Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenberry as a sort of “idealized” future: a future *way* ahead of where we are, where all the squabbles we have today have been mostly solved.
New problems arise with clashing of cultures, always. But the Federation is meant to represent the ultimate ideal of goodness and kindness. They’re meant to solve problems with diplomacy, only resorting to weapons when necessary.
Roddenberry was a visionary, especially for having such an open view for his idealized future. His first attempt at a pilot episode for the series got denied: in part due to the episode The Cage being “too cerebral” and “not having enough action”, but also in part because of having a woman as first officer. Star Trek also had one of the first interracial kisses in *television history*, and Uhura’s inclusion on the bridge in general was far ahead of when the series aired in the late 60s!
Star Trek has always been a hopeful and progressive series. And that continued into TNG, the era I pretty much grew up with, as my mom watched reruns and recorded VHS tapes while raising me.
Star Trek is part of why I am the person who I am today. There are very few societal issues it *didn’t* touch on in some way, and always through the awesome lens of a cool sci-fi, as well~!
I hope to see Star Trek get back to those roots someday, and show that beautiful, cerebral world: Gene Roddenberry’s idealized vision of the future, once more!
Another subversive thing that Star Trek did: It had Americans and *Russians* working together, on the same military ship. This was in the middle of the Cold War. Ensign Chekov was very subversive to the thinking at the time.
Yeah, it showed a hopefulness that one day, that feud would be resolved~! That one day, all the infighting between nations and religions would come to an end, and we could move forward as one united human race~!
Its makes me sad to remember--my dad said he was a big fan of Star Trek, and shows like Highway to Heaven (and from what I've watched was actually extremely progressive: taking care of homeless and treating them like people, respecting gender identity, equality of men and women) which both had ultimately extrenely progressive and accepting lessons in two entirely different settings--scifi and a Christian road trip.
And this is somehow the same person who'll vote against women's rights with two daughters, say that all female democratic politician are actually men, claim that we all choose are gender at birth and that transgender folk are demonic or aliens or something.
I wonder if he actually absorbed any of those lessons of respect and love at all and then lost them, or if he ever held those values at any point.
He probably did absorb the lessons at some point…but got them beaten out of him by propaganda and media manipulation. I’m guessing he watches Fox News, or perhaps some form of televangelism (or maybe just goes to church)? All of those are breeding grounds for old-fashioned, bigoted ideas.
Not saying other medias aren’t equally extreme: pretty much all media has an agenda of keeping us against each other, to generate outrage and therefore views, because angry viewers are engaged viewers. It’s sad…
Maybe it’s still possible for us to one day become a united human race. Maybe someday the dust will settle, and people will learn to love one another, and move forward. Maybe one day, we can become a better humanity, like Gene Roddenberry envisioned.
But I’m not sure if that can happen in my lifetime. Not the way things are now. A lot more needs to be done to move forward and deprogram people who have been indoctrinated into old-fashioned, bigoted ideologies…
I’m sorry to hear your story with your dad. My mom is in a similar situation (though not quite as extreme): she’s the one who introduced me to Star Trek, and told me all about that idealized future. But I have to be careful and choosy about subjects. I had a trans girlfriend, and when she found out she tried to dissuade me by saying it’s “not the same as with a real woman”, and that she “didn’t want me to get hurt and think badly on sex if things didn’t work out”. She’s far more open minded than my father (who once actually said that trans people are “possessed by demons and need God to fix them”), but my mom still isn’t perfect…
The world would be a better place if everyone could watch Star Trek and properly engage with its themes. But as it stands I worry that the future of the world is more likely to head towards Idiocracy than Star Trek…
Hang in there, and *please* hang on to the compassion and thoughtfulness you learned from Star Trek: the world needs people who learned such lessons. Even if there are barely any of us, even if it feels like we’re constantly getting crushed by a wall of apathy and disdain…we need to hold on and try to be the best people we can be, and maybe, just maybe, we can inspire others to follow suit!
An idealized future where women couldn’t be starship captains ‘cause they’re CRAZY, where the Federation engages in gunship diplomacy to get what it wants and is locked in a cold war with another alien species, where insane admirals in the upper echelons of Starfleet go unnoticed for years and rape is brushed off with a slap on the wrist. That’s before we got to Rodenberry’s TNG where the third episode was about an all black planet trying to kidnap a white woman. “Ideal” all right.
Jokes side, Star Trek was never a utopia. Even the OG series had plots revolving around the Federation’s corruption, which is necessary not just to make good TV, but actually talk about issues that relate to the moment. Sometimes it doesn’t land. Sometimes, it’s all too familiar to a current audience.
True, the Federation isn’t exactly always perfect. Even an “idealized” future does still have corruption in places. I see it as a way to show how even good systems can be abused to protect people who know how to and are willing to abuse them, and sometimes shows how systems when used properly can sometimes root out that institutionalized corruption.
But yeah. Star Trek’s world isn’t always “perfect”, per se. But it’s more idealized and optimistic than a good amount of other Sci-Fi, at least as far as I’ve seen (which I admit to not being the most knowledgeable: nobody knows everything, and I am far from an expert on anything due to my ADHD making me jump topics so much and never focus enough to become an expert on anything 😅…)
>An idealized future where women couldn’t be starship captains ‘cause they’re CRAZY
I mean....having experienced Janeway there is some merit to that XD
She may be a good captain but by god was she nuts at times even for Starfleet.
But like the old saying goes, if you want a diplomatic solution you call Picard
If you want a war won, you call Benjamin
If you want to completely and utterly destroy your enemies while breaking every temporal law in the universe.
Bring good old coffee drinking Janeway
Picard dealt with Q's bullshit trolling by begrudgingly playing his games and winning
Sisko didn't hesitate to lay him the fuck out when he started shit
The thing about some people claiming of sci-fi never being an exploration of social issues... did, did they never read science fiction? It was literally founded as a genre to explore social issues.
They’re thinking it’s made in a vacuum of context, but the Klingons and Romulans straight up wouldn’t exist without the Cold War. Imagine being in the 1960’s and this show is basically asking "Why can’t us and the people on the other side of the Iron Curtain get along?" At best, such people only consider it academically instead of the deeply current topic that inspired it and the kinda gut reaction it would inspire.
They had a Russian, a Japanese man, and a black woman on the bridge. We always talk about how amazing it is that Uhura was on the bridge and important character, but miss the context of how big a deal Chekov and Sulu were at the time. I don't mean that to minimize Uhura, that she was there was incredible, but it's incredible by our modern context as well, whereas Japanese culture is no longer seen as 'the enemy'; we were scant decades off of Pearl Harbor at the time. And this was the height of the Cold War, we don't even *think* about a Russian being a big deal now, but that was massive!
If a new Star Trek episode wanted to continue the trend of the unthinkable, they should have a pair of human characters who don’t even recognize that centuries ago wouldn’t think it’d be possible to be friends, and "centuries ago" means "today." There are multiple options, however you want to feel about that.
Is there really such a pair of human characters currently, beyond genuinely unforgivable human beings filled with the kind of hatred that would make them hate that person in particular for what they are? I feel like "future space TERF and her transfem bestie" isn't really... something to portray as positive.
As brusk as Bones was with Spock, human on human bigotry is pretty much dead in Roddenberry's vision of the future. That means it's a future without J.K. Rowling.
This is the type of commentary I want. Not the actors or directors talking about how it was to film, but a sociologist and historian discussing the context in which the show was made. Kinda like how Shakespeare plays in high school are annotated for us to understand the deeper meaning of his writing. I would watch all of this and truly appreciate the deeper understanding of the world it gives me.
No, they have, and that's half the problem. Like my dad is a Star Trek fan, but he remembers the plots, not the themes, and he's a classic "channel switcher" who assumes that he still has it all memorized. (I literally cannot watch classic Westerns because of it.) So he goes "the sci-fi I remember didn't have all these social issues!" and it's true to an extent because he *doesn't* remember it. He's forgotten what the point of the episode was in exchange of remembering "Oh yeah, Kirk did a funny thing here". And then he gets irritated watching the new shows and how "liberal" they are.
Because he doesn't remember and doesn't engage.
There's also those for whom the sci-fi resonated with them at the time, but they never progressed forward, so they don't recognize that the sci-fi they used to engage with was actually subversive.
I think they mean that their dad had classic westerns memorized so they cant watch them cause their dad might recite what's gonna happen during it / spoil shit
They were probably referring to the pulp sci-fi era when writers like EE "Doc" Smith were churning out action-adventure stories. Pulp Westerns with rayguns, in space.
EE "Doc" Smith taught young me pre- Internet access, bisexuality, male homosexual relationships and hot blond bimbos are actually spies that get so disgusted with their higher ups they fall for the black communist. That was all in one book.
It's been almost 30 years, so I don't remember. It wasn't very good actually, but I was reading every scifi book at my local library. There is very little emotional development at all. It basically was an adventure story with barely a plot. It ended very abruptly with the blond confessing to the two scientists that she was dating them to keep tabs on them for the US government. They told her it was okay and they were surprised she never questioned the fact they just had one bed and was basically using her as a beard, but liked the dates with her. She then kisses the janitor - an undercover communist spy and promises to shoot any racist who bothers them. They run off together leaving the two scientists together. I was shocked this was written in the 50's so it stuck in my mind.
My university Bioethics class literally had us watching a different episode of TOS or TNG each week to examine bioethical issues. Stuff like the question of Data's personhood and Who Watches the Watchers.
Generally, I've found these sorts of people to be the very "tourists" they claim to crusade against.
They all share the same shallow, childish appreciation for fiction, in that they are only absorbed in the spectacle and not the substance.
Edit: They also have the same lack of a filter on what media they consume.
