What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Anonymous asked: Re: sexism in Sherlock, did you hear Steven Moffat's recent quote? "I think there was somebody who was attempting to extract a version of my own personal sexual politics based on ASIB. Which is completely untrue but let me tell you THIS... You can extract Mark Gatiss' views on dogs... from THOB. 'Cause what Mark likes to do with dogs is accuse them of murder and explode them." I thought it was pretty douchey on a number of levels... would love to hear you respond in your usual eloquent fashion!

I hadn’t heard that quote before, but I’m not at all surprised by it. Essentially, I think you can sum up Moffat’s backward obliviousness on the subject of his own sexism via the simple expediency of taking two of his quotes - from the same interview, no less - and comparing them. 

Responding to accusations about his portrayal of Irene Adler being sexist, he said this:

In the original, Irene Adler’s victory over Sherlock Holmes was to move house and run away with her husband. That’s not a feminist victory.

But regarding his depiction of women in last year’s Doctor Who Christmas special, he went on accuse his critics thusly:

I was called a misogynist because I was reducing women to mothers. ‘Reducing women to mothers’ – now there is possibly the most anti-women statement I’ve heard.

So, in other words: there’s nothing feminist or empowering in the original Irene Adler’s decision to marry the man she loved because marriage = traditional femininity = wrong, but exalting motherhood is both feminist and empowering because motherhood = traditional femininity = right? His position is utterly self-contradicting, because it’s not actually based on an understanding of agency, gender or complex characterisation, but rather on a knee-jerk need to categorise his detractors as the real misogynists and himself as a champion of women regardless of the facts.

And the fact is, there’s nothing inherently wrong with having your hero rescue a heroine, just as there’s nothing inherently wrong with a woman choosing love, or marriage, or motherhood. These things only become problematic when handled badly, as a way of shoehorning women into stereotypically gendered roles without really thinking about it, and especially when that’s all you ever seem to do. If Irene Adler had been an original character, it wouldn’t have mattered half so much that Moffat had her come in second (although, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, it still would’ve contributed to his pattern of sexualising, belittling, demonising and/or damselling the female characters in Sherlock), but because she was an established figure, his decision to have her rescued - and worse, to claim that doing so was actually more feminist than the original because his Adler didn’t end up married - belies, at absolute best, a complete misunderstanding of what narratively constitutes a positive display of female agency. 

So when he comes out and essentially tries to argue that it’s impossible to tell anything about a writer’s personal politics from their fiction because it’s all just for entertainment purposes - oh, but except for all that deliberate feminism I was putting in there deliberately, and all the interpretations of those characters and their motives that I wanted the audience to walk away with - it’s clearly, obviously bullshit. What he’s really saying is, it’s unfair to infer anything from my writing that I don’t want you to infer, because if I didn’t do it deliberately then I can’t have done it at all.

And that, frankly, is about as stupid a sentiment as it’s possible to uphold. Follow that logic - that a conscious intention must always trump not only the actual execution, but any relevant subconscious bias - and no politician has ever made a gaffe before, because if nothing they said was meant as offense, then it can’t have been offensive. 

Bottom line: Moffat is allergic to criticism, and the more he says about women, gender and sexuality, the more it becomes apparent that he honestly, really needs to admit to the fact that wanting to uphold an ideal isn’t magical proof against frequently failing to do so. 

  1. capriciousnerd said: I’m really loving seeing this criticisms of Moffat. He really needs to take a step back and understand that what he does unintentionally is just as awful/good/whatever as something he’s done deliberately.
  2. fozmeadows posted this