An Open Letter To Mary Speakman, Headteacher At Altrincham Grammar School For Girls

Dear Mrs Speakman,

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I recently read in The Guardian about the efforts of one of your students to set up a Feminist Society within your school, and about the backlash she and her fellow students have suffered as a result of it. Almost as disheartening as the rampant misogyny of their detractors, however, was the response of the school itself, which was to require their work to be taken down from the internet.

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In your words (my emphasis), “We are committed to protecting the safety and welfare of our students, which extends to their safety online… As such, we will take steps to recommend students remove words or images that they place online that could compromise their safety or that of other students at the school.”

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Mrs Speakman, not only is this contradictory – you start out by saying that the school is committed to protecting its students, then place the onus of protection on the students themselves – it is perilously close to victim-blaming. Your girls have been viciously attacked for standing up for their rights, and your response has been to suggest that, by making a simple, courteous plea for equality, they have endangered themselves. The fact that this endangerment is itself the problem has apparently passed you by: in your rush to protect your students, you have done the opposite, effectively sanctioning the violence being directed against them by saying that, to all intents and purposes, they brought it on themselves.

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You have unambiguously told your students that only silence can protect them; that if they wish to be safe, then they should neither draw attention to themselves nor advocate for their rights. By withdrawing the school’s support, you have given power to their assailants and effectively punished the girls for being unquiet victims. You have taken away their voice, and you have told them it’s for their own good.

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Mrs Speakman, I am generally opposed to same-sex educational institutions. Whatever benefits can be derived by separating and teaching children by gender in our highly gender-sensitive society is, I feel, subsumed beneath the inescapable weight of the fact that real life is coed. But despite the learning environment you provide for them, your girls are acutely aware of this reality: in fact, they are actively dealing with its consequences, and thanks to you, they are doing so alone. Perhaps you feel that, as the threats being made against them are coming from outside Altrincham, the issue is out of your hands. Perhaps you feel you have no control over what outsiders say to your students, and are therefore simply trying to engage in damage control.

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But I wonder, Mrs Speakman – would your attitude still be the same if Altrincham were a coed school: if the tirade of racist, sexist, misogynist abuse being levelled at your girls was coming from their male classmates – boys whose actions did fall within your bailiwick? Would your reaction to that scenario have been the same? Knowing that you would be forced to face the consequences of doing so on a daily basis, would you still have told the girls that the price of their safety was silence, and that the best response to abuse at the hands of their male peers was never to speak out against it? I dearly hope not; but the point, Mrs Speakman, is that these boys are still learning from your actions. They might not be your students, but they are students of the world, and when they see you withdrawing support from your girls, they learn that sexism is correct: that the girls who made a fuss, rather than the boys who attacked them, are the ones at fault, and that they should be castigated accordingly.

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As well as emailing the school, I’m making this letter public – partly to increase the chances of your seeing it, but mostly because this is an issue I’m passionate about. You have made a bad decision, and in so doing have left your girls to deal with sexist vitriol in isolation. But it is not too late to change things. You can issue an apology; you can reaffirm your support. You can give them the confidence they need to continue advocating for their rights, not only while they’re at school, but once they’ve left its walls. Because while you might think that silence equals safety while they’re under your care, in an all-female environment, that won’t be true forever – if, indeed, it was ever true at all. One day soon, your girls will graduate, but until then, you have a choice: to support them in defending themselves, or to tell them to sit in silence.

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I hope you make the right one.

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Yours sincerely,

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Foz Meadows

Doctor Who: Season 6

Warning: spoilers! 

There’s several things I’ve been wanting to blog about these past few days, but in light of just having watched the first two episodes of Season 6 of Doctor Who, I’m going to put them on hold in favour of performing a narrative vivisection. It’s been a while now since Season 5: long enough that many of the small, crucial details hinting at Steven Moffat’s arc for Matt Smith’s Doctor have doubtless slipped my mind. What I do recall, however, is that the final episodes didn’t make a lot of sense to me at the time. Or, wait: let me rephrase. I don’t watch Doctor Who because it makes sense, and I’m fairly sure that’s the case for most viewers. I mean, when your basic premise is a species of open-door, case by case worldbuilding with full retconning options and an ad-hoc magic system masquerading as science, continuity and inherent logic are always going to be, to paraphrase one Shepherd Book, a mite fuzzy.

