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#where’s that post that said ‘a hag and her fag’ because that’s them
isitandwonder · 7 years
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The Female Gaze
I think, in the end, it was about the women, not the gay. I think the groundbreaking new thing BBC Sherlock wanted to do was to strengthen and re-evaluate the role of women in Sherlock Holmes adaptions. But that went horribly wrong.
Mofftiss always said they wanted to right something with their adaption that everybody else did get wrong. Well, what could that have been, as Holmes has even been portrayed as a mice? We all hoped for Johnlock… as this has been a reading of the canon especially appreciated by female/queer fans, because it takes into account a somewhat different interpretation from the cis white het male reading. Sherlock Holmes is somewhat ideal as a character to captify female readers - as he retorts to thinking and talking and not to violence in the first place to solve a problem, which are classic female strategies. Holmes mostly employs his brain and not his fists - which sets him apart from most male action / crime solving heros in a way women can relate to (but remember Gatiss’s poem, advocating a more physical Holmes? Making him into a cis white male het hero…?) 
But as S4 clearly showed us that Johnlock wasn’t the goal - what else could have been the new, groundbreaking thing everybody had gotten wrong before?
Especially around TAB, but also before, Mofftiss talked excessively about the role of women in Sherlock Holmes adaptions; that the Zeitgeist when the stories had been written didn’t allow for many strong female characters. TAB was sold as a story about strong women and their empowerment - which sparked anger, because the women were portrayed as murderous furies. I’ll return to this later. The point here is that there were even panels at Sherlocked in 2016 harping on “Women in Sherlock”, emphasising their importance.
So, I think what Mofftiss felt necessary for a modern adaptation was to strengthen the role of female characters. Only, the brave thing then would have been to make Holmes and Watson both female. Which Mofftiss didn’t.
This got very long and is therefore continued under the cut.
As Mofftiss said themselves, instead they played heavily with the longstanding homoeritoc interpretation of the stories (feminising Sherlock and Watson?) - which appealed to gay and female and gay female fans. And, surpirse, surprise, they dig this; not the allegedly new / stronger female characters. But it was just a joke to the writer - whereas they were serious witht heir female characters like Moll yor Mary or Eurus. I think this misunderstanding of what the fans and the writers wanted respectively led to the train wreck of S4 (think about the Mary feature for the cinema screenings, for example, much hated around here!)
There is a great post going around about the male gaze in Sherlock. I’m sure every female person has been subjected to this sort of male gaze. Subjected, not enjoyed it. And that was one mistake. Mofftiss might not have seen what their characters were actually doing, how they were looking at each other - because they are male writers. To them, such a gaze is the normal look on the world. But not for female persons. For them, such a look is sexually charged. Mostly derogatory, or at least predatory. If a man looks at a women like Sherlock looks at John or vice versa, it’s a look of lusting after. Women / female persons see and know that, because we have to identify and interpret this look over and over in out lives to stay save. Men haven’t. For them, such looks might even be nothing special. But it is. This is one example where men and women read their reality differently. Therefore, female fans interpreted these glances in a sexual way, what Mofftiss couldn’t understand. They thought we were hypersexualising their show, because they are not accustomed to interpret such looks as the female fans are.
Therefore, they had no idea why so many (het) female fans read so much Johnlock into their show, as they just wanted to play with it a bit as a homage to Billy Wilder. This bafflement formed an unholy alliance with Mark Gatiss’s hate for fag hags, an ugly word for (het) females fantasising about gay men. He hates and mocks those women since League of Gentlemen days. He never tried to understand why women might have this kink in the first place. Gatiss seems to see those proclivities as perverted as many women see lesbian scenes in het porn. But there’s a difference.
Het porn is mostly made by and for men. The f/f scenes in it are almost always foreplay. Two women get it on, but a soon as a man enters, they go down on him. It feeds the idea that lesbian sex is just something women resort to when no man is around - otherwise they would, of course, go for the ‘real thing’ - an opinion that fuells the idea that lesbians just haven’t met the right man yet etc. In short, this opinion states that lesbian sex is not real sex. This is, of course, a derogatory view.
