Tory fears for male role models .. someone please call a Doctor
SPEAKING on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, MP Nick Fletcher recently made a plea on behalf of oppressed men.
In a speech delivered in stunning monotone, Tory Fletcher bemoaned the part of Doctor Who being taken by a woman and said the usurping of male “role models” was leading young boys to crime.
He said: “One only needs to look at the discussions about who will play the next James Bond – and it’s not just James Bond. In recent years we’ve seen Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Luke Skywalker, the Equalizer, all replaced by women.”
“Men are left with the Krays and Tommy Shelby. Is it any wonder that so many young men are committing crimes? Such programmes make crime look cool.”
Given the Doctor is an alien, the naughty bits lurking under the character’s dungarees were never specified so it’s a moot point.
Fletcher’s speech delivered in a Westminster Hall debate about International Men’s Day went viral but not in Obama style, rather a Boris Johnson, Peppa Pig, I am a teapot, vroom vroom kind of way.
If you haven’t seen Fletcher’s speech, do watch it but be warned, he delivers it with all the oratorical flair of a Dalek.
One feels that Fletcher’s examples let him down, given young fans of Doctor Who, Star Wars and Ghostbusters, tend not to be high risk and more interested in plot points than gender. Hence you have never heard it said, “Today’s Comic Con kids are tomorrow’s crackheads.”
Fellow Tory MPs Danny Kruger and Miriam Coates have now rallied to Fletcher’s defence, which makes one wonder if there is any sanity left in the ranks of the Conservative Party. Not to be conspiratorial but it seems plausible the Tories have been taken over by a species akin to Doctor Who’s enemy, the Cybermen, extraterrestrial cyborgs which replace human forms, rendering them evil, emotionless and really bad at public speaking.
Could there be a better explanation for Jacob Rees-Mogg?
Not that we should go down the rabbit hole of the QAnon conspiracy theory of a cabal of the powerful eating babies to imbibe their blood.
The Tories don’t do that, they just let babies drown in the English Channel to secure racists’ votes.
It is worth noting some of Fletcher’s other profundities, which are timely given we are in the midst of the United Nations’ annual campaign, 16 Days of Activism against gender-based Violence.
Fletcher said there had been too much societal focus on the idea of toxic masculinity, saying: “Yet again we have to ask ourselves, ‘Who does this help?’”
Quite, Fletcher, ignoring it worked really well for centuries, especially for women. If Fletcher took the Tardis back to the early 20th century, it’s easy to imagine him decrying the Suffragettes.
I imagine him in the vein of anti-suffrage campaigner Rowland Hunt MP who proclaimed that having women in the Commons would result in an invasion of “enormous hats”.
Nearly one in three women have been abused in their lifetime, by men most certainly infected by toxic masculinity, so forgive us Fletcher if we focus on a problem key to the murder of at least two women a week in the UK. Fletcher could have used his speech to talk about the serious issues facing young men, such as high levels of mental illness, depression and suicide rates. Instead he choose to ramble about whether a woman will be shoehorned into the role of a mysogynist government assassin.
In these 16 days of activism, let’s remember six women are killed every hour by men around the world, most by men in their own family or their partners.
So who plays Doctor Who or a Ghostbuster really isn’t important.