That title really should end with ‘…walk into a bar’, shouldn’t it?
The underlying gripe driving this post has been bubbling away for a long time. Far too long a time because I’ve been up to my perfectionist tricks again and had myself convinced that I needed to re-watch every single Amy Pond episode of Doctor Who whilst taking immaculate notes before I could possibly write it. That, however, is not the only way to do this, and in fact my gripe can be stripped back to the bare bones without losing the point.
There’s been a lot of discussion about the way Amy, Rory and the Doctor have been portrayed. I’ve seen it on credible feminist blogs, I’ve heard it said in conversation and I’ve seen it posted on fan forums. (I won’t play name and shame here since I recognise the problem is often societal and structural, even if I do anticipate something of a higher standard from generally privilege-aware people.) The common thread running through many of these discussions is a disdain for the way Amy has been written, and more specifically her portrayal as a poor damsel torn between two men in a love triangle. Which, approached from a vanilla feminist point of view, is dreadful, demeaning, patriarchal bullshit.
But I need to call this one out. None of the highly critical feminist readings I’ve encountered are anything other than blind to monogamous privilege. Not one. Maybe I need to up my Google-fu but I can’t find an Amy Pond hating blogger out there who takes a breath to so much as mention the fact that the ‘love triangle’ reading is thoroughly reliant on the assumption that the only real relationships are monogamous ones. Relationships where a woman loving two people has agency only to choose between them.
To pause and be absolutely clear here, I’m not saying that there aren’t some major problems with Amy’s characterisation from a feminist point of view. I’m not saying the Amy Pond episodes were written with an explicit commitment to portraying a poly family. I’m not even saying that a monogamous reading is invalid. But I am saying that the relationship between the members of the little family on the TARDIS has, over the past couple of seasons, often looked a hell of a lot like a poly family to me. A real, stumbling-along, first-time poly family with wibbles and insecurities and doubts and a fear that it may just be too hard, but also the structure and core of a deeply loving intimacy between more than two people. (And before anyone comments to point out that the Doctor and Amy aren’t – at least on screen – having a good, heteronormative shag…just don’t. Don’t tell me that sex is the defining factor that magically creates a ‘relationship’. Don’t assume it works that way for anyone other than you.)
So there it is, my dear ones and random-stranger ones. By all means, write loud and intelligent posts picking apart our popular entertainment. It’s a worthy use of anyone’s time to do so. But if you’re going to go to lay into the portrayals of relationships in that entertainment, take a good, hard look at your own privilege first and think about throwing in a few words pointing out that you’ve made that assumption of monogamy.
I exist. My lovers, my family, my friends exist. Oh my how they exist. But some days in spite of that, it feels like – just maybe – we don’t.