And totally not the same as (het)  women enjoying gay porn! First, gay male porn is taken seriously as a sex act between two men. I’ve never seen it as interpretated as foreplay for f/m action. Never have I seen two guys making out, then a female enters and they are suddenly all over her. Male gay sex actions stays just this: only guys getting it on. And women watching can do this like “Well, two (3, 4, 5 …) dicks are better than one”, but they can also feel save while doing so: No woman will be subjected to anything in male gay porn. There’s no female character to compare oneself to and be found lacking in looks etc. There’s no violence against women in these movies, no abuse, no reducing them to their sexual organs, no exploitation of female sexuality. Women can just sit back and enjoy male gay porn without feeling involved. And some women like it, because, as with the male gaze, male sexual attention towards females can be predatory, violent, looking for a conquest etc. And some (het) women just don’t like that. So they escape to gay porn, where they might even identify with the taking side.
This is not necessarily deranged fetishising of gay m/m sex. Women have a sex drive as well, get over it, Mr Gatiss. Everyone sins differently, so, please, no kinkshaming. It can be a confident expression of female sexual desires. Only, female sexuality somewhat seems to scare men.
Paired with this misreading of women enjoying gay porn as a fag hag fetish was the idea that the female fans who shipped johnlock are mostly teenage girls/virgins - and this seems apparently not the target group those writers want to be admired by. But honestly - can a 14-year old virgin write something like The Cold Song? A Cure For Boredom? PiaLR? That’s not to say that young girls shouldn’t write fanfic - on the contrary, they should, to explore their sexual identity and proclivities in a save space. But I’m quite sure that most of this fandom’s best writers are the other side of 20, 30 and even 40 or 50. Because it needs experience to write really engaging sex scenes. Experiences I hope 14 year old girls simply don’t have yet. So, here’s another misunderstanding / misconception the writers have about this fandom (and they are not very eager to correct it, despite Moffat’s somewhat encouraging words towards fanfic writers. In the end, they can’ tget over themselves, it seems).
But somehow mature, sexually confident, intelligent women seem to frighten Mofftiss, despite their idea of  giving women more room in a Sherlock adaptation. Why? Because mature, confident, feminist women KNOW that two men simply can’t strengthen and enhance female characters like they deserve it. Mofftiss knew that they couldn’t live up to feminist expectations, so they dismissed it outright, while even gaslighting female fans by ‘Look, we gave you great female characters, stop complaining!’ (And don’t get involved with  this perverse thing called johnlock either).
Look at how Mofftiss have done this:
Molly is a het woman, constantly humiliated by Sherlock, yet still pining for him. She was the first new character invented by Mofftiss for their show. But not as a strong character, only as a female character. Even when she finally emancipates herself, she chooses a boyfriend ridiculously looking like Sherlock. That at least earns her a condescending kiss from the object of her desire. Bah! And when under stress, because Sherlock is shooting up and her engagement is over, she is only allowed to turn to the male form of stress relieve - violence. She slaps Sherlock! Why does she not talk to him, offer help, involve their friends? Because that would be the female approach, but that is unfathomable to the male writers.
Same with Irene (in canon a  confident artist who wants to get married, not in the slightest interested in Holmes). In the BBC version, she becomes a lesbian (see above re: the value of lesbian sexuality) = has not yet met the right man (Sherlock). This is awful, becoming straight for Sherlock! I don’t mind the naked scene in her house so much, though. It’s not overtly sexualised, but can be read as self-confident and sexually assured. But I hate the wardrobe scene. Lara Pulver looks great in that green negligee and suspenders - but why was this scene necessary if not to charge the show hetero sexuall?. In the DVD comments, Mofftiss joke around that loads of people (men) suddenly hung around the set while this scene was filmed - to gaze at Lara Pulver in underwear. That is not funny, that is sexism! That is not a joke. She was displayed as a sexual object - not for herself or character growth, but for the pleasure of others. She was reduced to a sexual object for the male gaze, despite her character being a self-professed lesbian. Arghhh!
