‘The Feed’ Has Very Helpful Advice For The “Man-Children” Complaining About Female ‘Doctor Who’
"What next, a female Wiggle?"
SBS’s The Feed is becoming the go-to place for banger video takes on the day’s biggest stories.
The latest that Mark Humphries and his team have taken on is the appointment of Jodie Whittaker as the 13th Doctor in long-running sci-fi series Doctor Who. Which is a problem for a bunch of people — unsurprisingly but depressingly — because she’s a woman.
“Today, men around the world are struggling to come to terms with a new reality. A fictional alien, that is a woman,” begins The Feed’s video, in a sombre news journo voiceover. The video is an ad for a “Doctor Who Helpline” that men can use to complain about the appointment of the first female Time Lord in the show’s history.
“How can the 12th doctor die and turn into a woman?” One man complains, leaning forlornly against a vending machiner. “He should do what happens in real life when you die: turn into another man.”
Another whines to the hotline operator, “Why can’t she have her own show about a time-travelling nurse or something?”
The video certainly captures the peculiar condition of men (and women!) on the internet whinging about female-led reboots/sequels of their beloved pop culture stalwarts. It’s the same kind of outrage as what got whipped up by the female-led Ghostbusters film, or the women-only screenings of Wonder Woman in the US.
And, while it’s funny to lampoon these over-sensitive pop culture gatekeeping goons, it’s worth pointing out that sometimes the vitriol against these kinds of (not very radical, tbh) changes to popular TV and film castings can actually get pretty out of control. Remember how the internet responded to a female ghostbuster who is also a person of colour??
And The Feed’s video, which has been viewed a whopping 2.24 million times, certainly taps into that angst. It’s a veritable parade of whining, despondent men seeking out the Doctor Who Helpline for a sob, like so many “male tears” Facebook stickers.
Best response to Doctor Who #TheFeedSBS
— Gilly Haines (@gillyreads) July 17, 2017
And it ends with a great bit of health advice for the Female Doctor detractors: “If pain persists… you know there are like 36 seasons of male episodes you can watch?”
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Matilda Dixon-Smith is Junkee’s Staff Writer. She tweets at @mdixonsmith.