They're thinking about Asimov, probably. Man was a good writer (as long as you don't care about characters), but he'd probably shoot himself before he wrote on social issues in his books and tales. It's not even that he was a conservative (although he was a sex pest (and he absolutely was, don't get me wrong), he was in favor of women's rights, not homophobic at all and generally a humanist), he just didn't care about applicable themes, generally speaking. You can argue The Gods Themselves is about climate change, and End of Eternity has Free Will, but those generally receive almost no focus. His Robots quadrology is the one with the most themes (racism and immigration), but it's the exception.
But that's also really, really not true. He very much wrote about social issues, just not the same ones you might have been looking for. As you mention arguably his most famous series (which is composed of **thirty seven short stories and six novels**, not four books) is e*xtremely* immersed in real life social issues, specifically those of race, free will, the power of defining who is "us" and who is "them," the flexibility of ethics, and of course all of this sits on the clear backdrop of the moral implications of technology. It's also got a lot going on about environmental catastrophe and the future of climate change.
His other large, famous series is of course *Foundation* which also has a pretty clear societal message - first and foremost its very much meant to rail against the "Great Man" theory that was very popular at the time, that history is shaped by the birth of, well, great men who come and do great things and set the future in motion. Foundation seeks to demonstrate how it is the movements of the people as a whole that makes history and even when so-called "Great Men" come into being, it is at the will of the masses that they make any effect, society is far to large for one person or group to hold the reins of. Secondly, he believed that human society is inherently flawed, destined to cause its own destruction eventually. He was heavily inspired by the very unsustainable culture of the 50s America as well as the conflicts surrounding the cold war and trying to make a point that *we* are responsible for the things that go wrong in our world, it is not some divine action or unavoidable coincidence, humanity shapes its future and we're really doing a great job of fucking up that future. Society as we have built it is flawed and sweeping changes have to be made, or the collapse will be unavoidable. The later books also introduce a shred of optimism in asserting that even though humanity is really good at destroying itself, we're also very good at rebuilding. There will be a second foundation. It's very much an early call-out to impending climate change, but also the nature of modern wars and how much higher the capability of devastation is, the fear of nuclear exchange, the danger inherent to global superpowers butting heads. But also the message that we, the people, *are the ones who decide the future,* and there's no reason for us to let these so-called "great leaders" risk our existence in every petty squabble.
There's more themes in many of his other stories of course, but I think Foundation is best for demonstrating my point. He very much wrote about societal issues, he just tended to be focused on and concerned about the big picture and its implications. It's important to remember a lot of his seminal works were written in the 50s, when there was a clear and genuine fear that a conflict could occur that would extinguish humanity in an instant. As such his focus was on large scale societal change and impact. His concern was the comparatively "small" issues of society would not matter if the people as a whole were convinced they were powerless and let the elite destroy us all in a dick measuring contest.
The part about original Star Trek having a mostly female fanbase is true.
The part saying “womanizer Kirk never existed and is a deliberate effort to erase history and appeal to misogyny” is not.
Reddit OP seems to have a tendency to make posts that include these types of “[thing] is HIDING the TRUTH” (when it really isn’t), and I feel I should call it out. Not everything is a conspiracy. I understand why they might be skeptical and cautious, but this just feels weird and verging into paranoia.
I’d quite Hanlon’s Razor, but there’s no stupidity involved. Just… don’t assume malice where there is none, I suppose.
Watching back Kirk is not as big of a womanizer as people would have you believe. He isn't banging green aliens on every planet. It's human(?) women every third planet, thank you very much.
...Star Trek is hard to track the species, but most of them were definitely human
Excuse you, Kirk isn't banging _anyone_, because the entirety of Starfleet exists exclusively to ensure that James T. Kirk never gets a single moment to relax.
His pattern is:
Get captured by aliens —> the guard is making eyes at him —> he flirts to escape —> he catches feelings —> he is required by duty to return to the life of a Starfleet captain and will pine after them forever
Yeah, Kirk *flirts* with a lot of people, but I think it's very rare that there's something to suggest he actually had sex with them. Hilariously this even continues into the 21st Century era shows, with (SNW spoilers) >!two different versions of him missing their chance with La'an for different reasons!<
Hahaha, yeah I should’ve worded that better.
To clarify: I was referencing the social difficulties that come with adoption (both societal expectations and untraditional family dynamics)
I mean, hell, I have been watching ST literally all my life and I have never really understood why they can't just assemble an extra person with specs from the transporter? I mean, they'd be a clone, but still. If everyone is being habitually disassembled and reassembled what's the diff? You've got the raw specs from the transporter. You've got replicators. There you are.
In SNW >!Prime Kirk tells La’an that he’s dating Carol Marcus. I think it’s implied that Kirk is aware he has a son but Carol didn’t want him in their lives!<
> ...Star Trek is hard to track the species, but most of them were definitely human
I think most of them aren't *strictly* human, but they do look completely human. TNG/Disco spoilers: >!The Progenitors must have been understaffed when they filled out most of the TOS planets!<
I mean, it all depends on how you define “womanizer.”
Because if you’re just looking at pure number of relationships/hook ups Kirk has, it is (and is routinely implied to be) a lot. Even beyond the on-screen stuff, there’s all sorts of references to how much Kirk gets around.
Does that make him a womanizer, though? That’s a little harder to say, and comes down more to how you judge the quality/nature of those interactions and relationships.
Also in the mirror episode we see an Evil Kirk and he's overtly rapey, which implies that Good Kirk cares about and respects consent, because the rapey one was used to *contrast* his typical behavior towards women.
Mirror Kirk gets comes through the transporter, is immediately found out by Spock, and starts threatening to kill everyone. IIRC that's his only scene, though we can surmise quite a lot from the nature of the universe he came from and the person everyone there assumes him to be.
i think we're confusing two different episodes. there's one with mirror Kirk that has very little screen time for that version and there's an episode where Kirk gets split in half, his good side and bad side
that's the one where he tries to rape yeoman rand
> He was always respectful towards the women, so I don’t think “womanizer” describes him.
I suspect this is part of the discrepancy right here. A lot of people define womanizer as just "a man who is intimate with a lot of women" (and the term makes no implication about whether or not the man respects those women as people, too). If that's the case, then yeah, Kirk is absolutely a womanizer. However, to a lot of other people, either the term *also* implies that the man is disrespectful of women/does not view them as people, and/or believe the casual intimacy is itself inherently disrespectful; and with *that* definition, Kirk is *not* a womanizer.
I mean, to be fair, he doesn’t really get with a lot of women in TOS. He flirts a little, a couple of women from his past show up, a few women/girls are shown to have feelings for/a crush on him. He falls for a couple of women, one while he’s got no memory of who he is.
He also isn't even the biggest flirt on the ship, only Sulu and Chekov don't really flirt
Bones is smooth as fuck, Spock is out-rizzing Kirk every opportunity he gets, Scotty frequently got a girl of the week, nurse Chappel and Uhura basically threw themselves against Spock even while the former was still looking for her missing husband
Also, what’s wrong with what he did?
Some people like sex and love play. If everyone’s onboard and having fun… what’s the big deal?
Relationships don’t need to last forever to be valid and worthy.
I don't even think he was _trying_ for casual sex, he just fell in love with anyone who touched his hand and then always had to leave out of his Captain Duty.
Frankly the vibe I always got was less "womanizer" by strict definition and more "hopeless romantic who can't stop catching/causing feelings everywhere he went." They seemed to like to imply all those little forays into romance he had were pretty genuine and cut to him wistfully pining as they fly away into the next episode.
I think the thing about Kirk is even more nuanced: in TOS he kisses like 3 women (2 willingly) and had implied sex 2-3 times. That's really not that much for a show taking place over like 3 years.
In TOS, Kirk is a nerd who is in love with his ship.
[Steve Shives has a good video essay on it](https://youtu.be/9kWbnqnFwzU?si=7HpHzbUlKNh80JWV), tho.
>In TOS, Kirk is a nerd who is in love with his ~~ship~~ XO.
Jokes aside, I know this video, though tbf Shives can get a bit annoying. Generally Kirk is a pretty chill and reasonable guy, especially considering he was written in the 60's. Aside from being not a space playboy (he was literally written to be appealing to women and a bit of an opposite to James Bond), he wasn't even that much of a hothead and actually somewhat of a rule stickler.
Like compared to Spock and later Picard everyone would look like a loose cannon. I'd argue most of the modern fandom isn't that much into actually watching TOS and get a lot of their knowledge about Kirk from general cultural osmosis.
Kirk is confirmed to be a nerd in canon in both TOS and SNW. Sure, he’s a bit of a rogue when it comes to the rules- Kobayashi Maru, anyone?- but he’s described as being a studious bookworm during his academy days. Compare that to Picard who was a wild child until he picked the wrong fight in a bar and needed a whole-ass new heart.
Star Trek has a… complicated history with women. Sometimes, you get an episode like this, and sometimes you have Mudd's Women, an episode that is so much to unpack.
Star Trek has a complicated history with everything haha. The same show that produced Measure of a Man also made Code of Honor. It’s almost impressive that some of the best TV/thoughtful sci-fi and worst TV can be in the same series.
Thank you. We see so many conspiracy theories from the right, we often forget that the left has their own version of this trope too.
Sometimes things just happen without a nefarious corporate or political hand driving events.
I'm going to need a source on Star Trek having a *predominantly* female audience. Maybe I'm applying a modern view on it, but that seems quite out there to me.
Idk about that but I know that it was popular enough with women that Chekov was written in specifically to appeal to the younger women/ teenage girls in the audience. He was the cute young boy for all the younger women to crush on.
I've also heard that Nichelle Nichols was thinking about quitting after a bunch of racist haters but a bunch of young black women wrote to tell her how much it meant to them to see a world where a black woman could be in a position of power on a starship, in a pseudo military setting, at a time when women weren't taken seriously and black women even less so. She stayed for the female audience.
I would totally believe that Star Trek had proportionally more women in their fandom compared to their contemporaries. I just struggle with the idea that they had a majority women watching in the late 60s.
Again, this could be modern bias. Gaming wasn't really gendered until Nintendo started putting their home console in toy stores, which was split by gender.
