Y’know, considering how much I usually end up rambling about media representation on here, it’s a little surprising that I haven’t written up anything coherent on Moffat or House. And part of the reason I haven’t concerns my real life, and part of it concerns my utter lack of interest in House, MD.
But most of it is that I just don’t have the energy to be angry.
For me, getting angry over this would require another emotion I just can’t work up — surprise. I’d have to have expected better, and from these two sources … I didn’t, not really.
Moffat has said problematic things, been called out on it, and backpedaled ineffectively before. I can’t say I’m happy about the quote concerning asexuality, particularly since I’ve seen it passed around uncritically on tumblr, and that it touched on a fairly ugly tendency of fiction to focus on sexual tension — heteronormative sexual tension, especially — to the detriment of other story lines. I’m certainly unhappy with the apologists trying to tell us he was right. It sucks, but it’s a pattern I’ve seen before, so I’m just irritable and tired and not going to shut up.
House … as other people have pointed out, the show has a tendency to treat everything as a symptom in a patient. It has also, as I mumbled vaguely about last night, done a horrible job handling intersex issues before, completely degendering the patient as the other characters followed in House’s wake [If anyone really needs to know, I’ll see if I can find the episode title/summary, it’s just one of those episodes I remember uncomfortably]. Neither of these are excuses, and neither of these negate any damage, but I was prepared for disappointment on that end.
It also sucks that both happened within a week of each other, and that there are apologists for both [I’ve seen the ones for Moffat, and I’m sure the ones for House are coming]. I thoroughly support the anger of anyone who does have the energy for it.
I just … there are some things that I shouldn’t have to live by “expect nothing and you’ll never be too disappointed” for. And seeing someone of my sexual orientation who’s not an alien, a serial killer, suffering from a brain tumor, or somehow not human is one of them. And I know good representations of asexuality exist, I just … can’t think of any off the top of my head.
And I’ve sat there and tried to defend my orientation from problematic fiction before. To eighteen of my peers, when the author of the work was a classmate, with no help from the professor until he asked me if I was okay after class. I’m not retelling that full story, but I’m cringing internally about how much worse it is to defend yourself from a writer with perceived legitimacy, who got this onto television. And it doesn’t matter if Moffat was talking out his ass, or if the writer from House was just trying to get us some exposure, the damage has been done and there’s even more out there we’ve got to deconstruct.
Because there’s no such thing as “just” a story.
