“How many heterosexual Doctor Who fans does it take to change a lightbulb? Both”

Thanks to his bevy of male sci-fi role-models, ProMaleAntiFeministTech will one day develop time travel, escape the matriarchal apocalypse and attempt to change the course of history by writing strongly-worded letters to Thrilling Wonder Stories.

This article presently has 629 comments and three of my friends have brought it up independently of each other within the last 24 hours, so I’m going to assume that most of you have already seen it. If not: Science Fiction was good until women and poofs got involved. Yeah, again. I’m not going to address every point it makes;  it’s already been done,  it’s so ridiculous that commentary is essentially redundant anyway, and I’m unfamilliar with either iteration of Battlestar Galactica. Except…

…Well, there’s this paragraph that tragically misunderstands the nature of Doctor Who. It’s not quite as tragic as when the show’s actual writers do it, but it’s still doing all sorts of things to my pedantry lobe. Anyone who’s seen the current version of Doctor Who will have a pretty good idea of what ProMaleAntiFeministTech is going to be objecting to, but anyone with a background in pre-2005 fandom is likely to find it doubly ridiculous, because Doctor Who has always had one of the gayest, if not the gayest, fanbase in SF, which is no mean feat for a show that began broadcast when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. The title of this post, in fact, is taken from old newsgroup sig file; obviously it becomes less funny if you see it half a dozen times per page during an argument about “Planet of the Spiders”, but it does at least get the point across. So it’s ironic that ProMaleAntiFeministDepartmentOfRedundancyDepartmentTech opens his screed with…

A few years ago Doctor Who was resurrected.  The man who brought back Doctor Who was Russell T. Davies, a gay man…

…because the lack of heteronormativity isn’t just a fandom thing, it’s been part of the approach since day one. The first ever serial broadcast, “An Unearthly Child”, is a character piece produced by a woman and directed by a gay Arab, and this was in 1963, before there were any made-up excuses about political correctness. That same woman, Verity Lambert, is almost singularly responsible for the series surviving past its first season.  It’s easy to forget how important she really was, since she’s not officially credited with creating any of what we now think of as the core mythology, but to think of her as simply a bean-counting bureaucrat who happened to have boobs is doing her a huge disservice: Most of what ended up being broadcast in the early 60’s, especially the popular bits, was essentially a list of all the things Lambert had been told not to do, but had fought tooth and nail to get on screen anyway. To pick the most obvious example, her (male) superiors thought the Daleks were a bad idea. Result.

And speaking of Doctor Who producers that there simply wouldn’t be a series without, it’s down to the openly gay John Nathan-Turner that the show survived after the 1970’s. He’s still quite vehemently derided in some corners of fandom, largely because of some truly shocking decisions he made toward the tail-end of his career, but he was also responsible for radically reformatting a show that most people, both inside and outside the BBC, thought was a lost cause. Within a year, he’d doubled the ratings, made the effects competent, and snared demographics that it was assumed wouldn’t touch Who with a barge pole. Once again, result.

There were nine producers across the original series, but these two, the woman and the homosexual, are the ones who had the most profound influence on the program’s direction, audience and continued survival. The idea that women and homosexuals have  ruined Doctor Who isn’t just ridiculous in and of itself, it ignores that women and homosexuals made it work in the first place.

But the big issue with Davies is that he:

…proceeded to add a recurring character named “Captain Jack,” who comes from the 51st century and is bisexual omnisexual.  Yes, omnisexual… Not only is this character bisexual, but he has enjoys having sex with non-human species as well. Davies has also admitted in interviews that he believes everyone will be “omnisexual” by the 51st century.

Since the thrust of this argument is that bisexual characters are inherently offensive, you can’t really hope to engage with it beyond yelling “Jesus!” at the monitor, so I won’t bother. ProMaleAntiWomanTech has, however, again missed a key point: Jack’s “omnisexuality” doesn’t denote a specific sexual identity, it means he doesn’t think of himself as having a specific sexual identity, and his attraction to men / women / Malmooth occurs on an individual, not group, level. And not only is it entirely possible that people will think this way in the 51st century, anyone with even a tenuous grasp of human history will know that people actually did think this way until relatively recently. Even the Goddawful God Hates Fags bits of Leviticus are specifically about acts between people, not the people themselves.

But what’s interesting here is that ProMaleAntiFeministBattleTech3000 fails to mention the changes wrung on the new series by Stephen Moffat, a man who’s gone above and beyond the call of duty to redefine the Doctor as a heterosexual male with properly-functioning hormones. Moffat’s on record saying things were always this way and fans were willfully blind to it, except… it wasn’t like that. It really, really wasn’t, and the only pre-Tennant incarnation to flirt with a period fling was, almost perversely, William Hartnell. This is, in fact, the major reason that the show ended up with such a big gay following; the Doctor simply isn’t interested in copping off with the women he meets, and therefore he’s a hero who, almost uniquely, doesn’t treat saving the world and getting the girl as parts of the same process. And if you want to take the gay identification even further, he’s also a character who’s forced to perform a gender role that doesn’t come naturally to him. He looks like a human male and is therefore treated like one, but that’s not who he really is and his attempts to fit in don’t entirely work. He is, in effect, an alien in human drag.

Moffat’s version of the character, however, fits in almost ludicrously well. I’m trying to reserve judgment until next year, but if the return of future-possible-wife-person River Song is anything to go by, 2010 is going to be one of the straightest years in Doctor Who’s history. The issue isn’t that a sexy, flirty, preternaturally-confident Doctor is a break from established continuity, it’s that it has the potential to skew the series away from one of the things that made it unique in the first place. I was originally going to conclude this paragraph with “Still, at least we’ll avoid any more romance-angst, since they can’t exactly have River die tragically more than once”, but then I realised that they actually could.

Continue the battle against The Spearhead in part two!