Methamphetamines are in the same family of drugs as amphetamines.
I looked it up before posting.
Amphetamines were popular in the 60s, and Meth is very popular right now.
Why no women captains?
- Thread starter uniderth
- Start date
I looked it up before posting.
Amphetamines were popular in the 60s, and Meth is very popular right now.
I was just commenting on the search perimeters. I typed in "Star Trek Meth". You typed in "Star Trek amphetamines". So we got different results
And we have different (regional) googles.
Here is a suggestion:
Possibly there was a space travelling society which was diplomatically important to the Federation. Possibly this society was capable of allying with either the Federation or the Klingons, and might tip the scales decisively they they allied with either side.
So both the Federation and the Klingons made great efforts to curry favor with that society.
And maybe that society contained people similar enough to humans to be able to easily tell the difference between human males and females. There are lots of human looking aliens in Star Trek.
And maybe that society doesn't believe that females should be in positions of authority, especially military authority. Maybe they found high federation female officials and Starfleet officers offensive, and considered it an insult to them for a high ranking female to be in charge of any visiting federation group.
And maybe that society opened several ports on its planets for peaceful visits by Klingon and Federation ships. And the Federation had to made a lot of visits to those ports for operations in that strategically vital region of space, and to check on Klingon activities, and to deter the Klingons from try to take over that society.
So the Federation could send ships with female captains to those ports to keep track of what the Klingons were doing, and have male officers pretend to be the captains while in those ports. But that would be lying,and maybe Starfleet officers never lie. And maybe lists of real Starfleet officers are too public for Starfleet to get away with using fake captains.
So maybe Starfleet had to abolish female eligibility for high level command positions.
Maybe Starfleet had to restrict female officers to ground assignments and non combat and non command roles on ships. Maybe a lot of female captains and admirals were fired, or resigned, or joined the Starfleet Reserve, or were reassigned to non combat and non command roles, or went into suspended animation to put their carriers on hold until the situation changed. Maybe young female officers were now limited to non combat and non command roles and faced a legal glass ceiling in their possible future rank. So many young females felt like they should only serve in Starfleet for a decade or so of adventures in space and then resign to get married or go into another career.
And possibly a number of Starfleet branches were temporarily spun off into allegedly civilian organizations, even though there were provisions to quickly reintegrate them back into Starfleet whenever the situation changed. And a lot of female Starfleet officers joined those organizations.
And that hypothetical situation should have lasted since sometime before Janice Lester got upset at the glass ceiling in Starfeet. Possibly Lester actually entered command school and was on the track to become a starship captain (though her doubtful mental stability indicates she wouldn't have lasted long) when the new policy and glass ceiling was decreed.
So I guess that policy might have been instituted at least ten or twenty years before "Turnabout Intruder", and lasted for an unknown period of time afterwards. Apparently it was lifted in time for the captain of the Saratoga in the Voyage Home to get her position.
So that policy might have been instituted soon after or before the visit to Talos IV in "the Cage", which no doubt would have put a damper on Number One's career prospects..
In "The Cage", Pike couldn't t get use to his new yeoman, Colt:
Those lines were cut from "The Menagerie".
However, Memory Alpha claims that Una, Number One, was already an lieutenant commander in Short Treks "Q & A", and thus before the Talos IV incident.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Una
In any case, being second in command of the starship Enterprise doesn't mean that she was eligible to be appointed command officer of a starship. She might only have been eligible to command in the absence of the assigned captain. So it is uncertain whether the hypothetical glass ceiling was already in effect during "The Cage".
Discovery, with captain Philippa Georgiou, Admiral Katrina Cornwell, other high ranking female Starfleet officers, indicates there is no Glass ceiling. So any fictional univesre that includes both Discovery and TOS should have that hypothetical glass ceiling instiututed after the second season of Discovery.
Sarek didn't have to be carried in the TNG episode "Sarek".. How old was he?
And Sarek is diagnosed with
So T'Pol would not be expected to be very feeble when aged merely 160, if that would have been her approximate age in "The Immunity Syndrome".