Mrs Hudson, on the other hand, is the devoted mother hen - another cliche. Only, in S4, she gets warped - again, like a man would want it, by having her drive an Aston Martin (cars=dicks). But it’s not even hers - she got it from her husband. She didn’t run a cartel, she was just typing… Giving her a fast car is not empowerment! Empowerment would have been to tell her tenants to brew their own tea!
Or look at Sally Donovan - the only WoC on the show apart from Hooper, who’s Asian (why are there no muslim women, disabled women etc on the show btw? Why is the female empowerment almost exclusively done via white women?): She calls Sherlock a freak, has an affair with a married man, who is an idiot, is sexually insulted by Sherlock for that in front of her collegues, and, in the end, is presented as a traitor, engaging in Sherlock’s downfall. Whereas Anderson is kind of redeemed later in MHR and TEH - nothing like this is waiting for Sally.
Or look at all of John’s girlfriends! Presented as jealous of Sherlock, helpless (Sarah), frustrated (Jeanette), some described as ugly (the one with the nose, the one with the spots). All of them are left by John for Sherlock the minute Sherlock asks him - now, imagine being one of those women. Would you like that? John treats those women like shit, not with respect.
I’m not going into the Mary story here, enough has been said about her. But just imagine for a moment being married to a closeted gay/bi man, secretly pining for his best friend… John treated Mary not much differently as Sherlock treated Janine.
Speaking of Janine! She’s befriended by Mary to get to Magnussen, courted by Sherlock for the same purpose, abused by her employer… only to get dropped by her fiance and dragged by the yellow press. The last thing is presented as her revenge - but at what cost? Picturing her as some kind of tabloid whore, as Sherlock says. What kind of treatment for a female character is this? Why again reduce her to a sex object?
Even Lady Smallwood is not allowed to be a strong independent woman - she is shown chatting up Mycroft!
Or Vivian Norbury! The old, lonely cat lady, still clinging to her dead husband.
And Eurus? Both Holmes brothers can channel their intelligence and use it for something good - but not the sister. No, as any female person, she just wants male attention and goes mad because she’s just too smart for her own good… seriously?!
I could go on and on… but I think you get the message. Mofftiss wrote female characters into the show and thought that would be enough to modernise the gender issue in the Holmes’s stories. But Mofftiss are not able to write strong, empowering female characters because they are men. They live in a men’s world (remember Hooper, who had to become a man to be successful?). That means, for example, that they reduce women to their sexuality, and advocate they resolve problems with violence, like the women in TAB. Think about it… why did they not just leave their husbands and settle somewhere in the country, together, supporting themselves with needlework? Well, that doesn’t sound very exciting, does it, but it was the female way back in Victorian times. You could leave your husband and seperate. Or you could poison him - but not shoot or stab him. 
There’s a sad truth to poison being a woman’s weapon - because usually, a man is stronger in hands on combat. Therefore, a man who beats his wife to death is usually just sentenced for manslaughter - it happened at the spur of the moment, no killing intended. But a woman who wants to get rid of her abuser has to do this when he sleeps, for example, or via poison or drugs, to be able to overpower him. This is mostly seen as cunning by the courts, which is a feature proving murder. A woman freeing herself from an abuser is seen as guilty of premeditation (= another feature of murder), whereas a man who beats his wife over many years unitl she dies from his abuse is exculpated exactly by this prolonged abuse, because he couldn’t expect the wife to die from his violence - as she lived through it for many years.
Sorry, but this is where the male gaze leads us - to a world made up and after male standards. But applying those standards to women is not empowering - it is still subjecting them to the male prerogative.
And many feminist fans see this (now) and ask why this happened. They criticise the male writers for this. Who kind of pout now, feeling perhaps misunderstood, as they wanted to give us strong female characters in a modern version on Sherlock Holmes and believed they succeeded with Eurus, Molly and Mary, even giving her the last word. And they don’t understand why we we don’t like it. Instead, all we wanted seems to have been gay porn! (Honestly, if we want to see dudes fuck, we know exactly where we can get that, Mofftiss). 
