that women’s issues are being properly championed. The very idea of all women shortlists is fundamentally at odds with the internal logic of our political system.

It’s also worth looking at this in a wider context, though. All female shortlists are intended to address the recognised problem that our political system is dominated by men and maintains masculine, patriarchal privileges. With this in mind, it is seriously doubtful that this system can be a mechanism for protecting (or even understanding) women’s best interests. Put bluntly; if you do not believe that our democratic system is institutionally prejudiced in favour of men then there is no need for all female shortlists. If you do believe that our democratic system is institutionally prejudiced in favour of men then there is no reason to trust it as an agent of female empowerment. A policy handed down from above, by men, within a patriarchal system will not empower women; it is a gesture of condescension. Women cannot be given equal democratic power, as the very act of giving is an assertion of superiority. Fundamentally, our representative parliamentary democracy is a hierarchy of power and privilege which has consistently disenfranchised women. Genuine gender equality cannot be achieved with in it.

*It is worth pointing out that at half the population, women are not in any meaningful sense a numerical minority, but are referred to as one because they suffer the same effects of marginalisation, victimisation and ‘othering’ as is common for actual minorities.