Fair warning, I’m pissed. This is going to be a rant-ish post.
For the life of me, I can’t understand how we ended up here. How did I go from voicing my opinion about the latest iteration of Doctor Who, to a full on conflict regarding the topic of “gender equality”.
The ridiculous non-issue issue:
In a massively misguided move, BBC decided that the next Doctor should be female. Yes, I’m a girl. Yes, I bloody well hate this decision. Why? Because this character has historically been the personification of dude quirk. He is male. He just is. In every iteration he has looked different, sounded different, been a different age.. but he has always been, without any doubts, a quirky, idiosyncratic male.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for a kick-arse female time lord, but not turning an already established very much male character, female. BBC’s decision comes through as a cheap distraction, as if they simply had no idea where to go with the series next.
But you know what is boiling my noodles right now?
The fact that voicing that opinion has so far several times resulted in someone wagging a finger at me and bringing up our modern society’s move towards “gender equality”!! I think somewhere along the line we forgot what gender equality is about, what it actually means. Gender equality has never been about genders being equal. It has always been about genders having equal rights, about everyone being able to make their own choices about their life, their education and career. It’s about the law giving every human being similar rights. It’s about fairness in our judgements. It’s about respect.
But genders themselves are obviously not supposed to be equal. Some people are female, some male, some both, some neither, some somewhere in between. Each of these categories is unique, each have their own characteristics, idiosyncrasies, aptitudes. Each have their own special something to add to the balance of our human society. What is the point of their existence if they were to be all the same? Have we forgotten that simple fact? Aren’t we, in our overflowing enthusiasm towards the topic of gender equality, suddenly being dismissive towards the identity of each category?
I guess by now you can tell that this post is not about Doctor Who. My rant is about the many examples of the term “gender equality” being misused these days. I’m getting the feeling the term is turning into an all purpose gadget people use when they can’t come up with a better arguement. We’re going straight from one imbalance to the other. There is no way we can be fair to any gender, as long as we are not acknowledging the particularities of that gender.
Let’s keep that in mind the next time we’re wagging our finger at someone and shouting gender equality at them.
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P.S.: Yes, right now there’s two versions of my blog and they both look….. under-construction I guess? It’s the same content, it’s just two different systems… long story, it’s a test run and I currently am not finding time to move things forward, so for the moment… yeah there’s two of them.
