Why no women captains?

[RandyS]

Why no women captains? Simple. To piss off the viewers watching the show 55 years after the fact when most of the producers and several of the actors are dead an couldn't possibly care anymore.

 

[Kor]

Spock said, "The name of Zefram Cochrane is revered throughout the known galaxy. Planets were named after him. Great universities, cities." To me, that implied that Cochrane was "revered" by more than just humans. Yes, there was spaceflight long before Cochrane, and there had to be faster-than-light travel of some kind. But in the context of TOS itself, in which terms like "impulse" and "warp" are not clearly defined and a Romulan ship makes it all the way from their home planet to the Earth Outposts on the Federation/United Earth/UESPA/whatever side of the Neutral Zone in a reasonable amount of time on "simple impulse" power, Cochrane's discovery must have been some kind of breakthrough in FTL technology, which made a big difference for many civilizations.

As for the question of "why no women captains?" I just write it off as Lester being delusional about a great many things. It was just coincidental that we hadn't seen any women in command of ships in the limited number of episodes we got, since it's a big galaxy and the series just scratched the surface. Within TOS itself we do have the example of Number One, who was obviously well on her way to a command of her own.

Kor

 

[Christopher]

I wonder how a 50-60 year old female captain will out wrestle a Gorn, three-on-one fight on Triskelion, battling a mad-superhuman in engineering, etc, etc...

The premise we're considering is that future medical advances will prolong youth and health, so that people in their 50s or 60s will still be in their prime.

Besides, Kirk was doing stuff like that in his 50s-60s in the movies (he was 60 in TUC/GEN).

Spock said, "The name of Zefram Cochrane is revered throughout the known galaxy. Planets were named after him. Great universities, cities." To me, that implied that Cochrane was "revered" by more than just humans.

True, but maybe not for the invention so much as what came after it. Other species invented warp drive before humanity, but humanity's warp era led to great accomplishments like the defeat of the Romulans and the founding of the Federation. Sometimes what matters to history is not who did something first, but who did it in the way that had the most lasting impact. Columbus was not the first person from Eurasia to "discover" the Americas, but he was important because he was the last -- the one whose "discovery" actually stuck and had a transformative impact on the world (for better and worse) in the long term.

Yes, there was spaceflight long before Cochrane, and there had to be faster-than-light travel of some kind. But in the context of TOS itself, in which terms like "impulse" and "warp" are not clearly defined and a Romulan ship makes it all the way from their home planet to the Earth Outposts on the Federation/United Earth/UESPA/whatever side of the Neutral Zone in a reasonable amount of time on "simple impulse" power, Cochrane's discovery must have been some kind of breakthrough in FTL technology, which made a big difference for many civilizations.

The idea that the Romulans only had impulse drive does not make any sense. There's no possible way a pre-warp civilization could wage a war against a warp-capable one. So that line is as problematical as Lester's "doesn't admit women" line. In both cases, it can't possibly be taken as truthful, so we must either ignore it or rationalize it away.

I like to interpret Scotty's line to mean that their power system for impulse drive was of a simple variety as opposed to the more advanced impulse drive Starfleet used -- perhaps it used pure thrust instead of a subspace mass reduction field, say. He wasn't saying they didn't have warp drive, just that if they got into a fight at impulse (as most space battles would presumably be, so there was no reason to bring warp into it), the Romulans' simpler impulse power would put them at a disadvantage.

And of course ENT has confirmed that the Romulans absolutely did have warp drive before the war.

 

[Kor]

The premise we're considering is that future medical advances will prolong youth and health, so that people in their 50s or 60s will still be in their prime.

Besides, Kirk was doing stuff like that in his 50s-60s in the movies (he was 60 in TUC/GEN).




True, but maybe not for the invention so much as what came after it. Other species invented warp drive before humanity, but humanity's warp era led to great accomplishments like the defeat of the Romulans and the founding of the Federation. Sometimes what matters to history is not who did something first, but who did it in the way that had the most lasting impact. Columbus was not the first person from Eurasia to "discover" the Americas, but he was important because he was the last -- the one whose "discovery" actually stuck and had a transformative impact on the world (for better and worse) in the long term.




The idea that the Romulans only had impulse drive does not make any sense. There's no possible way a pre-warp civilization could wage a war against a warp-capable one. So that line is as problematical as Lester's "doesn't admit women" line. In both cases, it can't possibly be taken as truthful, so we must either ignore it or rationalize it away.

