Walter Phippeny refers us to this YouTube video from Trekspertise to kickstart a discussion about feminism in Star Trek. I haven’t watched the video yet, but dig in.
Walter Phippeny refers us to this YouTube video from Trekspertise to kickstart a discussion about feminism in Star…
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8 responses to “Walter Phippeny refers us to this YouTube video from Trekspertise to kickstart a discussion about feminism in Star…”
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Oh, this won”t be controversial at all! For my part, I promise no flamage and will attempt to keep all my posts in good faith.
There should be some kind of debate/discussion pledge website that you can link to where it you publicly announce that you know what logical fallacies are, and that you will do your best to avoid them, giving people a heads up on how you try work through discussions. That would be awesome!
The basic premise of the above video is that Star Trek is unprecedented in it’s treatment of a post-feminist world. He also points out that Star Trek has slide backwards with the J.J Abrams reboot. If I understood his points correctly.
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I think this video presents a well done high-level summary of the relationship between Star Trek and feminism, and I agree with it as far as it goes. Despite the good intentions of the shows’ creators, the various iterations of Star Trek still reflect the cultural mores of the society at large at the time they were produced, and of the writers and producers who worked on them. Depending on how much you want to grade the shows on a curve for being ahead of their time (especially with the inclusion of Majel Barrett’s Number One character in the first pilot in 1965!), I do think there are times when the episodes did not fully live up to their own ideals. It is interesting and productive to talk about these times, while giving credit (as I do) to the series as a whole for being a strong positive force for inclusiveness and equal rights. Much more to say later.
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I have a hard time calling a show “femminist” when it insists on dressing the female characters in miniskirts or low necklines, while the men are showing no skin other than their hands and faces. Similarly, while TNG puts on a good face of femminism in the first two seasons, you don’t have to scratch the surface very hard to find systemic misogyny in the writing.
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This is a good point. Having recently rewatched TOS, I can tell you that they did try to get William Shatner’s shirt off at every reasonable opportunity (or else slice it to ribbons). His regular uniform, however, was much more chaste than Uhura’s and Rand’s. Interestingly, Majel Barrett’s Number One originally had pants and a turtleneck.
I’m not sure this excuses anything, but television is an inherently exploitative medium, and I suspect the producers were trying to get away with everything they could in order to seize and retain eyeballs on the screen. If they thought the audience would have accepted the men not wearing pants, we probably would have gotten that, too. This is not fair on women when society has a double standard, which the show then ends up reinforcing.
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Here’s Shatner in ST episode 2, “Charlie X”: http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/eames/3940715/405643/405643_original.jpg. They actually had him do a fully nude scene in TOS’ kinkiest episode, “What Are Little Girls Made Of.”
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sunny jim You make some good points, but the question that Kevin Black raises also needs to be addressed. Namely, how much of the scanty, sexy times are due to Execs attempting to raise ratings through fan boy service, and how much due to the writers. And it”s also true that Shatner’s shirt comes off so often that they made fun of it in “Galaxy Quest”; so, we do see scantly clad men too. But, some of those female costumes are pretty damn risque. A few episodes, I wondered how they got them on the air in the late 60s. And TNG certainly has its moments of male fantasy. I was watching “Up the Long Ladder” last night and when the ridiculous love scene happens between Riker and the Irish stereotype, I kept thinking, “what the hell is she wearing?!” Whenever TNG tries to do sexy, it often comes off weird…at least, in my opinion.
The fact remains, Janeway or Admiral Nechayev aren”t unusual for their high position. They aren”t women who achieved, just people who achieved. The same can be said for the Klingons; the genders seem to be pretty equal in Klingon society. Roddenberry tried something daring with Number 1 in the pilot and got shot down, but he still kept trying to see what he could get away with. Last night I watched “Prelude to Axanar” and I was happy to see that one of the three awesome captains was a women, and played by Kate Vernon, no less. In my opinion, Star Trek has woven its post-feminism so tightly into the background, that you can easily miss how challenging it’s actually being.
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Walter Phippeny – Generally, spirit gum, toupee tape, and a product called “Sticky Grip” are how costumes like that stay on, and in place. 🙂
There was a lot of discussion in this group about the Season 1 TNG episodes, especially by Randi, about the sort of deeper-level lack of feminism in the show. Sure, there are good examples of good feminist thinking (the Chief Medical Officer isn’t in a miniskirt, after all, and the Security Chief was a woman, so not all female officers are in “caretaker” roles), but there are also a number of examples of fairly subtle (and in some cases, not so subtle) careless thinking regarding women. Lines that seem weirdly out of place, and that would imply our main characters to be way behind the times, if their casual, off-the-cuff conversation can be taken seriously. Also, the writing of those characters, in general, made them seem overly weak and emotional, and specifically unsuited to their jobs on a regular basis. It was hard to believe them to be competent members of the crew because of the way they were written.
The controversy surrounding the departure of Gates McFadden for Season 2, and Denise Crosby’s exit from the show, largely centered on the attitude of the writing team toward the female roles. Even the actresses playing those characters felt they were being given short shrift as humans on the show during that time, and in looking at those episodes, I’m not surprised.
While I can agree that, on the whole, the show displayed some great post-feminist thinking, there are a number of glaring counterexamples, and not all of them can be written off as demands from the network to make the show more appealing to 18-49 year old men.
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sunny jim You seem to know a lot more of the behind the scenes stuff than I do. I”ll have to ask Dr. Google about the Gates McFadden and Denise Crosby chapters in TNG history.
You agree that there are some examples of post-feminist thinking, but that there are still counterexamples and subtle things that point to misogyny. Do you think that these counterexamples are coming from a conscious motivation, or more from the background bigotry that is harder to detect? A passive bigotry, if you will. When you’re coming from a position of privilege, it can be a lot harder to tell where you’re taking your privilege for granted, assuming that things are a normal state of affairs when they aren’t. Am I making any sense? Sometimes you’re being a bigot, and you don’t realize it because your privileged position hasn’t forced you to see the world in a different way; you’re assumptions about things sneak into your work. Not saying it’s right, but a bit more excusable than active bigotry.
By the way, I’m really enjoying this conversation. It’s great to be able to tackle big subjects like this without the conversation going sidewise into flameage.
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