They can’t come around to our view of what is and has been going on. They can’t see us the way we are, because they have a totally different perspective and no inclination to change that. They think our criticism is juvenile, that we are ungrateful - as if the very idea of a largely (queer) female fanbase being grateful towards male showrunners isn’t fucked up to the extreme!
As I said at the beginning - if they wanted a Sherlock Holmes adaption that empowers women - make Holmes and Watson female. If you don’t want to go there - leave them as they are, together. No women are needed - especially not like Mofftiss wrote them. Explore Holmes and Watson’s friendship, and see where it takes you… Johnlock didn’t come out of nowhere. Holmes isn’t the typical 19th century male - he’s moody, thin, pale, likes music… all then and now characteristics associated with feminity. Perhaps that’s why he has such a broad, devoted female fanbase? Perhaps it would be empowering to allow us our reading and make it canon?
The first step, if you want to give women an empowering modern Sherlock Holmes adaption, is: Take the female fans seriously!
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A NIGHT TO TRANSGENDER - PART I
I just started to wake when the trained rolled into the Glasgow Central Station. My AirBNB host Kaska, wanted meet me at the station just so that she was sure I wouldn’t get lost. Kaska was in her early thirties, Scottish by way of Polish descent and she lived in England for almost twenty years, making her accent more English than Scottish. She was also an artist an had a daughter of fourteen who lived outside the city with her family. Immediately after meeting her, I got a sense of mystery; she smoked inccessantly, her eyes would dart back and forth, she walk in a hurried pace, and it always seemed like she was looking over her shoulder. Despite this outlaw demeanour, I could not of predicted the events of this night.
After grabbing a quick coffee she said, “Let’s go drop off your stuff and then we’ll meet my friends.” The reason I chose to stay with her is because she also has a studio to paint in and she was going to introduce me to some of her friends in the Glasgow art scene. These weren’t the those friends. We headed over to an area near the university called Ashton Lane where her friends were already imbibing enough alcohol to put William Wallace on his knees. She looked at me and said, “Just so you know…I’m a bit of a fag hag - you’re good right? If you’re not careful, you’ll be gay by the end of this trip.” They was a warning in her voice that I could tell was less about the gay and more about the uncertainty of where this weekend could go. We approached and I met them one by one. There was Gaven, the gentle and soft spoken pudgy red-head, Drew -the working class boy in a tweed cap, Guillaume - the brooding french-men who never looked up from his cigarette; both Jezebel and Sharene, the two English transgendered women with their lived-in faces, heavy makeup and greasy hair, and then finally…Liam - their outspoken Scottish leader who liked to talk politics and rub his boyfriend Guillaume’s chest. I felt like I was on the set of a gay Trainspotting between the maniacal laughter, shouting, sexual inneundo, drunken rants, and making out. Most of this group was in their twenties aside from Jezebel who was in her late thirties and Sharene who was 59.
Despite their Ruffian nature, they were quite nice to me. They all introduced themselves between rolling cigarettes and murmuring unintelligible Scottish phrases. The two English transgenders took an immediately liking to me and chatted me up about everything from the steakhouse in San Francisco that they loved to my thoughts on Donald Trump. We quickly headed to the park where they wanted to continue drinking. It was a bright and sunny day. Jezebel says, “You must of brought the weather with you, their are only three days like this in the year”. As we lay in the sun at the park, it felt good. It was a friendly atmosphere and they asked me questions about myself and America. I even drank my first Iron-Bru as they cheered me on (Scotland’s staple soda and cultural past time). Sharene said, “ I like you Rene, you’ve got nice teeth, but not your skin color.” Kaska then says, “Don’t be racist!”. I just responded with, “I like your skin tone Sharene, it reminds me of raw chicken.” Everyone laughed including Sharene. Felt like I had passed my first prison challenge. I needed to go pee so Sharene and Jezebel decided that they would go with me. It was a really chin-scratcher to see which bathroom they went into. I had no idea about the laws here or how “transitioned” they were. Girls toilet it was. As we went back, the climate both above and in the conversations had changed. Even in the LGBT community, the English and Scottish divide is still explosive. Liam and Sharene went at it debating over the Brexit and general state of affairs between the English and Scots. Kaska didn’t bat an eyelash. I could tell this was going to go on for awhile and so I left to explore the city, telling Kaska I would meet them back at her place. She said, “ Cool, don’t forget we are going to club Hot Mess tonight.” Hot what?“ I thought as I was walking away.