I like to interpret Scotty's line to mean that their power system for impulse drive was of a simple variety as opposed to the more advanced impulse drive Starfleet used -- perhaps it used pure thrust instead of a subspace mass reduction field, say. He wasn't saying they didn't have warp drive, just that if they got into a fight at impulse (as most space battles would presumably be, so there was no reason to bring warp into it), the Romulans' simpler impulse power would put them at a disadvantage.

And of course ENT has confirmed that the Romulans absolutely did have warp drive before the war.

My point about "impulse power" is that in TOS it didn't necessarily mean exactly what it meant in the spinoff shows, or in non-canon technical manuals, etc., and that Cochrane's "space warp" concept must have been a new form of FTL travel in a galaxy that already had other forms of FTL travel that are not described as "warp drive." Even in TUC, the Excelsior was heading home from Beta Quadrant on impulse power. How many decades or centuries would that take if impulse was strictly a slower-than-light form of travel?

Kor

 

[Nyotarules]

I wonder how a 50-60 year old female captain will out wrestle a Gorn, three-on-one fight on Triskelion, battling a mad-superhuman in engineering, etc, etc... Maybe there were physical requirements that a captain needed to attain, especially in the fighting skills (i.e. Kirk-Fu). Both Matt Decker and Ron Tracey showed their fighting expertise. We see over and over where the captain, as leader, must fight as the Federation's champion. (The reason Chekov will never be a captain based on his fight against Kloog. )

T'Pol and an Andorian female could fight them all with one hand tied behind their back lol

 

[Angry Fanboy]

...the Excelsior was heading home from Beta Quadrant on impulse power. How many decades or centuries would that take if impulse was strictly a slower-than-light form of travel

I took that to mean the Excelsior was currently at impulse when the log entry was being recorded.

By 1991 the writers seemed to have a pretty good handle on the whole warp versus impulse thing and were using the two consistently.

 

[uniderth]

Anyone familiar with my Star Trek novels knows that I love explaining continuity minutiae. But not every inconsistency is worth the effort. Nobody actually wants there to be a ban on women in Starfleet. It's a stupid, ugly idea and it's a blemish on the series that it was ever posited at all. So the only thing we should do with it is gloss it over and move on. Just tiptoe around it and hurry away, like a dead bird lying in the sidewalk. It doesn't deserve anything more.

I'm not saying everyone has to go to the effort of explaining every little inconsistency. But I think it's kind of pointless to debate whether it's worth the effort in a thread dedicated to making the effort.

And that's not a place I want to go. There's no evidentiary basis for assuming there weren't female captains, since we can only confirm at most 5 contemporaneous male Constitution captains out of 12, which is no more than you'd statistically expect with gender equality. It's an ad hoc assumption that there's no reason to make, except to justify a premise that's undesirable to begin with.

To me it's irrelevant if it's desirable or not. I prefer trying to make things fit even if it's not something that I like.

But on that note, as far as I can discern the United States has about 11 operational aircraft carriers and all are captained by men. So is it really beyond the realm of possibility that all of the 12(another assumption) Starship class vessels are captained by men? I think it's definitely possible. And while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, we do have, as you pointed out, about five data points aligned with this conclusion, and none that contradict the conclusion.

Certainly there's plenty of evidence for some degree of sexism in the TOS era. That's where my colonial-attitudes theory comes in. But that doesn't require an actual lack of female captains. Lester could've experienced some regressive gender attitudes in other respects, and blamed them when she was washed out due to psychological instability. A narcissistic delusion doesn't have to fit the facts, since its holder will cherrypick the facts to fit it.

Certainly, but it's probably based on some observations. Just look at flat-earthers, they observe real world phenomenon, but then take it to wild tangents. I think Janice Lester observed some real situation, and she interpreted to be a misogynistic, systemicly sexist, boy's club of Starship captains. So the question is what was the real world observation her extremist view based on?

I'm speculating that up until that point all Starship captains were male. This is the real world observation she made. There wasn't actually institutional misogyny keeping women out, but Lester's obsession made her think there was. Thus the conclusion that the world of Starship captains doesn't admit women. Though, the world of Starship captains is perfectly willing to admit women, but for some reason or another there just haven't been any yet.

Huh? Of the four founding species, humans discovered warp drive last. First Contact had Vulcans showing up to greet us literally hours after the first warp flight, and Enterprise confirmed that the Andorians and Tellarites both had well-established presences in space for generations before humans did.

Vulcanians were already in the solar system during the Phoenix's test flight. All they had to do was perform a braking maneuver.

The only statement in the four Star Trek series that indicated Vulcanians had warp drive before humanity is Quark's line in "Little Green Men" and if we take that at face value then Vulcanians only discovered warp drive after 1948. That's a line I think we can conclude Quark was mistaken about.

