Have you watched the new 'Sherlock' yet? You really should. It has tits! Well, not really. Maybe a bit of side tit. A little cleft. Not much worth buffering for. But I was watching it with my parents, so the effect was heightened somewhat. It felt a little like seeing Lucy Pinder enter during a Victorian funeral. I could feel my Dad's mutton-chops bristle.
Then, all of a sudden, as I was loosening my breeches a little to accommodate the excitement, the dead six year old broke through the lid of its coffin, pointed a rotting finger at her and cried 'Sexism!', and I thought I should probably put my stovepipe away.
Sexism! The elephant in the room. Actually it's an elephant in the room that some people keep trying to point out, and others keep trying to ignore, whilst still more stand up and claim that the elephant stands for strong family values and the natural order of things, whilst it stumbles around bumping into furniture. It's a divisive elephant.
The elephant is present at this funeral (at this point both metaphors have completely broken down, so just ignore them) because of what the makers of the show have done with the character Irene Adler. Simply a bit of a vamp in the source material, she appears in the modern adaptation as a dominatrix with Sapphic tendencies, taking her kit off for the first scene in an attempt to throw poor Sherlock, changing his text alert tone to an orgasmic sigh, using her measurements as the code to unlocking her personal safe, etc, etc. Some key grievances here (plus lovely spoilers);
- Her powers are sexual rather than intellectual. She's clearly smart, but no match for any of the rational men - outwitted by Sherlock and getting Moriarty to help her out with the trickier bits of her plan. She uses raw sexuality as her prime, but only real weapon.
- In the end, her plan is foiled as a direct result of her attraction to Sherlock, who, though he spends a few days moping earlier in the episode when he believes her to be dead, never succumbs to such emotional fripperies.
- The episode ends with her in a hijab, knealing down, about to be beheaded, which could almost symbolise her rightful punishment for her reckelss, immoral ways and the ultimate assertion of patriarchal authority. Then it turn out one of them is Sherlock in disguise, and her life is saved. By a man.
There are several ways you could respond to this. You could say 'It's just a bit of harmless fun.' This would be the stupid response, but if you're a Sun reader you should probably just stop here. However, if you had a least a few spare brain cells and a little typing time, you could probably mount a nicely robust defence of the episode. You could argue she was an enlightened, modern woman, using her sexuality to her advantage. You could go further; you could say that the episode was actually subversively feminist, in delivering the message that in a world dominated by patriarchal and bureaucratic authorities (notice that no other women occupy positions of dominance in the episode - it's pretty much a Sherlock/Mycroft/Moriary cock-fight) raw sexuality is the only power that she has access to, alienated and disenfranchised from any other method of asserting power. You could argue that, though she is indeed bested, one woman manages single-handedly to bring the government, and the country's best detective, to its knees. You could have a go, basically.
But I'm not here to call it either way. I'm just saying, it is possible to call it either way.
Feminism is a deeply complex ideological sphere, which involves intricate and often directly conflicting branches of thought. Which means that, at this level, the debate has progressed past the point of determining whether something is 'sexist' or not.
There's things that can be labelled sexist, but these are things that have an agenda, or that can be shown to be actively contributing to negative stereotypes and attitudes about women, or even that clearly betray prejudices on the behalf of the creators. When it gets to this level, where the sexual politics are contentious and blurred, we're cannot apply simple demarcation. It's more nuanced than that. We can look at the individual parts and try to discern what they say or imply about the role of women in society; we could even say that something contains sexist/misogynist elements. But we can't say Sherlock is sexist. As the master himself would agree, the evidence doesn't add up. Even if that bit at the end was just fucking ridiculous. It's not Doctor fucking Who, Stephen Moffat. Try harder.
This was supposed to be an anniversary post, but I got distracted. By breasts. It'll come eventually, don't fret.
