Oh, gentle readers, do let’s discuss Clara the Impossible Girl and the thrilling or perhap insipid conclusion of the seventh season, which just aired on televisions ‘round the world. We were promised a resolution to the Mystery that is Clara, and we certainly got it, and, shocker, it went along the same lines as all of Moffat’s usual misogynist garbage, as Ted Kissell pointed out in his withering review at The Atlantic.

We’ve been taunted throughout the season by visions of a woman who seems to slip back and forth through the Doctor’s timestream, someone who flits over and over again onto the scene just in time, and someone who dies over and over again, the words “run, you clever boy, and remember me” on her lips. She’s tormented the Doctor, who’s spent the entire season grappling with an understanding of who she is while Clara insists that she’s simply an ordinary girl.

Moffat has been criticised before for his limited way of writing female characters and his tendency to ultimately destroy them, making their entire existence about the Doctor; River Song was perhaps the most marked example, but he ruined Amy Pond, and let us not forget What Happened to Donna. So watching Clara’s story unfold—what story there was to unfold, at any rate, in a season that felt more like watching the Doctor on a hamster wheel—was really more like waiting for the other shoe to drop. We knew it was coming, we just didn’t know when.

And on Saturday night, Clara’s moment arrived at last: yet another chance to sacrifice herself that the Doctor might go on, and a definitive explanation for her character’s seemingly supernatural tendency to show up whenever and wherever. Clara, it turns out, is bound up within the Doctor’s timestream after throwing herself into it to undo the sabotage done by the Great Intelligence (note to Time Lords: perhaps you should secure your blobs of timey-wimey lightness better in the future so as to avoid this sort of thing). Which means she’s sentenced to die over and over again for the greater good.

This puts her in the same sort of company as the rest of the Doctor’s female companions, women who are doomed to constantly live in the shadow of the Doctor, and to live effectively for the Doctor. Some viewers seem determined to spin Clara’s ‘choice’ as one made independently, one that shows strength, conviction, and determination, but it’s anything but. She’s forced into a corner by the dawning reality that she’s supposed to be responsible for the Doctor and must be willing to sacrifice herself, tearing her very being into fragments, so that he might go on.

Madame Vastra points out that without the Doctor, the universe would be a much colder, darker place, that he’s been responsible for saving millions and likely billions of lives. Implication: everyone in the Doctor’s party should be prepared to give up everything for him, as he’s a big important man and the sacrifices of individuals are insignificant in the face of that. Thus, there’s no real surprise when Clara ‘selflessly’ plunges into the Doctor’s timestream even though she knows what the consequences will be—in truth, it’s a preordained outcome, as she herself points out, because she’s already done it.

Her entire life is about the Doctor. And we’re supposed to view this as some sort of rah-rah female empowerment storyline somehow? I think not. Not with Moffat’s history, and not with the way it’s played. This is just another case of a woman throwing herself off a cliff for the Doctor, casting aside her own value as an individual human being even though the Doctor’s patronised her, lied to her, and cheated her of an opportunity to truly live.

The Doctor takes advantage of an effective reset button to keep Clara from the truth in ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS,’ for example, skipping back in time to avoid the ramifications of an uncomfortable and complicated conversation where he tries to figure out who Clara is and how she accomplishes the impossible. He also, of course, evades some vicious salvagers in the process, but at the same time, he doesn’t tell Clara what happened and seems to have no interest in volunteering information to her.

On the contrary, he spends a lot of time acting as though he’s much more capable and important than she is, dismissing her despite the fact that she’s demonstrated her grit on a number of occasions (let’s face it, she’s died many more times than the Doctor has, and without the benefit of regeneration). It’s ‘easy mode’ on the TARDIS for her, and don’t ask questions, girl, because your job is simply to be a companion awed by the Doctor’s presence.