I quite liked the way Enterprise deconstructed the Campbellian assumption of human superiority over aliens by establishing that the reason humans became the keystone of the future Federation was because we were the youngest, least experienced spacefaring civilization. We were the newcomers that nobody had any longstanding grudges against, so we were the only ones all the other species trusted as neutral mediators, and thus we ended up in the anchor position, the buffer between all the others.

I respect that point of view. However, I think it disregards A LOT of on screen evidence that points to a different conclusion.

Good explanation, but I prefer it adjusted slightly, "... a transition when UESPA Starfleet was taking over duties of the Federation."

They transition United Earth's Starfleet to be under the Federation creating the first joint space command for the Federation. The transition is underway during Season 1, and the transition is officially completed by mid-Season 1.

interesting idea. Personally, I don't think there was such a thing as an Earth Starfleet prior to the Federation Starfleet.

Here's a rough idea of my Star Trek history timeline, though this version is mainly focused on ships rather than people and events:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/the-enterprise-that-wasnt.303794/page-2#post-13349159

I think that was retconned

I don't recall that. Unless you're talking about Enterprise in which case I don't really care about it.

Rather, it was never established in the first place. Indeed, the fact that the Romulans existed made it obvious that Vulcans had starflight long, long before Earth did. True, Kirk did call Cochrane "the discoverer of the space warp,"

We both know that the "did Romulans have warp drive" is a hotly debated topic. Starflight doesn't require FTL technology to accomplish. Plus with the predilection for sublight earth ships and probes to make it into the vast depths of space I don't think it's out of the real of plausibility for Vulcanian offshoots to have accomplished the same feet. Or not, maybe they just left a long time ago.

but if you're gonna argue for the existence of institutionalized misogyny,

Thank goodness nobody is arguing for that.

Anyone familiar with my Star Trek novels knows that I love explaining continuity minutiae. But not every inconsistency is worth the effort. Nobody actually wants there to be a ban on women in Starfleet. It's a stupid, ugly idea and it's a blemish on the series that it was ever posited at all. So the only thing we should do with it is gloss it over and move on. Just tiptoe around it and hurry away, like a dead bird lying in the sidewalk. It doesn't deserve anything more.

I'm not saying everyone has to go to the effort of explaining every little inconsistency. But I think it's kind of pointless to debate whether it's worth the effort in a thread dedicated to making the effort.

And that's not a place I want to go. There's no evidentiary basis for assuming there weren't female captains, since we can only confirm at most 5 contemporaneous male Constitution captains out of 12, which is no more than you'd statistically expect with gender equality. It's an ad hoc assumption that there's no reason to make, except to justify a premise that's undesirable to begin with.

To me it's irrelevant if it's desirable or not. I prefer trying to make things fit even if it's not something that I like.

But on that note, as far as I can discern the United States has about 11 operational aircraft carriers and all are captained by men. So is it really beyond the realm of possibility that all of the 12(another assumption) Starship class vessels are captained by men? I think it's definitely possible. And while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, we do have, as you pointed out, about five data points aligned with this conclusion, and none that contradict the conclusion.

Certainly there's plenty of evidence for some degree of sexism in the TOS era. That's where my colonial-attitudes theory comes in. But that doesn't require an actual lack of female captains. Lester could've experienced some regressive gender attitudes in other respects, and blamed them when she was washed out due to psychological instability. A narcissistic delusion doesn't have to fit the facts, since its holder will cherrypick the facts to fit it.

Certainly, but it's probably based on some observations. Just look at flat-earthers, they observe real world phenomenon, but then take it to wild tangents. I think Janice Lester observed some real situation, and she interpreted to be a misogynistic, systemicly sexist, boy's club of Starship captains. So the question is what was the real world observation her extremist view based on?

I'm speculating that up until that point all Starship captains were male. This is the real world observation she made. There wasn't actually institutional misogyny keeping women out, but Lester's obsession made her think there was. Thus the conclusion that the world of Starship captains doesn't admit women. Though, the world of Starship captains is perfectly willing to admit women, but for some reason or another there just haven't been any yet.

Huh? Of the four founding species, humans discovered warp drive last. First Contact had Vulcans showing up to greet us literally hours after the first warp flight, and Enterprise confirmed that the Andorians and Tellarites both had well-established presences in space for generations before humans did.

Vulcanians were already in the solar system during the Phoenix's test flight. All they had to do was perform a braking maneuver.

The only statement in the four Star Trek series that indicated Vulcanians had warp drive before humanity is Quark's line in "Little Green Men" and if we take that at face value then Vulcanians only discovered warp drive after 1948. That's a line I think we can conclude Quark was mistaken about.

