Caught my eye in the Guardian. I thought about it, quite a bit, and decided that in the end I didn’t agree with the protesters- all the contestants chose to be there. I don’t know, our society’s concept of beauty and good looks above all is not a good thing- but women are always being told what not to do, in a way that men never ever are. Don’t enter a beauty contest- don’t decide to wear a burka- don’t go out at night- don’t sleep with too many men- don’t be too thin -don’t be too fat. Both men and women have rules for women, but no-one has more than very basic rules for men.
Been reading a lot about Amy’s journey in Series 6a, and the fact that in a way her main character arc there is ‘getting pregnant, getting kidnapped, getting rescued’. Which from a feminist perspective is somewhat of a problem. That essay I did about Amy and the Monomyth is still in my head, so I’m just considering where Amy’s been and where she’s going next…
I can see why people are annoyed at what happened to Amy’s story arc…she went from messed-up fairytale girl to dedicated wife and mother. But then again, that’s what happened to Wendy Darling, too. Also, I wonder if it’s not so much the ‘woman! gotta make her pregnant!’ thing as it is a ‘parenthood = adulthood’ thing in most stories. For men as well as women, sometimes. And Amy, like Wendy, had to grow up sometime…I think for most writers, probably me included, giving a character a baby is the fastest way to turn someone into a fully fledged adult.
I think the main problem with the pregnancy arc is that before it, we never got a hint of Amy actually wanting to be a mother (although she is good with the kids she comes across, like Toby) In Amy’s Choice it’s kind of hard to tell how Amy feels about being pregnant- she tells the Doctor off for calling her new life dull, but then she tells Rory she only got pregnant ‘so I don’t have to see the amateur dramatics society doing Oklahoma.’ (interestingly, if you watch Rory in the background, this is the only time he ever looks really angry with Amy. Because she’s admitting she wants a baby out of boredom?) But when Rory dies, the baby is quickly forgotten, and never brought up again. (Which I always thought was a huge flaw in the episode.)
So yeah, there’s nothing we can point at and say ‘Amy wanted this baby!’ but I think she did. (Okay, let’s face it, Doctor Who is a children’s show and there’s sort of…no way in-universe that she couldn’t have, because the writers would simply never go there- they’d never bring up the concepts of abortion or contraception. They had difficulty enough getting River conceieved in the TARDIS!) Regarding messed-up Amy- having the memories of growing up in a stable environment probably helped her decide what she wanted. Her parent’s relationship, what little we saw of it, is sort of like the Amy/Rory relationship- attractive woman, nerdy man, the occasional mild insult, but still love (you can see them dancing at the wedding, behind Amy and Rory). And it’s clear her parents loved her. I sort of make Aunt Sharon the bogeyman in a lot of my fanfiction, but I do think there’s a chance she was neglectful of her niece. You don’t leave a seven-year-old alone in a house at that time of night, you just don’t. (I think it’s illegal in Britain, actually.) And Amy, all through Series Five, she has this thing about being ‘clingy’- even in a near-lethal situation, she demands of the Doctor trying to save her, ‘How clingy do you think I am?’. She’s afraid of getting too attached, too clingy. That’s the legacy her childhood and her various abandonments left her, I suppose…and the Doctor fixed it. But then Amy fixed the world, bringing the Doctor back. With the sheer power of words!
She does that a lot- Amy creates things, I think she has since the beginning. Her bedroom is covered in drawings (not just of the Doctor, either- look at little Amelia’s room) and her and Rory’s flat is covered in photos and arty stuff too. Amy-as-artist isn’t explored much (well, ever, really) but it’s clear that she’s an art lover. She knows how to work emotions, does that girl- she sees what’s around her and channels it. The Doctor destroys bad things, Amy creates good things. (And Rory heals things. We’ve got a destroyer, a creator and a healer. Cool.) She recreated the whole world, via the cracks in time and her own memory- now that’s awesome.
And now she’s created River. I honestly don’t know how that works in terms of feminist theory, because it leaves me with the creepy feeling that she’s just sort of created the Doctor his perfect mate. But…well, I thought I’d bring it up anyway, that Amy’s been sort of the Maker since day one. Her memories save the day in The Eleventh Hour, too…
I know some people prefer the messed-up, reckless Amy, but me, I kinda love the badass-mother Amy as well. Cos she still is awesome, fierce and courageous- she tells her baby to be brave, she threatens to shoot both Lorna and River and she defends herself with just a toothbrush. Also, there’s this bit that no-one really picked up on (I thought those who didn’t like Amy would instantly use it to bash her with, but they didn’t) where she tells Rory, “Let the others die first.” She’s sort of half joking, but the point is- this is a woman willing to let other people die to protect her child. (Which is what most mothers would do, admittedly.) Amy Pond is a kickass role model and a kickass mother.
The marriage! I gotta bring up the marriage. It is a bit odd that Amy flirts with the Doctor on her wedding day (does Rory mind? I can’t tell. I’d mind) but then pretty much never does again. I think when she realised that Rory geniunely wasn’t sure if she preferred him or the Doctor, she decided to give it a rest. I do think the marriage changed her a bit- I think that everything leading up to it (Rory dying, returning, waiting 2000 years) turned off the fear of ‘clingyness’ and generally made all of Amy’s relationships healthier.
I don’t know where Amy will go next, but I like the idea of her, Rory, Melody/River and any future mini Ponds saving the world from a house in Leadworth. One big family defending Earth, just like The Sarah Jane Adventures. With the Doctor dropping in from time to time- I think it’ll be a shame if the Doctor/Amy relationship is over, because it really wasn’t his fault, the kidnapping- he couldn’t have prevented it. Also, Amy has got to get her baby back – if not, then the whole thing basically becomes a story of how an alien dropped into a girl’s life and fixed her childhood only to destroy her adulthood. And that’s just too sad.
So…in conclusion: Amy is awesome. I know this series hasn’t served her entirely well, but it doesn’t change her innate awesomeness. Also I think her current damsel-in-distressness will change in Series 6b and we’ll see her being more proactive. (Although she was still pretty proactive in Series 6a, sort of, it just wasn’t in her real body. She takes command of the pirate situation while the men stand around helplessly for example.) If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen her in what looks like samurai armour, fighting robots. Yay!
So I was reading about what happened to journalist Lara Logan, and on the site there’s all these tips about what women can do to avoid being raped, and one of them is ‘urinate, deficate or vomit on yourself’ if you’re being attacked. So I got to thinking, instead of telling people to vomit on themselves, couldn’t we just cut the nuts off rapists? And then I thought, okay, that’s not the way, can’t we just really really educate men about rape and the treatment of women?
I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.
How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.
I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.
It’s safe to say that I’ve snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I’ve looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I’ve shorted out. I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the “women are saints” route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn’t that tradition eventually fall apart?