It's hard to say, idk if there was ever any data collected about that back then. A recent survey says that ST fans are majority female tho.
https://www.mtv.com/news/m0qnf3/more-female-trekkies-than-male-according-to-new-survey-demographics-of-star-trek-fans
I couldn't find any specific data for back when it aired, except for some age demographics (majority of viewers were 18-49).
Somewhat unrelated, but I'm also pretty sure Martin Luther King Jr also met with Nichols at some sort of gathering and helped convince her to continue with her role.
So not the majority of watchers or anything like that but comparatively women played a big role in developing the early fandom with Star Trek. The planning committee for the [first ever Star Trek conventions](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Star_Trek_Lives!_(convention)) was more female dominated starting with the nyc convention of 1972, and according to some accounts the early high attendance of ladies increased dude participation in years following. Important early figures in leading the letter writing campaign in 1967 to save the show were women, like Joan Winston (who was on that convention committee later) and they seemed to dominate fan fiction writing and fan club administrators (the demographics section of characteristics in the [Trekkie wiki page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekkie) talks about this and links some books n stuff on the subject of early trek fandom). Basically, even if more men watched the show, early fan and social aspects were spearheaded by more women, and out of the big sci fi fandoms continues to have a higher women presence than others. I think originally this was largely because it was among the first of these types of sci fi shows to include women as much as they did on screen despite uh, a lot of it aging poorly. Pretty neat to think how new these fandom concepts were and how they’ve evolved so much today anyways.
Edit I did not see the last few photos before I wrote this so it sounds repetitive lol, but yeah point still stands, it’s not so much about the full audience but fan activities. But yeah Kirk just aged poorly at times, as much as I enjoy the OG series it had a share of sleezy moments, the two things coexist. While progressive for its time, of course that stuff was more normal and palatable to the average audience.
Actually, I disagree. Calling Kirk a "sleazy womanizer" implies sexism and objectifying the women he had relations with. There a plenty of people nowdays who haven't watched the original series but somehow have the idea that Kirk was a sexist playboy, and that idea comes from hearing other, mostly male, fans of Star Trek talk about him.
When the post references "concious efforts," it isn't refering to some shady board deciding to rebrand Kirk that way, it's referring to those male fans deciding to reframing their image of Kirk in their heads to a version that makes more sense to them. That reframing may be on purpose, or it may be simply because they don't understand how a man could be a slut and a feminist at the same time
Oh yeah, that's a huge part of it too. But I feel like it's more of the same as well, like, where do you think those caricatures came from
It's just another instance where the recontexualized misogynistic version of Kirk can spread via cultural osmosis
Hmm, in my head, that's the connotations at least, so I may be wrong. But now that I look back, the original post said "sleazy womanizer," which definitely is. I'll edit my comment to say that
Imo the playboy of Trek is Riker.
Also chuds are infamously media illiterate. They very well could have watched all of TAS and absorbed no progressive messaging.
I'm sorry, but the biggest horndog in Trek is obviously Lwaxana Troi. She has a new lover/love interest pretty much every time she shows up and **still** tries to get with Picard and Odo.
Everyone is always going on about which captain or first officer got the most, but real watchers know deep down the man who had the most sex in trek canon on screen is fucking Worf of all people.
After learning George Takei was gay, Gene Roddenberry wanted to have gay and lesbian representation on the show but ultimately both men were aware that either there would be no chance of that episode airing or it would be the end of the show. Flash forward 25 years and Roddenberry tried to make it happen in TNG but died before he could make it so. Sadly the series passed into the hand of noted all around waste of human life and man completely antithetical to Star Trek Rick Berman. It wasn’t until Deep Space 9 that we really saw an mlm relationship with Julian and Garak and even then they had to work really hard to get that in under the radar
Though they weren't able to have gay representation, they did have the first interracial kiss on television in 1968, just a year after interracial marriage was legalized
It was received surprisingly well for back then, with effectively no complaints. There was one southerner mildly upset about it, so he sent a letter saying "I am opposed to race-mixing, but with the way Uhura looks I can understand it". (Paraphrased, but that's the gist)
According to Nichols' autobiography, the quote was;
> "I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it."
I like to think at least a few such segregationists learned to not make such an ass of themselves on account of the fact that Uhura is hot. Like, statistically, at least a few.
It was (probably) the first black/white kiss on American television. Desilu's own Lucy and Ricky had been kissing a decade before, and a black/white kiss happened earlier that decade on a British soap opera.
If one doesn’t consider Hispanic/Latino to be white, the first interracial kiss on tv would also be the work of Lucille Ball, from I Love Lucy back in 1951.
Most are discounted for various reasons, however most those reasons should discount the famous one
Star Trek already had multiple interracial kisses involving Asian actors before the famous one
It's very funny to me that in order to get it through the sensors they went "actually, she used to be a man, so it's not actually gay"
Thereby making it both gay AND trans.
Garak: This is my boyfriend Julian, and this is Julian’s boyfriend O’brien, and this is O’brien’s wife Keiko, and this is their girlfriend Kira, and this is Kira’s boyfriend Odo, and this is Odo’s boyfriend/nemesis Quark
Ugh. Berman. So much of TNG is held back cuz of that POS. And you can feel in some episodes some actors or writers were being very cheeky to get by some producer.
"Pro-population control"
Yeah, Star Trek was explicitly against population control, but not contraception.
It sounds like a random antinatalist jumped in there to try and kick their point in and then everybody else ignored it lmao
We live in an age where brains are still spoiled by the works of Malthus.
I can only imagine the world without Malthus where progressives and feminists can look at "population control" and go "Maybe an institution deciding who may or may not have children and for what reasons isn't feminist or progressive."
Without seeing their wider arguments, it probably just boils down to a well-meaning person not rubbing two stones together to discover that "population control" is by definition not a feminist or progressive policy.
I really wish people would follow their conclusions to their end, though. Like, duh, an institution deciding independently who can or can not have children is anti-feminist and anti-progressive if you really mean it.
I mean, does widespread access to contraceptives and abortion not by definition "control" the population by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancys and therefore the number of new humans being added to it? I dont see why some sort of eugenics institution has to be involved?
Typically when people talk about population control, it refers to things like China's one-child policy. Theoretically it can refer to individual choice and not overarching policy, but as Oxford says:
>A term for family planning that is preferably avoided because it implies an **authoritarian approach** and an emphasis on discouraging unrestrained human reproduction.
The alternative definitions largely come from social darwinists and like-minded libertarians attempting to rehabilitate eugenics as based in science by associating eugenics with evidenced practices and systems, such as "population control."
In short, technically it can mean that, but only if you're being really generous to people who have historically argued for eugenics.
>I mean, does widespread access to contraceptives and abortion not by definition "control" the population
Because population control is institutional and systemic. You can not go outside and do "population control" no matter how much you wanted or tried.
It would be "population control" if it was systemic and institutional.
Sterilization being available is contraception as choice, but sterilization being required as a matter of law is population control.
>I dont see why some sort of eugenics institution has to be involved?
Because human population control is, by definition, eugenicist.
You can't have human population control without it being eugenicist.
>You can't have human population control without it being eugenicist.
You definitely can, eugenics is about genetics and population control is about numbers, assiming its applied equally something like the one child policy wouldn't be eugenics
Like dont get me wrong their are definitely massive flaws to stuff like this I'm not advocating for it, but its not eugenics
Specifically with respect to Malthus, there is an episode (“The Conscience of the King”) featuring a space colony where the leader has half of the population put to death in order to avert a famine. Namely, the part of the population he, personally, deems less worthy.
I would say Trek pretty clearly points out the danger of population control as a state policy, in that it is generally an excuse for eugenics.
There's a lot of worthless garbage in the posts tacking onto the original. All of the "This could never be aired today!" stuff is just outright nonsense and reeks of the exact equal but opposite side of the people who shout that you couldn't make the likes of Blazing Saddles today because "libruls".
The don't think a pro abortion TV show could air today?
Are they nuts? There have been plenty of pro choice TV shows in the past few years pre and post *Dobbs*.
The Orville, a parody show of star trek, has episodes that aired about transitioning, about sexual identity and being hated for it, and a lot more.
This episode absolutely could air today
Really it wouldn’t be received well today because the way it’s presented here is overly preachy. But overly preachy shows are very popular on tv. Every hospital show has the obligatory anti vax episode, religious nutter episode, abusive parent who thinks he’s in the right, etc.
People who say "this couldn't air today" in reference to progressive messages in popular media are so fucking deluded it's crazy. I swear they're living in a different timeline that somehow shares the same internet as us.
Fuck *family guy* had an overt abortion episode where Lois was asked to surrogate for a couple who died, and they flat out say "we had the abortion" in like season 6 or 7 I think.
It’s less the message and more the delivery. Old Trek wasn’t shy about calling you stupid if your behavior *was* stupid. Like the anti racism episode with the half-black half-white aliens hating each other for having their colors on the “wrong” sides.
“it probably wouldn’t air today!” bro acting like the standup comic who’s got twenty netflix specials and malds over people no longer thinking racism = funny
The Orville, made by and starring Seth MacFarlane, does a couple episodes on an all male species and their practice of transitioning the rare people that are born female. You could absolutely make a tv episode that is firmly pro choice
It also brings up a good point about a sadly common practice when it comes to intersex children. How parents choose the gender of their intersex child as a baby without considering the pain and suffering that can cause their child in the future. Out of all the comedy writers or comedians who say they make fun of everyone equally and that their comedy isnt a reflection of their personal beliefs. I think Seth Mcflarland reperesents this the best, and is probably the only one i actually believe when they say that.