[I wandered around seeing sights and having good food, but that can wait for another post. No detours on this story]
I returned to Kaska’s place hoping she would forget about the whole club thing and we could get some art in. As I walked passed the window, I could see this wasn’t the case; her and Jezebel were on the floor still drinking and Kaska was doing Jezebel’s makeup. Jezebel was a man by birth, and kind of looked like a mix between the lead singer of Motley Crue (today) and the toothy Gary Busey. She spoke in that stumbling mumbling British way, where she laughed in between little quips, almost talking to herself. When it was intelligable, it was quite funny. I kept referring to her as him throughout this whole escapade and even now. They were both happy to see me and tried to remember what the plans were for the night. Kaska said, "Right, we’re doing this gay club, I’m going to go get ready.” So now it was just me and Jezebel in the room alone and we started chatting. Keep in mind she was undressing right in front of me as Kaska brought her out clothes to wear. We were just two dudes in a room and one was taking his bra off. I started making conversation to distract myself. “So what do you do for work Jezebel?” (implants out now), “ Oh I’m an escort….and I do porn sometimes. You ever seen Tranny Nun Bangers?"she asks."No”, I replied with calm like I could of maybe stumbled on to it. “Right, well you should, it’s brilliant, I’m in that one.” Is Sharene in that line of work too?“ I replied. "God no, she’s a tranny-granny, she’d hurt her bloody back.” Jezebel said. I dunno know at this point if my face was reflecting what I was feeling. I imagined to Jezebel it looked like I was smelling onions.
Kaska came back in room and said, “Ok darlings, let’s go.” I wanted to say no but I could tell she had really wanted me to go and I somehow felt it was rude not to. She sweetened it up with “My studio is next door so we can check that out too”. Ok, maybe this won’t be bad, pop my head into the club and then to the studio for some art. Kaska finsihed her last cigarette and completed Jezebel’s hair. Right before we were about to leave, Jezebel says (with one eye already shutting), “OK, now I can’t party too hard, I have an electronics class in the morning.” “ Electronics class…I thought you were an escort?” I questioned. “That’s my passion, I’m an electrical engineer by trade”. Well ain’t that a page-turning resume. We headed off in a taxi. Now, I am no expert in clubs, straight or otherwise; I can’t stand them and I couldn’t dance even if someone was shooting bullets at my feet, but this club was awful, uninspired, and sad. Even Jezebel was like, “These fags are rubbish, shall we leave?”. Kaska was nowhere to be seen and so I took it as an opprtunity to get out of there and get some fresh air. Outside was a stereotype in Scottish debauchery. This was the shallow end of the gene pool and they looked at me like I was a Mexican Chinchilla, wanting to feel the painted man’s exotic hair. A man was rubbing me head and I was ready to get out of there, but I had no keys to the place. Just then, Kaska exits the club with Jezebel and says, “Let’s go back home and get pizza.”
On our way home, I was done. I thought I’ll just pull the old Irish (Scottish) exit; I couldn’t do another night of this, my clothes reeked of cigarettes and I had no idea when or where I would sleep. The internet was non existant, I wasn’t even sure Kaska owned this place - it was glorified squatting. Kaska said I was the first she had hosted and didn’t even know if she would have a place by the time I arrived. “What about the damn studio” I thought? We went home and Kaska said “Go ahead and take my bed, Jezebel and I will sleep out here, we’ll be drinking”. I heard them laughing into the night. At one point, I woke up to go pee and saw the two of them spooning on the floor smiling ear to ear. “Don’t know If I’ll ever sleep that well” I thought. OK, tomorrow, this is it. I’m going to make my own Brexit from this place and this situation.
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