I’m wondering what is sexist if Moffat isn’t? I’m guessing the answer is nothing. You think sexism is not letting women vote or some shit. But calling women needy and clingy and refusing to hire them for important jobs is not. Until he says women shouldn’t vote, you’ll just keep falling all over him. Actually, no, when he says that you’ll explain how it’s a hilarious joke.
Lately what I find most frustrating about Moffat is that his garbage writing actually fulfills all of his own negative stereotypes about women writers. Which is probably why he spends so much energy on his frantic, pathetic sexism. It’s all candy romance and cliched “family” dynamics that have everything to do with fantasy and nothing to do with real life.
Moffat knows that he only has the capacity to writes stories about “mommies” and “daddies,” little boys and little girls. Every personality in his writing is a mommy, a daddy, a little boy, or a little girl. Not parents, not adults with children, “mommies” and “daddies.” There are no adults, no people with fully formed identities whose struggles are adult struggles, whose hopes are adult hopes. It’s people who range from 25 to over 1000 years old who don’t even know who they are. His characters don’t have hopes, they’re just looking for something to do. The “couples” he writes don’t talk to each other, don’t even know how to talk to each other; they cower and sulk wondering why no one is guessing their thoughts. None of his characters grow up, or grow, they just stagnate or regress (often literally.)
It’s vacuous, empty nonsense. It could be good. If he had the nerve to really embrace the idea that the show is about adolescent concerns, but he doesn’t want to admit that or even know how to see it. He thinks he’s better than being a teenager because he is older than one. But teens are locked in that developmental stage for legitimate reasons, he’s locked in it because he’s terrified and pathetic.
Complaint Department: blah blah blah
It’s all candy romance and cliched “family” dynamics
YES THIS.
And sorry to hijack your comment on writing styles but I really need to get this off my chest.
And I think it actually has a deeper ideological root than cliches and shallowness – it’s some bullshit social conservatism propaganda that he himself probably isn’t aware is social conservatism propaganda. The way he puts the institution of heterosexual marriage on a fucking pedestal – the whole “never mind your abandonment issues we aren’t dealing with them just go marry your fiance marriage will cure you” storyline with Amy(background theme of Season 5), giving them a house in the country (post-God Complex, right after Eleven told Amy to grow up by forcing her husband’s name on her, which she never indicated she wanted), giving them a baby because otherwise “they are just dating” (talking about River,) prioritizing the wife’s guilt about ~not being able to have his kids any more~ while ignoring and trivializing the trauma she had been put through (Asylum of the Daleks), saddling River with a stepford motherhood she had shown no sign she wanted (Forest of the Dead), making the Doctor’s psychic bond with the TARDIS a gendered thing and calling it heterosexual marriage as if that is the ultimate affirmation of intimacy and understanding (psa: it’s fucking not) (The Doctor’s Wife) – is so backwards, so 1950-ish, and so ironically parallels the nuclear family/sanctity of marriage rhetoric of the religious right, and when all this is coming from a self-proclaimed open-minded progressive guy, you just have to marvel at the irony.
And then you have the normalizing of stalking women(‘11 Christmas Special, Blink), imprinting on young girls and coming back when they are hot and legal(The Eleventh Hour, The Bells of Saint John prequel), the depiction of female-on-male sexual assault as hilarious and harmless(Flesh and Stone, Snowman), the obvious as day lesbophobia and hostility to women deviating from the marry a man have his kids and your legitimate psychological issues shall be cured paradigm – disrespecting lesbian unions and sexually assaulting lesbians and acting as if their physical resistance to it is even more of a turn-on(The Crimson Horror), and then you have Sherlock where you take a self-identified lesbian and have her fall for a man that ridicules her for that, oh, I could go on.
The thing is, if you look at it as a whole it actually makes perfect sense under the logic of the patriarchy, it is not even disappointing anymore once you assume that the show has never been a neutral medium, has never been something women can look to for aspiration for empowerment, but has always been part of the indoctrination methods of the patriarchy. Or, as I preferred to think, he really got rid of all pretenses on progressivism and open-mindedness and turned the show into the perfect distillation of the patriarchy.
Now isn’t that a depressing thought.
I know this is probably funless, humorless, angry, paranoid and second wave, but that said I am indeed a second waver and this is my claim.
(via nerdylifeinhiding)