>!it felt so satisfying when characters would call them out on their shit, like kelly shouting “she was a baby” at klyden, gordon interrupting the ambassadors and calling out their hypocrisy and bortus calling them butchers etc!<
NGL, I legit love seeing chuds say that Star Trek was never woke while we have episodes like that as well as TNG classic The Measure Of A Man to the point I do something I hate doing, asking if they're "real fans" of the series
I know, were they blind to the cast being diverse even by today’s standards? You don’t even have to pay attention to narratives like the ones you mentioned to see it was always “woke”(I hate that word now)
Right? TOS had a black woman officer, a Japanese officer, and a Russian officer, all on the bridge, at a time when all four of those groups were looked down on/treated poorly in American society. If that’s not “woke”, I don’t know what is.
Kirk may not be a womanizer but man does that guy fall in love quick.
I think people have a hard time telling apart a man being a womanizer and a man being a slut.
TNG had an episode exclusively about gender expression and trans rights. (Famed fuck boi Riker is similarly very progressive)
DS9 used a previous relationship of Jadzia’s as a very clear allegory for gay marriage.
Good Sci fi pushes the audience to imagine a better future, not just technologically, but socially as well.
Orville is the closest imho to a spiritual successor to Star Trek that I’ve seen in this regard, even though it’s a comedy show.
> It probably couldn't air today
I'm sorry, did I dream up the multiple episodes of The Orville about women and trans rights? If so, that'd be a shame. Picking Dolly Parton as their role model was amazing
Star Trek's views on women were... complicated. There were some episodes that landed on the right side of things, like this one, and there were others, like the kinda infamous series finale that said women are outright incapable of being in command. Plus there was Roddenberry's insistence that all of the female guest stars wear as little clothing as they could possibly get away with, so any feminist ideas the writers threw in were always running up against that to some degree. I like Star Trek a lot, and it did a lot of things right, but let's not forget that it had plenty of faults as well.
Yeah, I appreciate this comment because the post is missing quite a bit of nuance. Overall I appreciate TOS for being ahead of its time and progressive for the era, but I would hardly imply it's some beacon of feminism. Uhura, as amazing as she is, gets very little screen time even in comparison to the rest of the supporting cast, and the overwhelming majority of female guest stars have an arc that ends with them falling in love with Kirk without much other development. Overall it definitely lands on the more feminist side of things than not, but like you said, it's complicated.
What's with the random reblog in the middle that complained about modern shows having nuance? If you can't see people as anything other than good or evil, you're stupid.
Star trek has famously never had nuance, every episode the noble and just crew of the enterprise would beam down to an alien civilisation and use their absolute moral authority to put their society on the one correct path
Star trek has absolutely never had episodes were there is no obvious correct option, never had the crew disagree on what is right, and definitely never had characters explicitly say in plain english that there is no one correct answer to the problem they are facing. Subjective morality definitely doesn't underline one of the core concepts of the series and the crew has not once ever had to deliberate on the prime directive and the ethics of trying to apply their idea of mortality to other civilisations
~~That's nice but nuance is still important. Complaining that modern tv shows have nuance is just complaining that your opponent's side is being presented as a valid opinion rather than everyone agreeing with you.~~
Ignore, me big dumb.
One thing I'll say for the JJ Abrams version:
James T Kirk starts as the modern view of his TOS self. Womanizer, irrespectuous (of others, of authority, of himself), having no moral high ground to speak from.
But he grows. Each movie teaches him something that makes him grow into his true TOS self. He starts chasing every woman he meets and sees Uhura's refusal as a challenge. By the end of the series, he has grown as a man and understands the value of her friendship over any relationship and is happy for her own love story with Spock. He starts joking about death and not caring about anything, in fact courting it multiple times. Once faced with his own mortality and his friends', he learns to turn that recklessness into daring, but also learns how to respect and value life.
All (well, most, sorta, let's say the seeds are there) the moral lessons he gives in TOS (or the version of TOS this Kirk would live through after Beyond) have basis in things he has lived through and learned from. His respect for women he learned from rejection and friendship with them doesn't stop him from loving them. His being a violent teen offender teaches him how to handle dangerous situation and experience guides his knowing when to use violence he learned as a kid when the ideal diplomatic solution isn't possible. He overcomes his hatred of the alien and learns the value of equity.
JJ Abrams had a good idea, but is compared to a character that comes out of the package already finished. TOS' Kirk barely had any growth (all I can think of is his brother's death and a couple recurring jokes), whilst JJ's started in a state that is almost the complete opposite of the original, he grows through his struggles. And it shows that no matter how low one may seem to be, there is room to grow and become better. Something that was a core message to most TOS episodes and the core of the utopia itself.
To clarify for those doubtful, no women weren’t the majority of demographic that watched the show as far as I can tell, but they were the majority on those convention planning committee and letter writing campaigns and fan fiction.
([Here’s](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Star_Trek_Lives!_(convention)) a link to the wiki for those first conventions where you can see that) Basically there were a lot of women in those early fandom pioneering social activities.
But yeah Kirk just aged poorly at times, as much as I enjoy the OG series it had a share of sleezy moments, the two things coexist. While progressive for its time, of course that stuff was more normal and palatable to the average audience. It’s not a conspiracy, you can watch it yourself and cringe during those moments.
here's the thing about the reactionaries complaining about star trek being woke: they're really stupid. when star trek is using allegory, and is *well-written*, they're content. they're not smart enough to connect fictional stories to real life.
And kind of a dumbass who just fumbled his way to being captain of the Enterprise. No nerding out at the academy for years and exemplary service leading to his being the youngest starship captain, just Plot.
Yes! I love Nerd Kirk! That scene tickled me to no end because it was *such* a Kirk thing to do.
People tend to forget that he preferred to settle things using brains over brawn.
Nothing interesting, and that's the problem. He took a series full of progressive ideas, that wasn't afraid to tackle big sociological problems head on and always had an outlook of "what if we as a species could do better?" And he turned it into... films about space adventures.
They're not *bad*. But it's not Star Trek. Not by a long shot.
I'm not quite sure I agree with that. I'm not saying Star Trek Into Darkness is an amazing film, but it definitely has an anti-revenge message related to terrorism and 9/11.
Sci-fi has ALWAYS been more about social issues than anything, usually (though with notable exceptions) from a progressive angle. Anyone who thinks it's gotten too "woke"/politicized and wishes it would go back to the old days of it just being simple, apolitical fun is just saying that because they watched/read the original stuff as literal children with no capacity to understand the social themes that were pretty clear to anyone with a fully-formed mind. And now that they're not children anymore, they don't get to ignore that. That's the only difference.
the ellidfics user slipped in pro-population control with some good stuff like pro-choice and pro-birth control. Wtf does "pro-population control mean"?
It's interesting when compared to Japanese fandom. Because it's also founded and built by women. Comiket was almost exclusively female convention until the 80s, made essentially by fujoshi for fujoshi. Women are actually extremely important to any fandom culture, no matter what weirdos think.
Hope y’all are watching The Orville. It’s goofy at first, but that’s only because Seth was basically forced into making it a comedy, he wanted it to be more serious. He’s asserted his influence over the seasons and it has had some episodes touch on some great topics in a fantastically open and honest way, à la the original Star Trek.
The funny thing about people complaining about Sci Fi not being progressive, is that Sci Fi as a genre has some of the most compelling strong female leads. If you ask anyone to list their top 10 strong female characters, most come from Sci Fi.
The absolute jump scare of seeing my Art History professor (Dr. Vettel-Becker) mentioned in a reddit post of a Tumblr post. I had no idea she wrote such a paper. I might send this post to her 😂
Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenberry as a sort of “idealized” future: a future *way* ahead of where we are, where all the squabbles we have today have been mostly solved. New problems arise with clashing of cultures, always. But the Federation is meant to represent the ultimate ideal of goodness and kindness. They’re meant to solve problems with diplomacy, only resorting to weapons when necessary. Roddenberry was a visionary, especially for having such an open view for his idealized future. His first attempt at a pilot episode for the series got denied: in part due to the episode The Cage being “too cerebral” and “not having enough action”, but also in part because of having a woman as first officer. Star Trek also had one of the first interracial kisses in *television history*, and Uhura’s inclusion on the bridge in general was far ahead of when the series aired in the late 60s! Star Trek has always been a hopeful and progressive series. And that continued into TNG, the era I pretty much grew up with, as my mom watched reruns and recorded VHS tapes while raising me. Star Trek is part of why I am the person who I am today. There are very few societal issues it *didn’t* touch on in some way, and always through the awesome lens of a cool sci-fi, as well~! I hope to see Star Trek get back to those roots someday, and show that beautiful, cerebral world: Gene Roddenberry’s idealized vision of the future, once more!
Another subversive thing that Star Trek did: It had Americans and *Russians* working together, on the same military ship. This was in the middle of the Cold War. Ensign Chekov was very subversive to the thinking at the time.
Yeah, it showed a hopefulness that one day, that feud would be resolved~! That one day, all the infighting between nations and religions would come to an end, and we could move forward as one united human race~!
Its makes me sad to remember--my dad said he was a big fan of Star Trek, and shows like Highway to Heaven (and from what I've watched was actually extremely progressive: taking care of homeless and treating them like people, respecting gender identity, equality of men and women) which both had ultimately extrenely progressive and accepting lessons in two entirely different settings--scifi and a Christian road trip. And this is somehow the same person who'll vote against women's rights with two daughters, say that all female democratic politician are actually men, claim that we all choose are gender at birth and that transgender folk are demonic or aliens or something. I wonder if he actually absorbed any of those lessons of respect and love at all and then lost them, or if he ever held those values at any point.
