After the furor over last year's all-female Ghostbusters, it's sad but not shocking that fanboys on Twitter whined and stomped their proverbial feet over the BBC's casting of a woman as the 13th Doctor Who, some going as far with their histrionics as to proclaim that the casting choice was ruining their childhood. But what's truly distressing is that two British papers, Mail Online and Rupert Murdoch's tabloid rag The Sun, attempted to diminish Jodie Whittaker, the actress who's been cast as Doctor Who (the first woman to play the doctor in the franchise's 54 years) with deeply misogynist, puerile photo histories of her on-screen nudity, according to The Independent.
While esteemed sources like Merriam-Webster Dictionary turned its trolling of the closed-minded ridiculousness from the Trump administration to the outcry from mostly male Doctor Who fans by tweeting, "'Doctor' has no gender in English," the staff at The Sun and Mail Online behaved like horny schoolboys running exposes on the 35-year-old Broadchurch actress's nude roles.
Both publications ran stills of Whittaker in roles that required nudity, although Mail Online attempted to bury its the sexism in its story titled "Dr. Nude" by also running shirtless photos of men who've played Doctor Who, including Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Matt Smith, according to The Guardian. But running photos of shirtless men is hardly on par woth shaming an actress for nudity on-screen.
The Sun (owned by media baron Murdoch, the man who appointed serial sexual harasser Roger Ailes to his post as the head of Fox News and kept him there despite mounting evidence that Ailes terrorized several women) attempted to discredit Whittaker, an actress with dozens of impressive roles to her credit. Treating her body of work as no different from a drunken night at Mardi Gras or a frat party, The Sun wrote, "New Doctor Who Jodie Whittaker has a sexy screen past, a trip back in time reveals. The show's 13th Lord has stripped off more than once for roles. At 24 she flashed her boobs at film legend Peter O'Toole in the 2006 movie Venus."
The Sun's writers felt as though they hadn't titillated readers enough by summing up of her entire career with their childish, salacious tone, so the story went a step further. "O'Toole's character licked her neck three times as she posed naked for a painting," they wrote. So while O'Toole is a "screen legend," Whittaker's entire character was boiled down to the number of times the legend licked her as part of the role.
If that weren't offensive enough, The Sun also ran an opinion piece from, surprise, a male journalist masquerading as so fully progressive that he believes casting a woman is so much the norm now that it's become regressive, except that it's not when one stops to consider the inherent misogyny in his argument.
"Almost as much, in fact, as the announcement of the first female Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, has been greeted with the usual tiresome cacophony of elation from an army of politically correct stampeders, eager to have their chest-beating approval heard loudest," Adam Postans wrote for The Sun. "Yes, it's a woman. In an acting role. What a game-changer."
He then made the point that the Star Wars franchise has cast a pair of women, Daisy Ridley and Felicity Jones, as leads in its most recent installments, so apparently that the quota for women in sci-fi is filled in Postans's estimation.
"It is frankly nauseating that the Beeb [BBC] should now get on their sci-fi high horse and gallop into Right-Onsville to plonk a woman sheriff in town," Postans wrote.
The piece offers nothing in terms of analysis save for a cursory yawn from Postans, who asserts that casting women in lead roles in sci-fi has been done a couple of times, so it's all good, but the lead-in to the piece tells readers everything they need to know about Postans and/or the editors at The Sun.
"ONE last desperate throw of the dice, then, by the BBC, and Doctor Who's 13th Time Lord turns out to be tragic little Danny Latimer's rape-counsellor mum, from Broadchurch," reads the teaser for Postans's story. It's tough to know if the "tragic little" refers to the child victim in the BBC's taut procedural Broadchurch (which incidentally stars previous Doctor Who Tennant), or if the editors decided to pile those adjectives on to the belittling of rape counselor as a profession and on motherhood. But one thing's for sure, whether it's Whittaker herself or the character she played in the series, The Sun's editorial staff exhibited pathological disdain for women and the work they do.
