There’s this issue you’re not allowed to discuss: that women are needy. Men can go for longer, more happily, without women. That’s the truth. We don’t, as little boys, play at being married - we try to avoid it for as long as possible. Meanwhile women are out there hunting for husbands.
Steven Moffat on Female Characters. (x)
Think about this next time you decide to praise his “not sexist” writing.
Jesus, Moffat, did you even take a second to ask WHY girls play at being married, being a mother, and keeping house? Maybe because everything they see on TV or in magazines or from their own parents is that those are the only things that garner women a semblance of respect from society?
I geNUINELY HATE THIS MAN
You cannot BACKWARDS RATIONALIZE THIS BULLSHIT. You cannot inundate women with the idea that their sole reason for existence is a male and then shame them and say all that they want to do is hunt for men, that they are dependent upon them. You can’t say that it’s okay that you write utterly dependent, sexualized females because that’s what women are like. I just— that’s not what women are like.
I’ve never watched Doctor Who, but I’ve noticed the article this quote is sourced to is talking about a 17th century courtesan the Doctor is in love with. Is Amy Pond a stripper? Coupled with Irene Adler, how many of Moffat’s supposedly “strong” female characters are also sex workers? There’s nothing wrong with this, per se, except for the fact that it’s a fixation, it sexualizes his women and makes their jobs and bodies performative (sex work does not necessarily do this, but after seeing his work in Scandal I’m really not interested in giving him the benefit of the doubt anymore), and it pulls into broad daylight this perverse association that to be worth your narrative while, women have to be flirty and sexy on top of intelligent and clever.
Sexuality can be used in positive, interesting, feminist ways: because women can never actually escape patriarchy, some of fiction’s most interesting characters have resigned themselves to it and learned to harness it to their advantage. This is cool. This is almost done with Irene, except when it’s not, when Irene “falls in love” with Sherlock (as women do) and it serves as her downfall. When her entire character dissolves from cleverness and surprise into blatant, simple seduction. When that becomes her only strength.
What disgusts me most about the implication of the quote - other than the visceral obvious - is that it all but outright says that men are happier without women, and women are happier with them. Men strive to achieve their goals independently, and a woman’s only goal is to obtain a man. Jesus christ it makes me want to riP MY SCALP OFF. THIS MAN IS A HUGELY INFLUENTIAL HAND IN BRITISH TV
“Well, the world is vastly counted in favour of men at every level - except if you live in a civilised country and you’re sort of educated and middle-class, because then you’re almost certainly junior in your relationship and in a state of permanent, crippled apology. Your preferences are routinely mocked. There’s a huge, unfortunate lack of respect for anything male.”
Steven Moffat is like the most frustrating thing of my entire life
Because he co-created Sherlock and it’s arguably my favorite thing in the world, it’s just a really amazing A+ piece of cinematic art and such a loving adaptation of some really cherished source material (like I can feel the fanboy waves radiating off of every second), and besides the ending of ASIB and the awkward chinese mob in TBB, i’m really hard pressed to find anything about it that I don’t absolutely 100% love.
(Though honestly my three favorite episodes were TGG, TRF and HOB, written by Gatiss, Thompson and Gatiss in that order. But that’s not to say that Moffat’s episodes were bad, because they were very strong.)
But Steven Moffat is really blatantly sexist at times and the problem is that he doesn’t even seem to recognize what’s wrong with what he’s saying. It doesn’t mean that I hate him as a human being, because honestly 7/8 of the guys that I know say things just as sexist as this all the time, and i’m still friends with them and don’t think they’re horrible human beings. (I try to correct them, obviously, and it makes me lose a lot of my respect for them, but unless they’re being totally willfully malicious I will not shun them for it.) But Moffat has to learn to take criticism when he’s wrong, which is often, especially because he’s in such an influential position in British Television. What he’s saying is 100% ignorant and disgusting and untrue and just reeks of “I don’t bother to try to understand how society actually works and why I think of women this way no matter how many times people may try to correct me.”
While I enjoy his work in Sherlock and can only find room to criticize his desicion to end Irene Adler’s association with Sherlock with a loss (when she really should have outsmarted him and stayed above it, rather than becoming infatuated him, which is basically the opposite of canon.), his seasons of Doctor Who have severely diminished my enjoyment of the show. While all the actors have done a great job with what they’ve been given, Amy pond makes me seethe, his River Song isn’t much better, and I can already tell that Clara makes me angry. Moffat doesn’t seem able to construct a female lead separate from the femme fatale archetype or her relationship with a man.
Like, how often does he need to be told that the views he holds are completely outdated, and that what he was taught about women growing up is wrong? I don’t know him, so i’m not going to say he’s a bad person, despite his blatant sexism and his occasional arrogance. Everybody knows plenty of people who do lots wrong but still manage to be good friends and parents and all despite that, but I am going to say that he seriously needs to be set straight, because frankly the quote that I read here was 100% disgusting.