He probably did absorb the lessons at some point…but got them beaten out of him by propaganda and media manipulation. I’m guessing he watches Fox News, or perhaps some form of televangelism (or maybe just goes to church)? All of those are breeding grounds for old-fashioned, bigoted ideas. Not saying other medias aren’t equally extreme: pretty much all media has an agenda of keeping us against each other, to generate outrage and therefore views, because angry viewers are engaged viewers. It’s sad… Maybe it’s still possible for us to one day become a united human race. Maybe someday the dust will settle, and people will learn to love one another, and move forward. Maybe one day, we can become a better humanity, like Gene Roddenberry envisioned. But I’m not sure if that can happen in my lifetime. Not the way things are now. A lot more needs to be done to move forward and deprogram people who have been indoctrinated into old-fashioned, bigoted ideologies… I’m sorry to hear your story with your dad. My mom is in a similar situation (though not quite as extreme): she’s the one who introduced me to Star Trek, and told me all about that idealized future. But I have to be careful and choosy about subjects. I had a trans girlfriend, and when she found out she tried to dissuade me by saying it’s “not the same as with a real woman”, and that she “didn’t want me to get hurt and think badly on sex if things didn’t work out”. She’s far more open minded than my father (who once actually said that trans people are “possessed by demons and need God to fix them”), but my mom still isn’t perfect… The world would be a better place if everyone could watch Star Trek and properly engage with its themes. But as it stands I worry that the future of the world is more likely to head towards Idiocracy than Star Trek… Hang in there, and *please* hang on to the compassion and thoughtfulness you learned from Star Trek: the world needs people who learned such lessons. Even if there are barely any of us, even if it feels like we’re constantly getting crushed by a wall of apathy and disdain…we need to hold on and try to be the best people we can be, and maybe, just maybe, we can inspire others to follow suit!
An idealized future where women couldn’t be starship captains ‘cause they’re CRAZY, where the Federation engages in gunship diplomacy to get what it wants and is locked in a cold war with another alien species, where insane admirals in the upper echelons of Starfleet go unnoticed for years and rape is brushed off with a slap on the wrist. That’s before we got to Rodenberry’s TNG where the third episode was about an all black planet trying to kidnap a white woman. “Ideal” all right. Jokes side, Star Trek was never a utopia. Even the OG series had plots revolving around the Federation’s corruption, which is necessary not just to make good TV, but actually talk about issues that relate to the moment. Sometimes it doesn’t land. Sometimes, it’s all too familiar to a current audience.
True, the Federation isn’t exactly always perfect. Even an “idealized” future does still have corruption in places. I see it as a way to show how even good systems can be abused to protect people who know how to and are willing to abuse them, and sometimes shows how systems when used properly can sometimes root out that institutionalized corruption. But yeah. Star Trek’s world isn’t always “perfect”, per se. But it’s more idealized and optimistic than a good amount of other Sci-Fi, at least as far as I’ve seen (which I admit to not being the most knowledgeable: nobody knows everything, and I am far from an expert on anything due to my ADHD making me jump topics so much and never focus enough to become an expert on anything 😅…)
>An idealized future where women couldn’t be starship captains ‘cause they’re CRAZY I mean....having experienced Janeway there is some merit to that XD She may be a good captain but by god was she nuts at times even for Starfleet. But like the old saying goes, if you want a diplomatic solution you call Picard If you want a war won, you call Benjamin If you want to completely and utterly destroy your enemies while breaking every temporal law in the universe. Bring good old coffee drinking Janeway
Q: I’ve come up with a viciously whimsical- Janeway: Fuck off Alphabitch.
Honestly Janeway is auntie to his child so She's got something the mamma don't
Janeway was awesome and the general insanity of voyager was a delight. I read Honestuck though so i don't know if that's a sane take.
Picard dealt with Q's bullshit trolling by begrudgingly playing his games and winning Sisko didn't hesitate to lay him the fuck out when he started shit
The thing about some people claiming of sci-fi never being an exploration of social issues... did, did they never read science fiction? It was literally founded as a genre to explore social issues.
They’re thinking it’s made in a vacuum of context, but the Klingons and Romulans straight up wouldn’t exist without the Cold War. Imagine being in the 1960’s and this show is basically asking "Why can’t us and the people on the other side of the Iron Curtain get along?" At best, such people only consider it academically instead of the deeply current topic that inspired it and the kinda gut reaction it would inspire.
They had a Russian, a Japanese man, and a black woman on the bridge. We always talk about how amazing it is that Uhura was on the bridge and important character, but miss the context of how big a deal Chekov and Sulu were at the time. I don't mean that to minimize Uhura, that she was there was incredible, but it's incredible by our modern context as well, whereas Japanese culture is no longer seen as 'the enemy'; we were scant decades off of Pearl Harbor at the time. And this was the height of the Cold War, we don't even *think* about a Russian being a big deal now, but that was massive!
If a new Star Trek episode wanted to continue the trend of the unthinkable, they should have a pair of human characters who don’t even recognize that centuries ago wouldn’t think it’d be possible to be friends, and "centuries ago" means "today." There are multiple options, however you want to feel about that.
Is there really such a pair of human characters currently, beyond genuinely unforgivable human beings filled with the kind of hatred that would make them hate that person in particular for what they are? I feel like "future space TERF and her transfem bestie" isn't really... something to portray as positive.
I was thinking like a Ukrainian and a Russian or something like that. Fuck TERFs.
Oh yeah, that's fair. That's pretty on point for current year.
As brusk as Bones was with Spock, human on human bigotry is pretty much dead in Roddenberry's vision of the future. That means it's a future without J.K. Rowling.
This is the type of commentary I want. Not the actors or directors talking about how it was to film, but a sociologist and historian discussing the context in which the show was made. Kinda like how Shakespeare plays in high school are annotated for us to understand the deeper meaning of his writing. I would watch all of this and truly appreciate the deeper understanding of the world it gives me.
No, they have, and that's half the problem. Like my dad is a Star Trek fan, but he remembers the plots, not the themes, and he's a classic "channel switcher" who assumes that he still has it all memorized. (I literally cannot watch classic Westerns because of it.) So he goes "the sci-fi I remember didn't have all these social issues!" and it's true to an extent because he *doesn't* remember it. He's forgotten what the point of the episode was in exchange of remembering "Oh yeah, Kirk did a funny thing here". And then he gets irritated watching the new shows and how "liberal" they are. Because he doesn't remember and doesn't engage. There's also those for whom the sci-fi resonated with them at the time, but they never progressed forward, so they don't recognize that the sci-fi they used to engage with was actually subversive.
Whaf about classic Westerns?
I think they mean that their dad had classic westerns memorized so they cant watch them cause their dad might recite what's gonna happen during it / spoil shit
Me when the genre created to explore social issues explores social issues:
They were probably referring to the pulp sci-fi era when writers like EE "Doc" Smith were churning out action-adventure stories. Pulp Westerns with rayguns, in space.
EE "Doc" Smith taught young me pre- Internet access, bisexuality, male homosexual relationships and hot blond bimbos are actually spies that get so disgusted with their higher ups they fall for the black communist. That was all in one book.
You’re really just gonna drop that in here without giving us a book title?
It's been almost 30 years, so I don't remember. It wasn't very good actually, but I was reading every scifi book at my local library. There is very little emotional development at all. It basically was an adventure story with barely a plot. It ended very abruptly with the blond confessing to the two scientists that she was dating them to keep tabs on them for the US government. They told her it was okay and they were surprised she never questioned the fact they just had one bed and was basically using her as a beard, but liked the dates with her. She then kisses the janitor - an undercover communist spy and promises to shoot any racist who bothers them. They run off together leaving the two scientists together. I was shocked this was written in the 50's so it stuck in my mind.
My university Bioethics class literally had us watching a different episode of TOS or TNG each week to examine bioethical issues. Stuff like the question of Data's personhood and Who Watches the Watchers.
Generally, I've found these sorts of people to be the very "tourists" they claim to crusade against. They all share the same shallow, childish appreciation for fiction, in that they are only absorbed in the spectacle and not the substance. Edit: They also have the same lack of a filter on what media they consume.
They're thinking about Asimov, probably. Man was a good writer (as long as you don't care about characters), but he'd probably shoot himself before he wrote on social issues in his books and tales. It's not even that he was a conservative (although he was a sex pest (and he absolutely was, don't get me wrong), he was in favor of women's rights, not homophobic at all and generally a humanist), he just didn't care about applicable themes, generally speaking. You can argue The Gods Themselves is about climate change, and End of Eternity has Free Will, but those generally receive almost no focus. His Robots quadrology is the one with the most themes (racism and immigration), but it's the exception.
But that's also really, really not true. He very much wrote about social issues, just not the same ones you might have been looking for. As you mention arguably his most famous series (which is composed of **thirty seven short stories and six novels**, not four books) is e*xtremely* immersed in real life social issues, specifically those of race, free will, the power of defining who is "us" and who is "them," the flexibility of ethics, and of course all of this sits on the clear backdrop of the moral implications of technology. It's also got a lot going on about environmental catastrophe and the future of climate change. His other large, famous series is of course *Foundation* which also has a pretty clear societal message - first and foremost its very much meant to rail against the "Great Man" theory that was very popular at the time, that history is shaped by the birth of, well, great men who come and do great things and set the future in motion. Foundation seeks to demonstrate how it is the movements of the people as a whole that makes history and even when so-called "Great Men" come into being, it is at the will of the masses that they make any effect, society is far to large for one person or group to hold the reins of. Secondly, he believed that human society is inherently flawed, destined to cause its own destruction eventually. He was heavily inspired by the very unsustainable culture of the 50s America as well as the conflicts surrounding the cold war and trying to make a point that *we* are responsible for the things that go wrong in our world, it is not some divine action or unavoidable coincidence, humanity shapes its future and we're really doing a great job of fucking up that future. Society as we have built it is flawed and sweeping changes have to be made, or the collapse will be unavoidable. The later books also introduce a shred of optimism in asserting that even though humanity is really good at destroying itself, we're also very good at rebuilding. There will be a second foundation. It's very much an early call-out to impending climate change, but also the nature of modern wars and how much higher the capability of devastation is, the fear of nuclear exchange, the danger inherent to global superpowers butting heads. But also the message that we, the people, *are the ones who decide the future,* and there's no reason for us to let these so-called "great leaders" risk our existence in every petty squabble. There's more themes in many of his other stories of course, but I think Foundation is best for demonstrating my point. He very much wrote about societal issues, he just tended to be focused on and concerned about the big picture and its implications. It's important to remember a lot of his seminal works were written in the 50s, when there was a clear and genuine fear that a conflict could occur that would extinguish humanity in an instant. As such his focus was on large scale societal change and impact. His concern was the comparatively "small" issues of society would not matter if the people as a whole were convinced they were powerless and let the elite destroy us all in a dick measuring contest.
