Your article (Dawn of the new Eve: in praise of TV’s killer women, 11 March) in Monday’s paper you have a page 3 article ‘in praise of TV’s killer women’ which happily quotes Phoebe Waller-Bridge saying it is “refreshing and oddly empowering” to see female characters being violent. In the same edition, there is a double-page spread (Knife crime up most steeply outside London, 11 March) on the rise of knife crime in the home counties. Does no one see the painful paradox here: the one cheerfully praising violence, the other adding to the concerns around the spikes in bloodshed of the last few weeks in particular?
I know it’s just drama, but surely licensing women to (apparently) redress the balance of violence against them by perpetrating violence themselves simply exaggerates the aggressive climate – verbal on the web, actual on some streets – that makes violence, for intimidation, retribution or, much worse, fun, increasingly acceptable? We need fewer bodies – of whatever gender – appearing on slabs, not more. But then Killing Eve was, as you say, named the Guardian’s best TV show of 2018, so hopes of a gentler atmosphere ever coming to pervade our media – and the nation’s mindset – are probably bleak.
Alexandra Shepherd
Aberdeen
• The article welcoming women as the new TV killers prompts me, as a passionate, active, and long-standing feminist male, to express my anxiety about women simply stepping into the dangerous and often idiotic footprints that some men have passed down over the centuries – and counting this endorsement (of the often crass ideas of a minority of males) as being liberation and equality.
Surely to rubber stamp what a few none-too-bright top-dog males have laid down over the years, and to follow in their often woeful tracks, is contrary to the fresh, original, insightful, long-ignored and dynamic swing to women’s influences and authority that I, a dedicated feminist, beg to see. I want to hear the true and pure voice of women in all our institutions – not, however much fun it may be, merely to follow the weary anachronisms of a few self-important males, living in the past.
Dr Ian Flintoff
Oxford
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