This Hilarious Viral Response to Anti-Feminist Backlash Shows How Sexism Really Works
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The first female lead on BBC's "Dr. Who" received a ton of backlash on social media for "ruining" the long-running U.K. based show, but a late night comedy talk show had a hilarious response. On Sunday the BBC announced that Jodie Whittaker will be the next actor to play the Doctor, a role that has been played by a male since 1963.
The actor playing the Doctor changes every few years as the character changes (it has a science fiction time travel storyline). Some men on Twitter were upset that a woman would take the iconic role.
On Monday, the Facebook page for "Samantha Bee: Full Frontal" made a congratulatory post for the new Doctor.
"Congratulations on Doctor Who, ladies, but stay vigilant," read the post. "We’ve got a lot more work to do." The post was accompanied by a picture of a handwritten "female agenda" of things to "ruin next."
The post includes things that women can ruin by creating a female James Bond, Female Father's Day, books for girls, and giving "all trucks vaginas." The list also includes items that have already been crossed off like Ghostbusters, "Starwars," and superheroes in general.
When women achieve a milestone in a male-dominated area, people accuse them of ruining it.
When the all-female remakes of the Ghostbusters movies were announced, some fans did not take it well.
"The fact there was so much controversy because we were women was surprising to me," Ghostbusters star Kristin Wiig said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2015. "Some people said some really not nice things about the fact that there were women."
The female leads in multiple Star Wars films also received similar backlash, a franchise that received previous criticism for the lack of female leads.
Beyond the genders of their favorite characters, some people also get upset about restrictions on watching female characters. When the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas wanted to have a women-only screening of the new Wonder Woman film, an iconic and rare powerful female superhero. When they put up a Facebook post about the event, men complained in the comments on Facebook.
Women have also ruined politics.
The death of the Senate's Better Care Reconciliation Act has been largely attributed to Republican women who would not vote for it. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Maine's Sen. Susan Collins, and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski publicly said they would not vote for the bill.
There were reportedly no women present in the discussions of the healthcare bill and it would have had some negative significant impacts on women's health.
Women also ruined voting in the U.S., by getting the right to vote. Black and white women received the right to vote in 1920, but black voters were subjected to hears of discriminatory practices for decades afterwards. Native American women received the right to vote in 1924. Before it became legal for women to vote, anti-suffrage pamphlets made the rounds to the American people.
"Vote no on woman suffrage," read the pamphlet published by the Jewish Women's Archive. It then listed the reasons.
"Because in some states more voting women than voting men will place the government under petticoat rule," it said. "Because it is unwise to risk the good we already have for the evil which may occur."