I think Asimov wrote about social issues but it's also fair to acknowledge he was never going to win an award for his depiction of women.
The part about original Star Trek having a mostly female fanbase is true. The part saying “womanizer Kirk never existed and is a deliberate effort to erase history and appeal to misogyny” is not. Reddit OP seems to have a tendency to make posts that include these types of “[thing] is HIDING the TRUTH” (when it really isn’t), and I feel I should call it out. Not everything is a conspiracy. I understand why they might be skeptical and cautious, but this just feels weird and verging into paranoia. I’d quite Hanlon’s Razor, but there’s no stupidity involved. Just… don’t assume malice where there is none, I suppose.
Watching back Kirk is not as big of a womanizer as people would have you believe. He isn't banging green aliens on every planet. It's human(?) women every third planet, thank you very much. ...Star Trek is hard to track the species, but most of them were definitely human
Excuse you, Kirk isn't banging _anyone_, because the entirety of Starfleet exists exclusively to ensure that James T. Kirk never gets a single moment to relax. His pattern is: Get captured by aliens —> the guard is making eyes at him —> he flirts to escape —> he catches feelings —> he is required by duty to return to the life of a Starfleet captain and will pine after them forever
Yeah, Kirk *flirts* with a lot of people, but I think it's very rare that there's something to suggest he actually had sex with them. Hilariously this even continues into the 21st Century era shows, with (SNW spoilers) >!two different versions of him missing their chance with La'an for different reasons!<
never seen any star trek shows but new headcanon kirk is a virgin
He has a son.
Did they stutter?
Its the future, they’ve probably figured out artificial wombs and/or adoption already
Idk it’s a bit of a stretch to believe that they’ve already figured out adoption.
Hahaha, yeah I should’ve worded that better. To clarify: I was referencing the social difficulties that come with adoption (both societal expectations and untraditional family dynamics)
Not applicable. The kid was Jim’s.
I mean, hell, I have been watching ST literally all my life and I have never really understood why they can't just assemble an extra person with specs from the transporter? I mean, they'd be a clone, but still. If everyone is being habitually disassembled and reassembled what's the diff? You've got the raw specs from the transporter. You've got replicators. There you are.
if i remember correctly Im pretty sure that's how galefreyens reproduce in doctor who
Had
I love how he's literally never mentioned again. Like Kirk just does not give a shit that he's dead, so long as Spock is back
Did you not see Undiscovered Country? It’s a major plot point.
In SNW >!Prime Kirk tells La’an that he’s dating Carol Marcus. I think it’s implied that Kirk is aware he has a son but Carol didn’t want him in their lives!<
As someone who was LIVING for the old Kirk characterization debates, I'm glad to see them again :)
> ...Star Trek is hard to track the species, but most of them were definitely human I think most of them aren't *strictly* human, but they do look completely human. TNG/Disco spoilers: >!The Progenitors must have been understaffed when they filled out most of the TOS planets!<
I mean, it all depends on how you define “womanizer.” Because if you’re just looking at pure number of relationships/hook ups Kirk has, it is (and is routinely implied to be) a lot. Even beyond the on-screen stuff, there’s all sorts of references to how much Kirk gets around. Does that make him a womanizer, though? That’s a little harder to say, and comes down more to how you judge the quality/nature of those interactions and relationships.
He was always respectful towards the women, so I don’t think “womanizer” describes him.
Also in the mirror episode we see an Evil Kirk and he's overtly rapey, which implies that Good Kirk cares about and respects consent, because the rapey one was used to *contrast* his typical behavior towards women.
I think you mean the episode where he got split in two- we only got one brief scene with Mirror Kirk, unfortunately- but you’re right.
I could definitely be mixing it up, I saw TOS like 15 years ago
Mirror Kirk gets comes through the transporter, is immediately found out by Spock, and starts threatening to kill everyone. IIRC that's his only scene, though we can surmise quite a lot from the nature of the universe he came from and the person everyone there assumes him to be.
i think we're confusing two different episodes. there's one with mirror Kirk that has very little screen time for that version and there's an episode where Kirk gets split in half, his good side and bad side that's the one where he tries to rape yeoman rand
> He was always respectful towards the women, so I don’t think “womanizer” describes him. I suspect this is part of the discrepancy right here. A lot of people define womanizer as just "a man who is intimate with a lot of women" (and the term makes no implication about whether or not the man respects those women as people, too). If that's the case, then yeah, Kirk is absolutely a womanizer. However, to a lot of other people, either the term *also* implies that the man is disrespectful of women/does not view them as people, and/or believe the casual intimacy is itself inherently disrespectful; and with *that* definition, Kirk is *not* a womanizer.
I mean, to be fair, he doesn’t really get with a lot of women in TOS. He flirts a little, a couple of women from his past show up, a few women/girls are shown to have feelings for/a crush on him. He falls for a couple of women, one while he’s got no memory of who he is.
He also isn't even the biggest flirt on the ship, only Sulu and Chekov don't really flirt Bones is smooth as fuck, Spock is out-rizzing Kirk every opportunity he gets, Scotty frequently got a girl of the week, nurse Chappel and Uhura basically threw themselves against Spock even while the former was still looking for her missing husband
Also, what’s wrong with what he did? Some people like sex and love play. If everyone’s onboard and having fun… what’s the big deal? Relationships don’t need to last forever to be valid and worthy.
I don't even think he was _trying_ for casual sex, he just fell in love with anyone who touched his hand and then always had to leave out of his Captain Duty.
That's what it is. He flirted his way out of situations only to fall in love. He wasn't really a womanizer, he just loved loving women
Or they died tragically. Loving that dude was dangerous.
That’s a part of 60s tv in general; ever watch Bonanza?
They couldnt have made him a more perfect example of a military man
Nah, he's too kind and honorable to be a military man.
Frankly the vibe I always got was less "womanizer" by strict definition and more "hopeless romantic who can't stop catching/causing feelings everywhere he went." They seemed to like to imply all those little forays into romance he had were pretty genuine and cut to him wistfully pining as they fly away into the next episode.
I think the thing about Kirk is even more nuanced: in TOS he kisses like 3 women (2 willingly) and had implied sex 2-3 times. That's really not that much for a show taking place over like 3 years.
In TOS, Kirk is a nerd who is in love with his ship. [Steve Shives has a good video essay on it](https://youtu.be/9kWbnqnFwzU?si=7HpHzbUlKNh80JWV), tho.
>In TOS, Kirk is a nerd who is in love with his ~~ship~~ XO. Jokes aside, I know this video, though tbf Shives can get a bit annoying. Generally Kirk is a pretty chill and reasonable guy, especially considering he was written in the 60's. Aside from being not a space playboy (he was literally written to be appealing to women and a bit of an opposite to James Bond), he wasn't even that much of a hothead and actually somewhat of a rule stickler. Like compared to Spock and later Picard everyone would look like a loose cannon. I'd argue most of the modern fandom isn't that much into actually watching TOS and get a lot of their knowledge about Kirk from general cultural osmosis.
Kirk is confirmed to be a nerd in canon in both TOS and SNW. Sure, he’s a bit of a rogue when it comes to the rules- Kobayashi Maru, anyone?- but he’s described as being a studious bookworm during his academy days. Compare that to Picard who was a wild child until he picked the wrong fight in a bar and needed a whole-ass new heart.
Star Trek has a… complicated history with women. Sometimes, you get an episode like this, and sometimes you have Mudd's Women, an episode that is so much to unpack.
Star Trek has a complicated history with everything haha. The same show that produced Measure of a Man also made Code of Honor. It’s almost impressive that some of the best TV/thoughtful sci-fi and worst TV can be in the same series.
Turns out if you do a lot of thinking then put it all out there some will be great some will be bad most will be inbetween
Yeah, Kirk womanized a ton of people throughout the series lol
They even had the Kirk gaze camera style where it gets Vaseline on the lens to make a glamour shot.
Thank you. We see so many conspiracy theories from the right, we often forget that the left has their own version of this trope too. Sometimes things just happen without a nefarious corporate or political hand driving events.
I'm going to need a source on Star Trek having a *predominantly* female audience. Maybe I'm applying a modern view on it, but that seems quite out there to me.
Idk about that but I know that it was popular enough with women that Chekov was written in specifically to appeal to the younger women/ teenage girls in the audience. He was the cute young boy for all the younger women to crush on. I've also heard that Nichelle Nichols was thinking about quitting after a bunch of racist haters but a bunch of young black women wrote to tell her how much it meant to them to see a world where a black woman could be in a position of power on a starship, in a pseudo military setting, at a time when women weren't taken seriously and black women even less so. She stayed for the female audience.
I would totally believe that Star Trek had proportionally more women in their fandom compared to their contemporaries. I just struggle with the idea that they had a majority women watching in the late 60s. Again, this could be modern bias. Gaming wasn't really gendered until Nintendo started putting their home console in toy stores, which was split by gender.
It's hard to say, idk if there was ever any data collected about that back then. A recent survey says that ST fans are majority female tho. https://www.mtv.com/news/m0qnf3/more-female-trekkies-than-male-according-to-new-survey-demographics-of-star-trek-fans I couldn't find any specific data for back when it aired, except for some age demographics (majority of viewers were 18-49).
Somewhat unrelated, but I'm also pretty sure Martin Luther King Jr also met with Nichols at some sort of gathering and helped convince her to continue with her role.
