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Reblogged from fucknodoctorten
fucknodoctorten:
I think the reason that the Moffat era gets more hate for it’s sexism (The racism issue seems different and would require a different rambling post… as it’s more an issue of tokenism/ignorance vs. flat invisibility) is that it takes a different form than the sexism of the Davies era. Since many people came into Series Five having only seen nuWho, their enjoyment of the show under RTD had probably desensitized them somewhat to how problematic his work was, and the stark shift in how everything operated helped to highlight Moffat’s dickery.
I see Moffat’s method of storytelling as being something of a quick sketch method of painting a narrative. Events happen very quickly and there are often unspoken months or years between episodes in which the characters are presumably having emotional reactions and dissecting whatever bullshit the plot has thrown at them. In addition to this, most characters who aren’t the Doctor seem to conform to very simple archetypes. They are fleshed out enough to help them contribute to the labyrinthine narrative, but don’t have a soap-operatic cast of supporting characters and a fully spelled out life history. Their deeper personalities tend to be hinted at, rather than explored explicitly.
Because of this, I personally find Moffat’s blatant in-your-face sexist tropes somewhat more palatable than Davies work. I can see that the man is holding up a bunch of paperdoll characters and that they are going to conform to the pictures from the fairy-tale book he cut them out of, rather than looking like real people. As such, I can sort of brush it off when Amy seems to have limited emotional reactions to her pregnancy or when River seems to spontaneously move from wearing her temptress hat to her loyal wife hat - I can assume that everything has more depth offstage. I understand, however, that there’s still sexist dickbaggery going on and that this method of plotting makes it all the more visible viewers used to a different format.
With Davies, everyone’s emotional reactions and thoughts were explored in wretched high-definition detail, often to the point that somebody’s internal monologue was clumsy pasted over top the already exposition-filled narrative. While this gave his characters some sense of completeness which Moffat’s lack, it also left me understanding that there was virtually nothing to expect of his cast outside of what’s being shown, and what I was shown was woefully lackluster. Whereas I can easily pretend with Moffat that River spends all of her time offscreen graverobbing the treasures of ancient ruins and spreading sedition in corrupt space empires, with Davies I keep being forcibly reminded that Rose thinks her life on earth pre-Doctor was insignificant and the rest of her existence appears to be spent either obsessing about Doctor Ten v. 1.0 or making out with Doctor Ten v 2.0.
I think both show-runners paint caricatured portraits of women and their emotions and that many people overlook Davies doing this because he spends so much time painting in all the sloppy little details of his sexism such as that there’s an illusion of depth… rather than just bluntly stating “This woman is crazy because of her crazy woman uterus!” every episode or so as Moffat tends to do.
Expanding a bit on this, and on some of the replies (not included because they cut the original post, which I want to reproduce):
RTD wants you to experience the characters’ emotional lives from the inside, and one of his more unpleasant tricks for doing that is inviting you to laugh along with them at another character’s expense. More generally, he has an irritating tendency to establish his favorite characters’ worth by comparing them to someone ‘less worthy.’ This doesn’t always involve female/minority/working-class targets—think Adam in The Long Game—and even when it does it’s not always expressed in an overtly sexist or classist way. But sometimes it is, as with Jackie; sometimes, as with Martha’s whole season, he seems oblivious to the glaring unfortunate implications or tries to brush them off as irrelevant; and in general the numbers are pretty disproportionate: the targets are disproportionately minorities, and minority representation is disproportionately negative. Even Martha herself gets established as cool-headed and competent by having Ten insult her fellow (also brown, also female) medical student for losing her head when they’re stuck on the moon without reliable air supply.
On the flip side, RTD’s more in-depth character work usually gives some nuance or redeeming qualities to the slighted characters, at least enough that most of them appear to have some sort of life outside being the butt of a joke. Moffat deals in sketches and archetypes, leaving him open to the accusation that he sees women as NOTHING but mothers, femme fatales, irrational miniskirt-sporting spitfires, or whatever questionable trope fandom has decided to side-eye this week. This is partly justified, since the character types he goes for are overwhelmingly gendered ones, but very few archetypes come without unfavorable and problematic stereotypes attached. IMO fandom is too quick to jump straight to the most unflattering and stereotypical interpretation so they can throw stones at Moffat for it—using the worst tropes to invalidate the whole archetype, then pointing to the very sketchiness and malleability that allowed such interpretations as evidence that he doesn’t respect his characters as people. Perhaps NuWho fandom is just primed to expect RTD-style character exploration for its own sake and doesn’t quite grok what Moffat is trying to do—he is more about crafting interesting pieces that he can push around his chessboard in interesting ways.
The other thing is that RTD’s continual attempts to be all socially relevant and shit often gave his missteps a flavor of truly nasty commentary on real life. Moffat deals in archetypes and fairy tales, which blunts the edge somewhat. Plus his intersectional sins are mainly ones of omission; he tends to forget that not everyone is straight and white, but he means well enough and tries to make up for it when reminded.
(Funnily enough, I do prefer RTD, warts and all; even at his worst he is disastrously compelling, and his characterization porn hooks me like the sucker I am. Moffat provides plenty of cerebral fascination but I am less invested. And yet I end up in this weird devil’s-advocate position where I affectionately slag off on RTD while admitting he’s got me by the balls, and feel compelled to defend Moffat against people who slag off on him one-sidedly and with no affection whatsoever.)
