Aidan Smith: Women are taking over while men become sex objects

Boys – including grown-up ones – need to realise the importance of being able to look up to women, writes Aidan Smith

What a hoot. Armando Iannucci pinged out a daft tweet about Donald Trump the other day and before he knew it Scotland’s comedy impresario seemed to have the next big satirical movie on his hands. “Film pitch,” it read. “Trump drugged and moved to a replica White House, where he carries on thinking he’s governing.” Actors rushed to say they wanted in on the flick and by the next day eight studios were jostling for position to make it.

I’d love to see that movie, but no more than I’d love to see the episodes of Doctor Who inspired by the meltdown over the Time Lord regenerating into a woman. They were collected by the writer Aaron Gillies from the below-theline website comments by readers of the newspaper which does moral outrage and marmalade-dropping best (you can probably guess which one). Gillies stuck them on to the whooshy Doctor Who opening credits and it’s a shame there isn’t a decent parody sketch show around right now which could have fun with “Time travel is for men and men only”, “Political correctness shouldn’t exist in space”, “The BBC is trying to brainwash your children” and – best of all – “Nobody wants a Tardis full of bras”.

You wonder whether the haters – all those disappointed men who’ve been devotees of Doctor Who for aeons – will be true to their threat of turning off their TVS next month when Jodie Whittaker blasts off as the 13th incarnation of the time traveller.

And you wonder how they’re feeling generally right now. Scotland’s woman footballers qualified for the World Cup shortly before the men’s team were thrashed by Belgium. One of the most male gigs in showbusiness, the breakfast show on the BBC’S most popular radio station, is a threeway, all-female contest. Also on the Beeb, a new politics programme is launched and there’s not a single man in a suit anywhere. And from Bodyguard to the new Robert the Bruce film Outlaw King, it’s the male actors who’re being objectified in scenes of gratuitous nudity.

Why, in the 55-year, galaxygalloping history of Doctor Who, were we not diverted back to Earth and shown what 2018AD might look like? Probably because no one would have believed it. Doctor Who had somehow persuaded us that sink plungers and egg whisks constituted the ultimate in terror – the Daleks – but as an impression of the near future and the reconfigurement of the sex wars, this would have been too farfetched.

Teaser clips for Whittaker’s Doctor have begun to appear. She gazes up into a magnificent domed roof where an equally magnificent chandelier pulses then shatters into a million pieces. The chandelier, it has to be said, resembles a giant breast. There is no giant brassiere suspended from the ceiling to minimise the devastation. “Whoopsy,” says Whittaker and the caption at the end of the promo reads: “It’s about time.” It’s about time for Doctor Who again and it’s about time “he” was a woman.

It’s about time that in football the floodlights were shone on the women who have battled scepticism, ridicule and – just as harmful – indifference for so long. My father – no sexist – once pointed out to his young son that girls invariably kicked the ball straightlegged, “like a Woodentop”. That was a different age – Jon Pertwee was Doctor Who, mansplaining