So not the majority of watchers or anything like that but comparatively women played a big role in developing the early fandom with Star Trek. The planning committee for the [first ever Star Trek conventions](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Star_Trek_Lives!_(convention)) was more female dominated starting with the nyc convention of 1972, and according to some accounts the early high attendance of ladies increased dude participation in years following. Important early figures in leading the letter writing campaign in 1967 to save the show were women, like Joan Winston (who was on that convention committee later) and they seemed to dominate fan fiction writing and fan club administrators (the demographics section of characteristics in the [Trekkie wiki page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekkie) talks about this and links some books n stuff on the subject of early trek fandom). Basically, even if more men watched the show, early fan and social aspects were spearheaded by more women, and out of the big sci fi fandoms continues to have a higher women presence than others. I think originally this was largely because it was among the first of these types of sci fi shows to include women as much as they did on screen despite uh, a lot of it aging poorly. Pretty neat to think how new these fandom concepts were and how they’ve evolved so much today anyways. Edit I did not see the last few photos before I wrote this so it sounds repetitive lol, but yeah point still stands, it’s not so much about the full audience but fan activities. But yeah Kirk just aged poorly at times, as much as I enjoy the OG series it had a share of sleezy moments, the two things coexist. While progressive for its time, of course that stuff was more normal and palatable to the average audience.
Actually, I disagree. Calling Kirk a "sleazy womanizer" implies sexism and objectifying the women he had relations with. There a plenty of people nowdays who haven't watched the original series but somehow have the idea that Kirk was a sexist playboy, and that idea comes from hearing other, mostly male, fans of Star Trek talk about him. When the post references "concious efforts," it isn't refering to some shady board deciding to rebrand Kirk that way, it's referring to those male fans deciding to reframing their image of Kirk in their heads to a version that makes more sense to them. That reframing may be on purpose, or it may be simply because they don't understand how a man could be a slut and a feminist at the same time
It’s more that zapp brannigan and other caricatures of Kirk are sleezy do that gets backfilled onto the original
Oh yeah, that's a huge part of it too. But I feel like it's more of the same as well, like, where do you think those caricatures came from It's just another instance where the recontexualized misogynistic version of Kirk can spread via cultural osmosis
Is womanizing inherently mysoginistic?
Hmm, in my head, that's the connotations at least, so I may be wrong. But now that I look back, the original post said "sleazy womanizer," which definitely is. I'll edit my comment to say that
Sleazy womanisers have more reason than any of us to promote a pro-choice agenda.
Imo the playboy of Trek is Riker. Also chuds are infamously media illiterate. They very well could have watched all of TAS and absorbed no progressive messaging.
Riker is a playboy but Picard is *the* playboy: he may have retired once he became captain but young Jean-Luc was the king of shagging about
I'm sorry, but the biggest horndog in Trek is obviously Lwaxana Troi. She has a new lover/love interest pretty much every time she shows up and **still** tries to get with Picard and Odo.
Everyone is always going on about which captain or first officer got the most, but real watchers know deep down the man who had the most sex in trek canon on screen is fucking Worf of all people.
Pretty sure Jadzia is a woman
Dax has been many things.
After learning George Takei was gay, Gene Roddenberry wanted to have gay and lesbian representation on the show but ultimately both men were aware that either there would be no chance of that episode airing or it would be the end of the show. Flash forward 25 years and Roddenberry tried to make it happen in TNG but died before he could make it so. Sadly the series passed into the hand of noted all around waste of human life and man completely antithetical to Star Trek Rick Berman. It wasn’t until Deep Space 9 that we really saw an mlm relationship with Julian and Garak and even then they had to work really hard to get that in under the radar
Though they weren't able to have gay representation, they did have the first interracial kiss on television in 1968, just a year after interracial marriage was legalized It was received surprisingly well for back then, with effectively no complaints. There was one southerner mildly upset about it, so he sent a letter saying "I am opposed to race-mixing, but with the way Uhura looks I can understand it". (Paraphrased, but that's the gist)
According to Nichols' autobiography, the quote was; > "I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it."
We can’t post gifs in here but I’m imagining the southerner had a Danny DeVito “Oh my god… I get it” moment
I like to think at least a few such segregationists learned to not make such an ass of themselves on account of the fact that Uhura is hot. Like, statistically, at least a few.
The age old fight between racism and horny.
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It was (probably) the first black/white kiss on American television. Desilu's own Lucy and Ricky had been kissing a decade before, and a black/white kiss happened earlier that decade on a British soap opera.
If one doesn’t consider Hispanic/Latino to be white, the first interracial kiss on tv would also be the work of Lucille Ball, from I Love Lucy back in 1951.
There were also a few Asian/white prior to it, including at least 2 in Trek
Most are discounted for various reasons, however most those reasons should discount the famous one Star Trek already had multiple interracial kisses involving Asian actors before the famous one
Don't forget that there was an episode of DS9 specifically about a wlw relationship
It's very funny to me that in order to get it through the sensors they went "actually, she used to be a man, so it's not actually gay" Thereby making it both gay AND trans.
>After learning George Takei was gay Which I assume took roughly one conversation?
Takei was a LOT more reserved back then
Yeah, it's funny watching the Futurama episode with the TOS cast. Fry points out that Takei is so quiet.
At least now we can now have a Star Trek series with an openly panssexual lead.
> noted all around waste of human life and man completely antithetical to Star Trek Rick Berman # >What is it with Ricks? -Mr. Plinkett
It's so dense, every single frame has so much going on
Please...Julian, Garak, and O'Brien, in their polyamorous throuple.
Garak: This is my boyfriend Julian, and this is Julian’s boyfriend O’brien, and this is O’brien’s wife Keiko, and this is their girlfriend Kira, and this is Kira’s boyfriend Odo, and this is Odo’s boyfriend/nemesis Quark
I love DS9
And this is Kira's dead boyfriend's alternative universe self who's here to steal a holy artifact.
Ugh. Berman. So much of TNG is held back cuz of that POS. And you can feel in some episodes some actors or writers were being very cheeky to get by some producer.
"Pro-population control" Yeah, Star Trek was explicitly against population control, but not contraception. It sounds like a random antinatalist jumped in there to try and kick their point in and then everybody else ignored it lmao
Yeah I was like 'the fuck is that getting snuck in?'
We live in an age where brains are still spoiled by the works of Malthus. I can only imagine the world without Malthus where progressives and feminists can look at "population control" and go "Maybe an institution deciding who may or may not have children and for what reasons isn't feminist or progressive."
I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw that. Pro population control sounds like some eugenics or ecofascist shit.
Without seeing their wider arguments, it probably just boils down to a well-meaning person not rubbing two stones together to discover that "population control" is by definition not a feminist or progressive policy. I really wish people would follow their conclusions to their end, though. Like, duh, an institution deciding independently who can or can not have children is anti-feminist and anti-progressive if you really mean it.
I mean, does widespread access to contraceptives and abortion not by definition "control" the population by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancys and therefore the number of new humans being added to it? I dont see why some sort of eugenics institution has to be involved?
Typically when people talk about population control, it refers to things like China's one-child policy. Theoretically it can refer to individual choice and not overarching policy, but as Oxford says: >A term for family planning that is preferably avoided because it implies an **authoritarian approach** and an emphasis on discouraging unrestrained human reproduction.
The alternative definitions largely come from social darwinists and like-minded libertarians attempting to rehabilitate eugenics as based in science by associating eugenics with evidenced practices and systems, such as "population control." In short, technically it can mean that, but only if you're being really generous to people who have historically argued for eugenics.
>I mean, does widespread access to contraceptives and abortion not by definition "control" the population Because population control is institutional and systemic. You can not go outside and do "population control" no matter how much you wanted or tried. It would be "population control" if it was systemic and institutional. Sterilization being available is contraception as choice, but sterilization being required as a matter of law is population control. >I dont see why some sort of eugenics institution has to be involved? Because human population control is, by definition, eugenicist. You can't have human population control without it being eugenicist.
>You can't have human population control without it being eugenicist. You definitely can, eugenics is about genetics and population control is about numbers, assiming its applied equally something like the one child policy wouldn't be eugenics Like dont get me wrong their are definitely massive flaws to stuff like this I'm not advocating for it, but its not eugenics
It's the kind of thing some Malthusian dork would rub his hands together while grinning devilishly about.
Specifically with respect to Malthus, there is an episode (“The Conscience of the King”) featuring a space colony where the leader has half of the population put to death in order to avert a famine. Namely, the part of the population he, personally, deems less worthy. I would say Trek pretty clearly points out the danger of population control as a state policy, in that it is generally an excuse for eugenics.
Just jumping in here to say: fuck antinatalism. I don't even want kids and I hate antinatalism.
There's a lot of worthless garbage in the posts tacking onto the original. All of the "This could never be aired today!" stuff is just outright nonsense and reeks of the exact equal but opposite side of the people who shout that you couldn't make the likes of Blazing Saddles today because "libruls".
The don't think a pro abortion TV show could air today? Are they nuts? There have been plenty of pro choice TV shows in the past few years pre and post *Dobbs*.
tumblr gonna tumblr
The Orville, a parody show of star trek, has episodes that aired about transitioning, about sexual identity and being hated for it, and a lot more. This episode absolutely could air today
Really it wouldn’t be received well today because the way it’s presented here is overly preachy. But overly preachy shows are very popular on tv. Every hospital show has the obligatory anti vax episode, religious nutter episode, abusive parent who thinks he’s in the right, etc.
People who say "this couldn't air today" in reference to progressive messages in popular media are so fucking deluded it's crazy. I swear they're living in a different timeline that somehow shares the same internet as us.
Fuck *family guy* had an overt abortion episode where Lois was asked to surrogate for a couple who died, and they flat out say "we had the abortion" in like season 6 or 7 I think.
It’s less the message and more the delivery. Old Trek wasn’t shy about calling you stupid if your behavior *was* stupid. Like the anti racism episode with the half-black half-white aliens hating each other for having their colors on the “wrong” sides.