I quite liked the way Enterprise deconstructed the Campbellian assumption of human superiority over aliens by establishing that the reason humans became the keystone of the future Federation was because we were the youngest, least experienced spacefaring civilization. We were the newcomers that nobody had any longstanding grudges against, so we were the only ones all the other species trusted as neutral mediators, and thus we ended up in the anchor position, the buffer between all the others.

I respect that point of view. However, I think it disregards A LOT of on screen evidence that points to a different conclusion.

Good explanation, but I prefer it adjusted slightly, "... a transition when UESPA Starfleet was taking over duties of the Federation."

They transition United Earth's Starfleet to be under the Federation creating the first joint space command for the Federation. The transition is underway during Season 1, and the transition is officially completed by mid-Season 1.

interesting idea. Personally, I don't think there was such a thing as an Earth Starfleet prior to the Federation Starfleet.

Here's a rough idea of my Star Trek history timeline, though this version is mainly focused on ships rather than people and events:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/the-enterprise-that-wasnt.303794/page-2#post-13349159

I think that was retconned

I don't recall that. Unless you're talking about Enterprise in which case I don't really care about it.

Rather, it was never established in the first place. Indeed, the fact that the Romulans existed made it obvious that Vulcans had starflight long, long before Earth did. True, Kirk did call Cochrane "the discoverer of the space warp,"

We both know that the "did Romulans have warp drive" is a hotly debated topic. Starflight doesn't require FTL technology to accomplish. Plus with the predilection for sublight earth ships and probes to make it into the vast depths of space I don't think it's out of the real of plausibility for Vulcanian offshoots to have accomplished the same feet. Or not, maybe they just left a long time ago.

but if you're gonna argue for the existence of institutionalized misogyny,

Thank goodness nobody is arguing for that.

My point about "impulse power" is that in TOS it didn't necessarily mean exactly what it meant in the spinoff shows, or in non-canon technical manuals, etc., and that Cochrane's "space warp" concept must have been a new form of FTL travel in a galaxy that already had other forms of FTL travel that are not described as "warp drive." Even in TUC, the Excelsior was heading home from Beta Quadrant on impulse power. How many decades or centuries would that take if impulse was strictly a slower-than-light form of travel?

Kor

I think that impulse has to involve some sort of spacetime manipulation field. This is mainly becasue in space you don't apply power to maintain a constant speed. Your given speed is a resting state. You apply power when you want to change speed. However, impulse power functions more like a car or a boat. It requires power to maintain a certain speed. So it seems like what it's doing it requiring power to generate a field that results in movement. With no power to the field it collapses and you drop back to whatever state you were at before engaging the engines. You can even put impulse engines in reverse, meaning they definitely aren't like rockets because the vent ports are always at the back.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Read my lips:
Janice Lester is a nutjob.

 

[Christopher]

My point about "impulse power" is that in TOS it didn't necessarily mean exactly what it meant in the spinoff shows, or in non-canon technical manuals, etc., and that Cochrane's "space warp" concept must have been a new form of FTL travel in a galaxy that already had other forms of FTL travel that are not described as "warp drive."

That's just overcomplicated. Besides, it's stripping the term "impulse power" of meaning. It's not just random phonemes stuck together like most of Voyager's technobabble. It means something clear and simple. Impulse means pushing, thrust. Impulse engines were called that because, as The Making of Star Trek and the series bible stated outright, they were meant to be literally just rockets, achieving thrust by expelling reaction mass.

For that matter, it's stripping "warp" of meaning too, because there is no such thing as a faster-than-light drive that doesn't involve the warping (topological alteration) of spacetime -- except maybe some kind of quantum jump drive making instantaneous transpositions through some kind of nonlocal effect, but that kind of drive would obviously be far more advanced than warp drive, not less. So the only way you can argue this is by ignoring the actual meanings of the words you're using, which is sheer intellectual anarchy. If you're willing to go there, you might as well argue that a hologram is a species of fish and that Robert Picardo was playing The Incredible Mr. Limpet the whole time. It's gibberish.

I'm not saying everyone has to go to the effort of explaining every little inconsistency. But I think it's kind of pointless to debate whether it's worth the effort in a thread dedicated to making the effort.

As I've said, I'm willing to make the effort of imagining some alternative, hypothetical science-fiction future where such a gender-based ban might exist, but there is zero way to reconcile that idea with the facts of the Star Trek universe overall, and no reason to try.

To me it's irrelevant if it's desirable or not. I prefer trying to make things fit even if it's not something that I like.

So do I, but making things fit does not require making the irrational assumption that every line spoken by every character has to be literal fact, even when the character is mentally unstable. Sometimes the most plausible, realistic explanation is that the speaker was simply wrong, lying, or deluded. It's unrealistic to reject that possibility, because real people are wrong about things all the time.

