Thanks for the link! I don't read the Doctor as fundamentally paternal in the way Verhoeven does, but I do really like his later point that the problem is not that the Doctor is male, but that the show's modern incarnation has had very few female characters with complexity, agency, and a force of personality like the Doctor's. His term "simpering" is maybe a little strong, but I'm fed up with female companions who are in love with the Doctor (and part of the reason I don't like River Song is that her whole story is about being in love with the Doctor). Even Donna, one of his examples of a strong female character, clearly felt that her life without the Doctor was nothing. What I'd like to see are women characters like Sarah Jane Smith (the original, the one who left of her own free will and just laughed when she found the Doctor had accidentally left her in Scotland, not the later clingy retcon) or Liz Shaw, or Tegan, or even Jo Grant, who was intensely emotionally close to the Doctor but still very much her own person. I'd like to see companions who aren't teenage girls or extremely young women, but who've had time to build their own selves and their own lives before the Doctor turns up. Of course I'd also like multiple companions and male companions to break up the deeply heterocentric dynamic of most New Who, but that's another argument.