This is a show where a nearly 30-year-old woman is still a girl, and where women are sacrificial cannonfodder provided to feed the story and make the world safer for the Doctor. When are we going to get a companion who truly lives and leaves on her own terms? The closest we’ve gotten is Martha, except that she, like so many other of his female companions, is hopelessly in love with him and that becomes the catalyst for her departure: hardly the sign of an independent woman making choices for herself, but rather the mark of yet another pulled under the Doctor’s spell.

Moffat didn’t just insult women this season: he also made dull television, and that’s simply unforgivable. In a sluggish season that went effectively nowhere, none of his characters developed, nothing changed, and above all, nothing showed us that Moffat has rethought his views on women in society.

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So I told my editor I was going to confront him. Something big, and rude, and embarrassing. I’d send him an e-mail – maybe I’d just quote a bunch of rape statistics, and ask him to rate how funny they were on a scale of 1 to 10 – and I’d wait to see if he responded.

I had a reason for being invested in his response. Last summer, the entire Internet had been set aflame by comedian Daniel Tosh essentially threatening a female audience member with rape for objecting to his rape jokes. She had a blog; she used the blog to relate what he’d said; Daniel Tosh, who had an entire show about the goddamn Internet, was apparently shocked and mortally wounded that someone in his audience had a blog.

Which would have been obnoxious enough on its own, without the stand-up comedians of the world rallying around Tosh. And yet, rally they did: Patton Oswalt referred to the woman as “some idiotic blogger,” and lamented that Tosh had been made to apologize to the woman he’d wished would be “raped by like two guys.” Dane Cook helpfully informed those who were offended by Tosh that “it’s best for everyone if you just kill yourself.” (After you get raped by the two guys, I guess. It’s a remarkably rough night Cook and Tosh had planned for that woman.) Even the normally reasonable and intelligent Louis C.K. got sucked into defending Tosh’s comments – although, thankfully, he didn’t go the route of Doug Stanhope, who hashtagged his Tweet about the controversy, simply, #FuckThatPig.

He was, yes, referring to the woman that Tosh had threatened. Because this is how it goes, between female comedy fans – especially feminists – and male stand-up comics. Let’s be entirely clear here: These are grown men who get paid money to stand in front of an audience and say, quite literally, whatever they want, as long as they think it’s funny. And yet when women talk back, especially if it’s not flattering, we’re “idiots,” pigs, better off raped, or better off dead. These guys grow up, go into entertainment, and then react to the presence of an audience as if it’s a form of armed robbery. But female comedy fans exist. We go to shows. In the age of social media, our microphones can be as big as any comic’s, or bigger. Why shouldn’t they hear what we have to say? More to the point: Why do they still act as if it’s avoidable?

Because they do. One year and approximately seventy thousand blog posts later, people were still hiring Sam Morrill. Because, you know. What could possibly go wrong?

So, I wrote to my editor, I was going to do it differently. I was going to give him no possible chance to claim that he’d been ambushed, or stabbed in the back. I was going to find him. I was going to tell him exactly who I was – “My name’s Sady Doyle. I’m a feminist journalist and pop culture critic, and I attended your show on April 13,” is how I opened my first e-mail — and I was going to tell him that I planned to write about his show. I was going to do this whole thing as fairly as possible. While still, you know, planning to write an entire piece specifically for the fun of humiliating the guy in public.

He wrote back.

Lets do it, Sady! Shoot me the questions. Thanks for thinking of me.

Best,
Sam

It was at this point that the story changed. He’d responded. In fact, he’d responded almost right away. There was a chance I could actually talk to the guy. And so I started to have doubts about my initial premise. A list of rape stats and an invitation to rate them on the scale of humor: I could do that. I could send that. I could print that. It would have been splashy, and it would have made my point, and – moreover – I was absolutely certain that he would be unable to respond to it. He would look like a coward. I would look like a hero.