But on that note, as far as I can discern the United States has about 11 operational aircraft carriers and all are captained by men. So is it really beyond the realm of possibility that all of the 12(another assumption) Starship class vessels are captained by men? I think it's definitely possible. And while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, we do have, as you pointed out, about five data points aligned with this conclusion, and none that contradict the conclusion.

I see the burden of proof as the other way around. It falls on the less probable claim, the more problematical one. The presumption of nearly the entire Star Trek franchise except the piece of hot sexist garbage that is "Turnabout Intruder" is that Starfleet is not misogynistic and discriminatory, that women are theoretically equal even if TOS fails to show it in practice. "Turnabout" is the exception, not the rule. So the burden of proof is on "Turnabout" to prove the existence of sexism, not on the rest of the franchise to prove its absence. The default expectation is that there are female captains. The postulate that there are none is therefore the one that has to be proven, and as the provable number of male captains is no greater than one would expect through random chance, the postulate is therefore unsupported by the evidence (because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).

Certainly, but it's probably based on some observations. Just look at flat-earthers, they observe real world phenomenon, but then take it to wild tangents. I think Janice Lester observed some real situation, and she interpreted to be a misogynistic, systemicly sexist, boy's club of Starship captains. So the question is what was the real world observation her extremist view based on?

As I already said, I can buy some degree of resurgent sexism in the culture, but that does not require presuming an absence of female captains specifically. There are other, less extreme ways it could manifest. Maybe Lester grew up on a colony world and was exposed to a degree of chauvinism not practiced on Earth or by Starfleet as a whole.

Vulcanians were already in the solar system during the Phoenix's test flight. All they had to do was perform a braking maneuver.

The only statement in the four Star Trek series that indicated Vulcanians had warp drive before humanity is Quark's line in "Little Green Men" and if we take that at face value then Vulcanians only discovered warp drive after 1948. That's a line I think we can conclude Quark was mistaken about.

That's ridiculous. The whole plot of First Contact revolved around the premise that it was Cochrane's warp flight that attracted the Vulcans' attention to Earth in the first place. If they didn't have warp drive, that means they would've had to invest a huge amount of time and resources into reaching Sol relativistically, which could only mean that they would have been already coming to contact us 16 years before, in which case Cochrane's flight would've made no difference. (And no way were they "just passing through." Stars are not that close together that you could just coincidentally pass through one system on the way to a different one.)

Besides, if they didn't have warp drive, how would they have detected or recognized Cochrane's warp signature for what it was?

I respect that point of view. However, I think it disregards A LOT of on screen evidence that points to a different conclusion.

It makes little sense to talk about "evidence" from a work of fiction as if it were the same as real-world data. Fiction is just pretending. If the creators of the fiction change what they pretend, then its reality changes. The way the Star Trek universe is defined now is not the way it was defined 50 years ago, and in many ways that's an improvement. It's the nature of the creative process to correct mistakes and make improvements along the way. To cling to the original, rough-draft version of a creation and reject its refinements is getting the whole thing backward.

We both know that the "did Romulans have warp drive" is a hotly debated topic. Starflight doesn't require FTL technology to accomplish.

It's not about starflight, it's about whether an interstellar war is even possible when one side needs decades to cover distances that the other can cover in weeks. That wouldn't be an interstellar war, it'd be one side capturing the other's home system before the other could even get past their own Oort cloud.

It's also about the fact that Romulans do canonically have warp drive. Your denial of Enterprise does not negate its existence as part of the whole, any more than the flat-Earthers you were mocking before make the Earth flat by their denial. It's an imperfect series, but there are things about it that are definite improvements on some of the earlier series' shortcomings.

 

[Tenacity]

Read my lips:
Janice Lester is a nutjob.

But when did she become one?

Always?

Or was it only after James traded having long tern relationships in exchange for climbing the promotion ladder, then she realized that she would never achieve her career goals, then falling back on a secondary profession. Resentment grew.

Could someone who was a complete nutjob have planned and executed the complex multi-year plan that resulted in Janice's consciousness being transferred inside Kirk?

Was she batshit crazy, or was she Ernst Blofeld?

One of the reason I don't discount that women can't become starship captains in that time period is the TOS time period is obviously a sexist one, it would be easy to see that culture only advancing males to top starship positions. A glass ceiling below starship captain.

Another reason is I don't exspect a 23rd century society to have rules that mirror modern day. Societies change and change again, what we have now is unlikely to be carved in stone for the rest of time.

Doesn't make any sense, who says societies do?