I say that with love, of course. After all, if you want to watch a witty Brit poncing about the multiverse in a police box, Doctor Who is pretty much your only option. But there’s a difference between nonsensical plots and plots which literally make no sense, and while I appreciate that Moffat is very much a creature of the long game, Day of the Moon comes perilously close to falling into the latter category.

But first: The Impossible Astronaut. Good premise, nice creepifying vibes, though I could’ve done without the prolonged image of Amy sobbing over the Doctor’s body. Also – and yes, I do realise that it represents a significant portion of the setup for Season 6 – I wasn’t keen on using his eventual death as a plot device. For one thing, it’s an annoying way to start an episode: the Doctor was always going to reappear again via some miraculous means, and in the interim, we waste time watching the characters grieve for a loss we already know isn’t final. For another, and more importantly, it’s a problematic means of garnering emotional investment in the series. If the death we’ve seen is truly an irreversible event, then Matt Smith must be the last Doctor – which, yes, is possible, but given the show’s popularity and the sheer length of its reign, I just can’t see that fact being flagged with such canonical finality so early in his tenure. Which means it’s probably going to be reversed at some point, or prolonged, or altered, or changed, or whathaveyou, and while I’m certainly interested in seeing how that happens (probable answer: Timelord magic!), I can’t feel any uncertainty about the fact that it will happen. Which makes it something of an empty threat, particularly as it’s been left to hang over the whole season.

Unless the death does stand and the show really is slated to end with Matt Smith. In which case: well played, Mr Moffat! Well played.

Monster-wise, the Silence were genuinely freaky, and a very well-seeded threat from Season 5, though as has been pointed out elsewhere, Day of the Moon was rather rough and ready when it came to how their powers worked. It’s a fridge logic problem, the sort of thing that only niggles in retrospect without really altering the fabric of the narrative: an omission of some facts and a blurring of others, rather than an outright contradiction. What I’m less forgiving about is the idea that an alien species, capable of space travel, who have demonstrably menaced multiple worlds and who, by River Song’s reckoning, have access to at least eight different types of alien technology while on Earth, had to engineer the moon landing because they needed someone to invent the space suit. Because, seriously? No. Even if they’re incapable of creating things on their own, they still have access to alien technology. I’m pretty sure there are alien space suits, you guys!

And while we’re on the subject of continuity being carried over from Season 5: haven’t we already established that there are colonies of lizard people living under the Earth? You know – another technologically advanced race that’s been sharing the planet with humankind since the dawn of history? Possibly I’m just being picky, but seeing as how the Silence also live in a network of tunnels running beneath the surface of the entire planet, it feels kind of odd to think that the two have never encountered one another. Oh, and if the Silence really are responsible for all those strange jitters people feel in empty places, the sensation of being watched – all that stuff – then can we assume that they’ve been working in tandem with the Vashta Nerada? All right, maybe that last one’s a stretch, but the point is, for a race of villains whose coming has been foreshadowed for some time now, the Silence feel underdeveloped to me. Yes, they’re frightening, but how do they fit into the wider Whoniverse as a species? (And why do they look curiously like knock-off copies of Joss Whedon’s Gentlemen?)

The other problem is Amy’s pregnancy-that-isn’t, though maybe that’s only a problem for me, given my stated position on Magical Pregnancies of any kind. Right now, it looks like Amy’s eventual daughter will kill the Doctor (somehow), steal his regenerative powers (somehow) and be reared in an abandoned orphanage in 1969 (somehow) by a creepy caretaker under alien control. With a photo of Amy on her dresser (somehow). Though when she does see Amy face to face, she doesn’t recognise her (somehow). Also, she’s not quite human (the TARDIS effect?) and super strong – strong enough to rip her way out of the space suit (somehow). Except, if she could do that, then why didn’t she do it ages ago? And how, if she is Amy’s daughter, was she stolen away? I’m struggling with all these things. I know it’s the long game, or rather, I really, really hope that it’s the long game, and the only reason it doesn’t make sense is because there’s more to come. But so far, it doesn’t feel like it.

That being said, I love River Song, I love theorising about the possible arcs and reveals of awesome TV shows (theory: River is Amy and Rory’s daughter!) and because I embrace the senselessness, I love Doctor Who even when it appears to make no sense, if only because Matt Smith is so magnificently daft. So despite my doubts and wonderings: bring it on!