Should there be a female Doctor?

This article was originally printed in "Celestial Toyroom", the magazine of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society.

“Should there be a female Doctor?” If your answer is “yes”, then ask yourself this – now? How would a female lead suit the programme as it stands now? Would she be awesome? Or would she suffer from the show’s ingrained sexism?

Throughout its history, Doctor Who cannot be said to have an unblemished attitude as far as its treatment of women is concerned. Retrospectives of the show such as Thirty Years in the TARDIS acknowledged its sexism quite baldly and Resistance Is Useless even showed a compilation of clips entitled “Leave It To Me, Dear”. The show would reference this within its own dialogue: sensible (if mini-skirted) scientist Liz Shaw stomps off between seasons because the role of the Doctor’s assistant equals “someone to pass you your test tubes and to tell you how brilliant you are”. Companions like Leela were often quoted as being there “for the dads”.

But we’ve moved on now, haven’t we? Shouldn’t 21^st century Doctor Who have left such tendencies behind? The 1996 TV Movie made steps towards gender equality by presenting a companion who may wear a ball gown but keeps her body covered up and presents the Doctor with a counter-offer when he invites her to join him. I would argue that the Davies era was also generally positive in this regard, but the ball has been dropped on several occasions since Steven Moffat took over in 2010.

The Eleventh Doctor’s first female companion was Amy Pond, played by Karen Gillan. Now, it’s hardly a new thing for an attractive young female actress to be cast, but there was a clear distinction between Amy and her immediate predecessors. However attractive Billie Piper might actually be, Rose Tyler was never fetishised in the way that Amy is. Try and find Rose or Martha in a miniskirt. Publicity photos of these young, attractive women tended to look “cool” rather than “sexy”. Karen, meanwhile, begins in a kissogram outfit. It takes her until the end of the season before she gets to put on trousers.

It’s not all about fashion, of course – it’s also about the way in which Amy is written and how people react to her. Infamously, she pounces on the Doctor at the end of Flesh and Stone. She spends the entirety of A Christmas Carol in a sex outfit. The special episodes Space and Time (Comic Relief fun for all the family) relied on the idea of Amy having sex with herself and Rory looking up her skirt. Upon leaving the TARDIS, she instantly becomes a supermodel with very little apparent effort. And if she’s not being sexy, she’s being pregnant (twice) or crying because she can’t get pregnant. This girl just can’t stop Being Female. Rose, Martha and Donna were content simply being female.

I used the word “girl” just now, quite deliberately. Both Amy and her successor (in more ways than one) Clara are given this infantilising epithet: “The Girl Who Waited”; “The Impossible Girl”. For the record, they are women. But then, I’m not sure Clara even qualifies as that. She’s a cypher, a plot device, fulfilling a function. Her purpose in Doctor Who is to act as the Doctor’s motivation, his obsession – by appearing in three different guises then being split across the Doctor’s timeline (in The Name of the Doctor), she appears more as an archetype than a living, breathing character.

Amy and Clara suffer from a malaise called “male gaze”. This occurs when a female character or situation involving her has been created or written for a heterosexual man’s viewing pleasure. So, for example, Oswin (aka Clara) discussing her “bisexual phase” just to excite Rory. Or Madame Vastra and Jenny, whose relationship exists for jokes far more often than for any actual evidence of love or tenderness. In her 2013 New Statesman article “I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl”, feminist writer Laurie Penny criticises recent Doctor Who in exactly these terms:

“Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else’s.”

The 2005 series began with Rose and the focus was on Rose, entering the mysterious world of the Doctor and having an adventure. Story titles now tend to refer to the Doctor, either blatantly (The Day of the Doctor) or obliquely (The Eleventh Hour) and it is the girls who are the enigmas. Clara isn’t even aware of her own arc plot until the circumstances arrive for her to kill herself. “I was born to save the Doctor” – so much for autonomy. But even worse is the Doctor’s attitude towards her: did anyone fail to flinch when Nightmare in Silver ended with our favourite time-travelling grandfather commenting on “a skirt that’s just a little bit too…tight”?