 

[MAGolding]

The few colonies shown in TOS only had a handful of people, assuming most humans who joined Starfleet are from the Sol system, there is no shortage of people living on Earth to keep the population growing. I think Deneva's population was in the millions, the colony with the spores did not seem to have any children at all. And not much is known about the other Federation planets.

The population of Deneva, which has been colonized for over a century, is given in "Operation: Annihilate!":

MCCOY: Captain, I understand your concern. Your affection for Spock, the fact that your nephew is the last survivor of your brother's family.
KIRK: No, no, Bones. There's more than two lives at stake here. I cannot let it spread beyond this colony, even if it means destroying a million people down there.

SPOCK: I regret I see no other choice for you, Captain. We already know this thing has destroyed three civilisations. Perhaps more.
MCCOY: Gentlemen, I want it stopped, too, but not at the cost of destroying over a million people.
SPOCK: Including myself, Doctor, and Captain Kirk's young nephew. Understandably upsetting, but once it spreads past here, there are dozens of colonies beyond and billions of people.
MCCOY: If killing five people saves ten, it's a bargain. Is that your simple logic, Mister Spock?
KIRK: I will accept neither of those alternatives, gentlemen. I cannot let this thing expand beyond this planet, nor do I intend to kill a million or more people to stop it. I want another answer. I'm putting you gentlemen on the hot seat with me. I want that third alternative.

http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/29.htm

The Sandoval Colony in "This Side of Paradise" is described:

KIRK: Mister Spock, there were one hundred and fifty men, women, and children in that colony. What are the chances of survivors?

http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/25.htm

So apparently there were children in the colony, although none were seen in the episode.

The population of Marcos XII in "And The Children Shall Lead":

GORGON: (echoy voice) You have done very well, my friends. You have done what must be done. You have come aboard the Enterprise. Now our destination is a Federation settlement. Captain Kirk will undoubtedly choose a closer station. Do not let that deter you. Marcos Twelve has millions of people on it. Nearly a million will join us as our friends. The rest will be our enemies. Together with our other friends who will join us, we will defeat our enemies as we defeated them on Triacus. A million friends on Marcos will make us invincible. No one will tell us where to go, when to sleep, where to eat. The universe will be mine to command, yours to play in. To accomplish this great mission, we must first control the Enterprise. To control the ship, we first must control the crew. You know how to do that. That is your next task. And as you believe, so shall you do, so shall you do. As you believe, so shall you do, so shall you do. As you believe, so shall you do, so shall you do.

http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/60.htm

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Could someone who was a complete nutjob have planned and executed the complex multi-year plan that resulted in Janice's consciousness being transferred inside Kirk?

Like the punchline in the old chestnut about the guy with the flat tire, whose lugnuts fell into a storm drain, and was advised by an insane asylum inmate to "take one lugnut from each of the other three wheels, and it will get you to a gas station",

. . . crazy, not stupid.

 

[J.T.B.]

But I think that the most obvious interpretation is that in her view the realm of Starship captains is a boys club. There are many specific words that push this interpretation rather than "there's no room for women in a captains life."

How do you interpret the further lines in that scene?

Lester: Your world of starship captains doesn't admit women. It isn't fair.
Kirk: No, it isn't. And you punished and tortured me because of it.
Lester: I loved you. We could've roamed among the stars.
Kirk: We'd have killed each other.

When and how would they roam among the stars? Separately on different ships? Being assigned together doesn't seem like a sure thing for two people for two people in a relationship who are both also pursuing the career goal of being a starship CO.

But as I mentioned earlier I don't think there are any institutional rules explicitly prohibiting women from becoming Starship captains.

The OP said "women cannot be starship captains in Starfleet/UESPA," which sounded like some kind of institutional rule to me.

Add to that that I think "Starship" refers to a specific class of vessel. Remember the Enterprise is a Starship class ship. Let's just assume that there are twelve Starship class ships(we don't know that for certain, but it doesn't really matter). That means that this is an extremely elite group.

Does this mean that women could command other Starfleet vessels, just not starships? It doesn't seem at all likely that a female captain who had proven herself a capable commander on a smaller ship would be denied the opportunity to go on to a higher command simply because of her gender. It makes one wonder why an ambitious woman would even consider a Starfleet career with such discriminatory barriers.

However, I think a big factor, maybe the biggest, is that perhaps becoming a Starship captain requires the approval of other existing Starship captains. It could be that one blackball is enough to bar someone entrance into the elite world of Starship captains.

That doesn't seem likely, either. It's not the Elks Club. There are officers in several levels of authority above the starship captains who would want to make those decisions.