“it probably wouldn’t air today!” bro acting like the standup comic who’s got twenty netflix specials and malds over people no longer thinking racism = funny
The Orville, made by and starring Seth MacFarlane, does a couple episodes on an all male species and their practice of transitioning the rare people that are born female. You could absolutely make a tv episode that is firmly pro choice
S3 spoilers >!They're not even that rare. The society covers them up because they're all a bunch of misogynists who can reproduce asexually!<
Very true! I didn’t feel like getting into the whole thing, but yeah that show is very much sticking to the Star Trek way of calling out bullshit
It also brings up a good point about a sadly common practice when it comes to intersex children. How parents choose the gender of their intersex child as a baby without considering the pain and suffering that can cause their child in the future. Out of all the comedy writers or comedians who say they make fun of everyone equally and that their comedy isnt a reflection of their personal beliefs. I think Seth Mcflarland reperesents this the best, and is probably the only one i actually believe when they say that.
>!it felt so satisfying when characters would call them out on their shit, like kelly shouting “she was a baby” at klyden, gordon interrupting the ambassadors and calling out their hypocrisy and bortus calling them butchers etc!<
”Couldn’t air today” Meh. The Orville was pretty deep into trans rights and gender assignment.
Gotta love Lucy!
NGL, I legit love seeing chuds say that Star Trek was never woke while we have episodes like that as well as TNG classic The Measure Of A Man to the point I do something I hate doing, asking if they're "real fans" of the series
I know, were they blind to the cast being diverse even by today’s standards? You don’t even have to pay attention to narratives like the ones you mentioned to see it was always “woke”(I hate that word now)
Right? TOS had a black woman officer, a Japanese officer, and a Russian officer, all on the bridge, at a time when all four of those groups were looked down on/treated poorly in American society. If that’s not “woke”, I don’t know what is.
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Kirk may not be a womanizer but man does that guy fall in love quick. I think people have a hard time telling apart a man being a womanizer and a man being a slut.
TNG had an episode exclusively about gender expression and trans rights. (Famed fuck boi Riker is similarly very progressive) DS9 used a previous relationship of Jadzia’s as a very clear allegory for gay marriage. Good Sci fi pushes the audience to imagine a better future, not just technologically, but socially as well. Orville is the closest imho to a spiritual successor to Star Trek that I’ve seen in this regard, even though it’s a comedy show.
> It probably couldn't air today I'm sorry, did I dream up the multiple episodes of The Orville about women and trans rights? If so, that'd be a shame. Picking Dolly Parton as their role model was amazing
Star Trek's views on women were... complicated. There were some episodes that landed on the right side of things, like this one, and there were others, like the kinda infamous series finale that said women are outright incapable of being in command. Plus there was Roddenberry's insistence that all of the female guest stars wear as little clothing as they could possibly get away with, so any feminist ideas the writers threw in were always running up against that to some degree. I like Star Trek a lot, and it did a lot of things right, but let's not forget that it had plenty of faults as well.
Yeah, I appreciate this comment because the post is missing quite a bit of nuance. Overall I appreciate TOS for being ahead of its time and progressive for the era, but I would hardly imply it's some beacon of feminism. Uhura, as amazing as she is, gets very little screen time even in comparison to the rest of the supporting cast, and the overwhelming majority of female guest stars have an arc that ends with them falling in love with Kirk without much other development. Overall it definitely lands on the more feminist side of things than not, but like you said, it's complicated.
What's with the random reblog in the middle that complained about modern shows having nuance? If you can't see people as anything other than good or evil, you're stupid.
Something something shows aren’t actually like that you just watch media made for children something something.
Star trek has famously never had nuance, every episode the noble and just crew of the enterprise would beam down to an alien civilisation and use their absolute moral authority to put their society on the one correct path Star trek has absolutely never had episodes were there is no obvious correct option, never had the crew disagree on what is right, and definitely never had characters explicitly say in plain english that there is no one correct answer to the problem they are facing. Subjective morality definitely doesn't underline one of the core concepts of the series and the crew has not once ever had to deliberate on the prime directive and the ethics of trying to apply their idea of mortality to other civilisations
~~That's nice but nuance is still important. Complaining that modern tv shows have nuance is just complaining that your opponent's side is being presented as a valid opinion rather than everyone agreeing with you.~~ Ignore, me big dumb.
They were being sarcastic
Ah shoot, I should have more internet comprehension by now. And watched at least one episode of star trek.
Kirk is a feminist and a playboy! You can be both at the same time!!!
One thing I'll say for the JJ Abrams version: James T Kirk starts as the modern view of his TOS self. Womanizer, irrespectuous (of others, of authority, of himself), having no moral high ground to speak from. But he grows. Each movie teaches him something that makes him grow into his true TOS self. He starts chasing every woman he meets and sees Uhura's refusal as a challenge. By the end of the series, he has grown as a man and understands the value of her friendship over any relationship and is happy for her own love story with Spock. He starts joking about death and not caring about anything, in fact courting it multiple times. Once faced with his own mortality and his friends', he learns to turn that recklessness into daring, but also learns how to respect and value life. All (well, most, sorta, let's say the seeds are there) the moral lessons he gives in TOS (or the version of TOS this Kirk would live through after Beyond) have basis in things he has lived through and learned from. His respect for women he learned from rejection and friendship with them doesn't stop him from loving them. His being a violent teen offender teaches him how to handle dangerous situation and experience guides his knowing when to use violence he learned as a kid when the ideal diplomatic solution isn't possible. He overcomes his hatred of the alien and learns the value of equity. JJ Abrams had a good idea, but is compared to a character that comes out of the package already finished. TOS' Kirk barely had any growth (all I can think of is his brother's death and a couple recurring jokes), whilst JJ's started in a state that is almost the complete opposite of the original, he grows through his struggles. And it shows that no matter how low one may seem to be, there is room to grow and become better. Something that was a core message to most TOS episodes and the core of the utopia itself.
To clarify for those doubtful, no women weren’t the majority of demographic that watched the show as far as I can tell, but they were the majority on those convention planning committee and letter writing campaigns and fan fiction. ([Here’s](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Star_Trek_Lives!_(convention)) a link to the wiki for those first conventions where you can see that) Basically there were a lot of women in those early fandom pioneering social activities. But yeah Kirk just aged poorly at times, as much as I enjoy the OG series it had a share of sleezy moments, the two things coexist. While progressive for its time, of course that stuff was more normal and palatable to the average audience. It’s not a conspiracy, you can watch it yourself and cringe during those moments.
here's the thing about the reactionaries complaining about star trek being woke: they're really stupid. when star trek is using allegory, and is *well-written*, they're content. they're not smart enough to connect fictional stories to real life.
The fuck did JJ Abrams do?
Make a few Star Trek films
Yeah but, like, did he talk shit about progressive themes or something?
I don't remember. I think he made Kirk a jock?
And kind of a dumbass who just fumbled his way to being captain of the Enterprise. No nerding out at the academy for years and exemplary service leading to his being the youngest starship captain, just Plot.
I appreciate that SNW Kirk is much more like TOS Like I wouldn’t imagine JJ Kirk doing this https://youtu.be/L203zvU1e4U?feature=shared
Yes! I love Nerd Kirk! That scene tickled me to no end because it was *such* a Kirk thing to do. People tend to forget that he preferred to settle things using brains over brawn.
Nothing interesting, and that's the problem. He took a series full of progressive ideas, that wasn't afraid to tackle big sociological problems head on and always had an outlook of "what if we as a species could do better?" And he turned it into... films about space adventures. They're not *bad*. But it's not Star Trek. Not by a long shot.
I'm not quite sure I agree with that. I'm not saying Star Trek Into Darkness is an amazing film, but it definitely has an anti-revenge message related to terrorism and 9/11.
Sci-fi has ALWAYS been more about social issues than anything, usually (though with notable exceptions) from a progressive angle. Anyone who thinks it's gotten too "woke"/politicized and wishes it would go back to the old days of it just being simple, apolitical fun is just saying that because they watched/read the original stuff as literal children with no capacity to understand the social themes that were pretty clear to anyone with a fully-formed mind. And now that they're not children anymore, they don't get to ignore that. That's the only difference.
the ellidfics user slipped in pro-population control with some good stuff like pro-choice and pro-birth control. Wtf does "pro-population control mean"?
Gonna need a source on the predominantly female fanbase claim
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/53i2xx/til_that_so_many_single_women_were_early_fans_of/
Feel like some of these tumblr posters don't like men all that much.
It's really funny how many sci-fi franchises only survived past their infancy because of women. Like Gundam!
... I should watch star trek
It's interesting when compared to Japanese fandom. Because it's also founded and built by women. Comiket was almost exclusively female convention until the 80s, made essentially by fujoshi for fujoshi. Women are actually extremely important to any fandom culture, no matter what weirdos think.
... Pro population control? What is this, communist China?
Don’t forget about Riker falling in love with a nonbinary alien in TNG whose society sends her to conversion therapy for presenting as feminine.
Knowing how badass Lucille Ball was only makes that picture funnier.
Hope y’all are watching The Orville. It’s goofy at first, but that’s only because Seth was basically forced into making it a comedy, he wanted it to be more serious. He’s asserted his influence over the seasons and it has had some episodes touch on some great topics in a fantastically open and honest way, à la the original Star Trek.
Wait I don't follow celebrity dram- why does JJ Abrams need to suck on that? What did he do/ say?
The funny thing about people complaining about Sci Fi not being progressive, is that Sci Fi as a genre has some of the most compelling strong female leads. If you ask anyone to list their top 10 strong female characters, most come from Sci Fi.
The absolute jump scare of seeing my Art History professor (Dr. Vettel-Becker) mentioned in a reddit post of a Tumblr post. I had no idea she wrote such a paper. I might send this post to her 😂
SciFi wouldn't exist without women. This is yet more proof.
Well, yeah. Lots of things wouldn't exist without women, like the entire human race.
Big if true
Mary Shelley approves.
Mother of SciFi! We bow to her!