But it would have been a lie. It would have been worse than that: It would have been shitty journalism. I could game the system, pre-determine the outcome, give Sam Morrill something he absolutely couldn’t respond to without looking like an asshole, and absolutely couldn’t ignore without looking weak, and then reveal to my readers – as if it were a surprise – that I’d managed to make the guy look bad. I would have looked brave to the outside world, while knowing deep down that I’d risked absolutely nothing. In point of fact, I would have been no better than a stand-up comic bullying an audience member for not laughing at his jokes. To do this thing right – to do it fair – I had to come to the table with the presumption of good faith. I didn’t have to pitch the guy softballs. But I had to give Sam Morrill an honest chance to write back.

So I sat down. And I wrote the nicest e-mail I could manage.

Hi Sam –

Thanks for responding so quickly! And I’m sorry that I didn’t do the same. The fact is, I have one main question, and it is: What’s with all the rape jokes?

 

I know the relationship between feminists and stand-up comics can be notably contentious on the rape joke issue. (Think Tosh.) And to be blunt, I sent you the e-mail because your set made me really mad. That’s probably what you were going for. But instead of firing shots at each other from the safety and comfort of our personal Twitters, maybe it’s worthwhile to talk about it. This conversation tends to get stuck in one repeating pattern: Feminists say rape jokes are offensive, comics say they have the right to offend people, and we just keep repeating the same lines from that point forward. So, even though I would expect you won’t like some of these questions, maybe this is an opportunity to open a dialogue.

 

One in five women reports being sexually assaulted. For women of color, that number is much higher; one study says that over 50% of young black women are sexually assaulted. (One of your jokes: “I’m attracted to black women. I had sex with one once. The whole time I was fucking her, she kept using the n-word. Yeah, the whole time, she was yelling NO!”) On your Twitter, you warned people that they shouldn’t attend one particular set of yours if they’d recently had a miscarriage or been raped. So, like: Are you comfortable excluding that big a chunk of the population from your set? I always wonder this, about comedians who tell a lot of rape jokes. You presumably know that it happens. Do you know that it happens this often? Is it a realistic possibility, in your mind, that not just one but several of the women in your audience have experienced it?

 

It’s not just that. An even higher percentage of the female population, 1 in 4, reports having been assaulted by a partner. 30% of all murdered women are murdered by their partners. To be blunt: You make jokes about hitting women. You also make quite a few jokes about killing them. One extended bit was about getting someone to hit a girl who didn’t want you bothering her friend, because you “couldn’t” yourself. On your Twitter (paraphrasing here): “I would never hit a woman. Or push one. Out of the way of a moving bus.” The basic punchline in your set was, the girl got hit, and you caused it. The punchline in your Tweet is that a woman gets killed. The punchline in your extended series of Tweets about Pistorius: Girl gets killed.

But in your Tweet about the Boston Marathon, you write that “this violence is infuriating.” What’s the difference between the violence perpetrated at the Boston Marathon and the violence that will affect about one-quarter of all women during their lifetimes, and account for no small number of deaths? That’s not a set-up for a joke. I just want to know. Why is only one of those infuriating?

 

Finally, Sam: The two rape jokes I counted in your set weren’t just about the concept of rape. They were jokes in which the punchline was that you raped a woman. (That didn’t happen with any of the other comics on stage, even though I remember at least one other joke about domestic violence, and the host did a long riff about rape.) And then a story in which the punchline was that you indirectly assaulted a woman. Given these numbers, what’s the benefit of presenting yourself to an audience — which is likely to contain some women, and some assault victims — as someone with an interest in raping and hitting women? Even as a joke? Where’s your pay-off there?

 

And I want to stress: I actually do want to hear what you have to say here. People keep having the same fight, and nothing changes on either side. Maybe this is a chance to actually have a conversation. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

S.

To date, we have received no response from Sam Morril.

Photo by visual.dichotomy , licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 license.

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This week one site spread like wildfire over the Australian parts of the internet – http://australianchristianlobby.org/. Unfortunately for notorious anti-gay group Australian Christian Lobby, not every website domain linked to their name delivers precisely what is promised.  The above website was created by another ACL group – the Australian Cat Ladies, who promise a pro-marriage equality platform of “family values, hard work, and lots of tummy rubs.” As with everything on the internet, you know things are getting serious when cats are involved.

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