 

[Nyotarules]

The population of Deneva, which has been colonized for over a century, is given in "Operation: Annihilate!":





http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/29.htm

The Sandoval Colony in "This Side of Paradise" is described:



http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/25.htm

So apparently there were children in the colony, although none were seen in the episode.

The population of Marcos XII in "And The Children Shall Lead":



http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/60.htm

So if there was a human colony bias that fertile female need to stay planetside and have babies, that colony would be the spore colony. No careers in Starfleet for Dr. Leila Kalomi!

 

[uniderth]

As I've said, I'm willing to make the effort of imagining some alternative, hypothetical science-fiction future where such a gender-based ban might exist, but there is zero way to reconcile that idea with the facts of the Star Trek universe overall, and no reason to try.

Yes, I think we've seen a few examples in this thread so far about such a ban could work with mixed results. But I think we agree that in the Star Trek universe there is no gender based ban on females becoming Starship captains.

I see the burden of proof as the other way around. It falls on the less probable claim, the more problematical one. The presumption of nearly the entire Star Trek franchise except the piece of hot sexist garbage that is "Turnabout Intruder" is that Starfleet is not misogynistic and discriminatory, that women are theoretically equal even if TOS fails to show it in practice. "Turnabout" is the exception, not the rule.

Well that's the thing right. In a nonsexist or misogynistic society men and women would be free to pursue whatever career they wish. However, that may still result in general trends of men and women pursuing different interests, even though they are free to choose any. I doubt that in such a society you would see an exact 50-50 split of men and women in every career. Mainly because women and men don't exist in a vacuum and there will always be certain predilections or cultural influences skewing the metric.

So the burden of proof is on "Turnabout" to prove the existence of sexism, not on the rest of the franchise to prove its absence. The default expectation is that there are female captains. The postulate that there are none is therefore the one that has to be proven, and as the provable number of male captains is no greater than one would expect through random chance, the postulate is therefore unsupported by the evidence (because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).

Sure, random chance in isolation would have us assume that out of twelve captains six would be male and six would be female. At most we see five male captains. So yes, that within the realm of chance. However, chance would also have us meeting the captains randomly. If we met five captains We would expect either three to be female and two to be male, or three to be male and two to be female. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that out of a random pool of six man and six women that all five we meet would be men.

That's ridiculous. The whole plot of First Contact revolved around the premise that it was Cochrane's warp flight that attracted the Vulcans' attention to Earth in the first place. If they didn't have warp drive, that means they would've had to invest a huge amount of time and resources into reaching Sol relativistically, which could only mean that they would have been already coming to contact us 16 years before, in which case Cochrane's flight would've made no difference. (And no way were they "just passing through." Stars are not that close together that you could just coincidentally pass through one system on the way to a different one.)

They were already passing through on a survey mission.

TROI: They're on a survey mission. They have no interest in Earth. ...Too primitive.

Besides, if they didn't have warp drive, how would they have detected or recognized Cochrane's warp signature for what it was?

Maybe they had some idea of what effects a theoretical ftl drive would have. Then when their sensors detected it they decided to stop as such an invention would be of immense value.

It makes little sense to talk about "evidence" from a work of fiction as if it were the same as real-world data. Fiction is just pretending.

Which is exactly why its ok to pretend that it is evidence.

It's also about the fact that Romulans do canonically have warp drive. Your denial of Enterprise does not negate its existence as part of the whole, any more than the flat-Earthers you were mocking before make the Earth flat by their denial.

if we are dealing with the whole then we have to include all the games and books, etc. As you pointed out its fiction, so saying, "I don't consider Enterprise canon." is vastly different than saying the physical world is not spherical.

It's an imperfect series, but there are things about it that are definite improvements on some of the earlier series' shortcomings.

In my opinion it had few redeeming qualities. Yes, there were some good moments and I do like some episodes. but on the whole I found it tired and cliche. Not to mention the problems it has being consistent with the other series. But that is a discussion for another thread.

How do you interpret the further lines in that scene?

Lester: Your world of starship captains doesn't admit women. It isn't fair.
Kirk: No, it isn't. And you punished and tortured me because of it.
Lester: I loved you. We could've roamed among the stars.
Kirk: We'd have killed each other.

When and how would they roam among the stars? Separately on different ships? Being assigned together doesn't seem like a sure thing for two people for two people in a relationship who are both also pursuing the career goal of being a starship CO.

I think her dream was to be the Captain with Kirk there (maybe as first officer), because she thinks that its better be dead than live alone as a woman.

The OP said "women cannot be starship captains in Starfleet/UESPA," which sounded like some kind of institutional rule to me.