Forget Russell T Davies’s alleged “gay agenda” – it’s Steven Moffat’s “straight agenda” that has really had an effect on the show. From 2005-2009, the Doctor was kissed by one man. From 2010 onwards, he can’t keep his mind off women. And they can’t keep their hands off him. He begins the 2011 season hiding under a 17^th century woman’s skirts naked. Incredibly, he seems to get married to Marilyn Monroe. And as for Queen Nefertiti – this extraordinarily famous and powerful historical figure begins her episode fondling the Doctor and ends it shacking up with a chauvinist hunter who wants to spank her. In between, she is treated as a commodity to be traded. I am not making this up.

Oh, I know, I’m going on a bit about this. I probably come across as though I don’t like this show. I do, really. Why else would I bother thinking about it in such detail that I get all cross and write something like this? Because I would love to enjoy an episode about dinosaurs rattling around a Silurian spaceship without having to think about patriarchy. And it’s not just me. I sent out a tweet asking if anyone had opinions about this. Boy, did they. (Thanks, incidentally, to those whose ideas I have borrowed.) Troublingly, if you type “Steven Moffat” into Google, its third suggestion is “Steven Moffat sexist”.

I’ll allow there are some strong women in recent Doctor Who. One might name Liz Ten, Madge Arwell or Kate Stewart. (Although, if being picky: silenced and duped figurehead; self-sacrificing mother; nepotistic chip off the old block.) And of course there are the evil women: Madame Kovarian, Miss Kizlet, Alaya and Restac, Miss Gillyflower. They’re certainly strong characters. But then, is being “strong” enough? Here’s Sophia MacDougall, again from New Statesman this year:

“No one ever asks if a male character is “strong”. Nor if he’s “feisty,” or “kick-ass” come to that. The obvious thing to say here is that this is because he’s assumed to be “strong” by default. Part of the patronising promise of the Strong Female Character is that she’s anomalous.”

The most important female character of the Moffat era is River Song. Although Alex Kingston’s name is yet to grace the opening titles, of the 18 episodes since 2010 written to date by Steve Moffat himself, a whopping 11 of them have featured Mrs Who. When assessing her as a character – and as a central part of the Doctor Who mythos – it’s instructive to go back and watch Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead, written by Steven Moffat under the aegis of Russell T Davies. River, here, is a mildly enigmatic character in a spacesuit. She’s an archaeologist who happens to probably be the Doctor’s future wife. The only gun she fires is Captain Jack’s old square-gun and she fires it at walls.

Since then, she has evolved (backwards) into a self-proclaimed “psychopath”, flirting with anyone she meets then drugging them with her lipstick. If they filmed her debut story now, she’d have at least three costume changes. Back then, she appeared to be a self-possessed, intelligent, resourceful, adventurous, professional woman and I could believe that someone like David Tennant’s Doctor could fall for her one day. Now, any idea that she is the Doctor’s equal has gone out the window. From the womb, her destiny, personality and everything were controlled by a religious cult. She was raised to kill the Doctor; adopted the name “River Song” because of the Doctor; became an archaeologist just to find the Doctor; spent years in prison for killing the Doctor, even though she didn’t; dies to save the Doctor (just like Clara) and gets uploaded to a hard drive for all eternity because “he doesn’t like endings”.

And she just accepts all this. Not one scene where she wigs out about the mess that has been made of her life. River is the closest thing we’ve yet had to a female Doctor (this side of Warriors’ Gate, anyway) and possibly indicates what such a character would be like at this time. I’m looking forward to the forthcoming Peter Capaldi era, but really, what I want from it most of all is the phasing out of the male gaze.

“Should there be a female Doctor?” This is, I believe, the wrong question. Much more importantly – isn’t it about time there was a female showrunner?