13. Break Away – Big Pig 1989
Well muma told me,
When I was young,
Stand tall girl (stand
tall girl)
You’re number one (you’re number one)
(she said)
You can't be what you
wanna be
But you can change the course of your destiny
In 2010 a 1980s riddle was retested. The riddle goes something
along the lines of:
A father and son are in a car
accident. The father dies at the scene and the son is taken to hospital. At the
hospital the surgeon says ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son’. Who is
the surgeon?
Unfortunately, despite more than
20 years passing since the sexual revolution of the 60s, most of my generation –
Gen X – in the 80’s thought that the surgeon was a male. For the record, the
surgeon was ‘Oh my God! A woman!’ - the
boy’s mother.
There is a light at the end of
this tunnel though, as when the riddle was retested on school kids in 2010 most
of them had the intelligence and social awareness to realise that a woman can be
a doctor.
With this riddle in mind it is
worth noting that Doctor Who, the British cult classic that I really don’t get into,
is a female! While the Doctor has regenerated into many forms (different actors)
over its long history, it wasn’t until 2017 that the Doctor finally regenerated
into, ‘Oh my God! A woman!’.
While fan reaction to a female DoctorWho was reportedly largely positive, some were unhappy. Naysayers felt that the
role of the Doctor was only ever meant to be played by a male, and others felt
that the casting of a female in the role was nothing but an exercise in
political correctness.
Whether it was intentional or
not, the change to a female Doctor Who was seen as providing young viewers with
a positive role model. One journalist even described it as ‘the revolutionaryfeminist need right now’.
A former Doctor Who actor, Colin
Baker, stated that ‘The Doctor in all his incarnations has always been a
passionate defender of justice, equality, fairness and resisted those who seek
to dominate or destroy.’. He said this, referring to the Doctor as a male, at the
same time as saying that ‘The world we live in has a history of male
domination, of stereotyping, of resistance to change, of playing it safe.’
Hmmm. Even those purporting to
not buy into male domination, still use the male assumption in their word choices.
In a Wired article titled ‘A Woman is Helming Doctor Who and the World Has Not Collapsed’ it is argued that
Dr Who is not confined by human sexes and then goes on to give the context of
the current ‘female condition’ – so, does gender matter or not?
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