Yeah, I'll admit I kind of lost the plot of my own thread. But I did figure out a way to make the line work without entirely dismissing it.

Does this mean that women could command other Starfleet vessels, just not starships? It doesn't seem at all likely that a female captain who had proven herself a capable commander on a smaller ship would be denied the opportunity to go on to a higher command simply because of her gender. It makes one wonder why an ambitious woman would even consider a Starfleet career with such discriminatory barriers.

I'd argue that, yes, they would command other Starfleet ships. But 12 (assuming thats how many there were) is a small number compared to the probably hundred of other starfleet ships out there. As discussed with CHristopher if you took a random sampling in a vacuum you'd expect that there would be a 50-50 male to female ratio. But Starfleet doesn't exist in a vacuum(oh wait...). Would there be any factors that might skew the metric?

Here's where I pull numbers out of my butt:

Lets say there are 50 officers being considered for command of the 12 Starships. without any other influences we would expect 25 males and 25 females. But, lets say there are some other elements at play. Gary Mitchell states that there are almost one hundred women on the Enterprise. So let say that "almost 100" is anyweher between 51 and 99. We don't know if this is before or after the compliment was upgraded to 430. So that gives is a range of:

203 Total crew:
25% - 48% Female crew members.

430 Total crew:
12% - 23% Female crew members.

So at the extremes we have at most 48% females and at the low end we have 12%. Averaging this out and we get about 30%. Meaning that its possible that men are more than twice as likely to join Starfleet than women.

So out of our fifty candidates now 35 are men and 15 are women. But that doesn't take into account some other things. In "Who Mourns For Adonais" McCoy expresses an expectation that women in Starfleet leave to get married. Now this certainly can't be interpreted to mean that ALL, or even MOST, women leave Starfleet. But since it's a thing enough for McCoy to mention it, we can expect greater than 50% of women leave Starfleet.

Add that to our calculation and that leaves with with 42 male candidates and 8 female candidates. None of these numbers comes from institutional sexism and instead comes from the free choices of women. Now if these numbers proportionally transferred over to the number of Starship captains, we would expect to see 10 male captains and 2 female captains.

This definitely isn't beyond the realm of the sample of captains we get in Star Trek. However, we still haven't factored in things like, the individual qualifications of the candidates, the timing of the command opportunities, physical strength qualifications, etc. It's not beyond the realm of plausibility that there are no female captains in command of Starship class vessels, and none of these factors have to do with sexism or misogyny.

So for me, if I can make Janice Lester's line work(even though its a corrupt interpretation of the truth) I prefer that to just throwing it out.

That doesn't seem likely, either. It's not the Elks Club. There are officers in several levels of authority above the starship captains who would want to make those decisions.

I admit that I just made that up. But we are talking about a fictional space force after all.

 

[Nyotarules]

In "Who Mourns For Adonais" McCoy expresses an expectation that women in Starfleet leave to get married. Now this certainly can't be interpreted to mean that ALL, or even MOST, women leave Starfleet. But since it's a thing enough for McCoy to mention it, we can expect greater than 50% of women leave Starfleet.

Another sexist line that dates the show.

 

[uniderth]

Another sexist line that dates the show.

I don't think it's sexist for women to choose to leave their career (permanently or temporarily) to get married. If they want to choose that they are free to do so. Now it may have been presumptuous on McCoy's part to assume that Lt. Palamas specifically was going to choose that. But it must have been a trend he noticed in order for him to bring it up.

 

[Guy Gardener]

It's not sexist for women to choose to leave their career (permanently or temporarily) to get married. If they want to choose that they are free to do so. Now it may have been presumptuous on McCoy's part to assume that Lt. Palamas specifically was going to choose that. But it must have been a trend he noticed in order for him to bring it up.

No money.

Who the %%ck is going to volunteer to be nanny to some other buggers kids, at no remuneration?

If you have kids, and no family willing to take up your responsibilities, you have to quit your unpaid job as a Space hero, and tend to your herd.

Unless there's a daycare blackmarket.

 

[uniderth]

No money.

No. Please, no. I beg you. The "No Money" debate is the kill switch for any Star Trek thread.

 

[Mark 2000]

I hate to bring reality into the retcon fest but the creator and writing staff of TOS were WWII vets and people that lived through WWII and Korea.

I think your knowledge of what women were doing during the war is limited. We don't have to get into that, though, to simply say Gene et al were misogynists plain and simple. And Gene would admit to that later in life. Saying "it was the times" is not a good answer because many, many people at the time knew better. I'd hate future people to look at the rise of anti-immigration and racism today and say "they didn't know better" because we do, just like they did in the 60's. And Star Trek degraded women in a lot more ways than just not giving them command.