And there is no reason to assume that T'Pau, whatever her age was in "Amok Time", was so feeble that she had to be carried in a Sedan chair or litter. The Sedan chair or litter was to signify her rank, not because she was too feeble to walk.
Last edited:
Why not use "person" then if it was to include both men and woman.
Or "beings" if you buy into the hypothesis (I don't) that all federation species mixed their personnel and space fleets together on day one.
Okay, then what about the absence of women in the upper ranks?
Considering they can't possibly exist in the same continuity, based on onscreen evidence alone, I don't see how that would fix it.
The long standing sexism in Trek writing means that we very rarely see matriarchal societies. In many animal species, females are larger and stronger than males or pretty much identical. The Rhandarites in TMP were androgynous but that never made it past the off-screen background.
Trek most often treated matriarchal rule as a bit of a joke (Angel One, Bashir's reaction to the Mintakans) and, while TOS featured female leaders, they were inexplicably young and hot, so they could be romanced by Kirk, Spock, or McCoy where their emotions could be used to gain some advantage. T'pau was one cool exception.
I think the bottom line is that Trek writers only placed women in prominent positions if there was an in-plot reason to do so.
Actually, if Decker had been a woman in TMP (they gender swapped Saavik from the original concept of Xon after all) the plot would not have missed a beat and it could have been the first gender balanced cast of the franchise.
Trek most often treated matriarchal rule as a bit of a joke (Angel One, Bashir's reaction to the Mintakans) and, while TOS featured female leaders, they were inexplicably young and hot, so they could be romanced by Kirk, Spock, or McCoy where their emotions could be used to gain some advantage. T'pau was one cool exception.
I think the bottom line is that Trek writers only placed women in prominent positions if there was an in-plot reason to do so.
Actually, if Decker had been a woman in TMP (they gender swapped Saavik from the original concept of Xon after all) the plot would not have missed a beat and it could have been the first gender balanced cast of the franchise.
Roddenberry defiantly had issues but I think he was already out the door at this time. If any blame for this episode is needed it makes more sense I suspect to direct it towards Fred Freiberger and who wrote the script.. Roddenberry provided the story but he wasn't exactly around in season 3 and the person who wrote it out was someone named Arthur H Singer.
Jason
Roddenberry and only Roddenberry wrote the story outline, which repeatedly uses the term, “female-hysterical.”
Arthur Singer was the story editor during season three; for better or worse, he worked on many scripts that year, although typically without credit.
I see it as the broad strokes being the same, details being different.
Problem would be, given the relationship and interactions between Kirk and Decker, Kirk would be seen (in 1979) as being sexist and dismissive towards Decker when he dressed Decker down and dismissed Decker's suggestions. Spock to a lesser degree also put Decker down a few times. If you have a gender equal society on display this shouldn't be problem, male or female you're occasionally are going to have the chain of command hit you in the face.
In 1979 would the writers have had to adjust the script to accommodate a female Decker?
All that said, I do think having Decker be a woman would have been a good idea. The then gay relationship between Decker and Ilia would have been fantastic. It would cemented Star Trek position as being societally forward.
Instead of just saying it was, when it really wasn't.
TNG did much better than TOS, but even in TNG women in Starfleet authority positions were notibly lower in number, with men being the default.
Because the line was written in 1966.
It's interesting isn't it that our perception of the same scene carries significantly different connotations by changing one character's gender? They should have done it more often.
Well, we all know they couldn't go higher than first officer in the ranks.
What you just read above was a joke, perhaps not a good one but an attempt if nothing else.
Kidding aside, maybe there are women admirals and women fleet commanders, just not on screen.
Women are so high on the command chain one would need a telescope to see them and not many of us have those.
Here is another idea. What if it was just a fluke their was no female Captains when she tried joining Starfleet. For starters the fleet was much smaller back then I think. You only had 12 Constitution Class ships I once heard. Between female Captains being promoted or retiring and maybe a few who were killed in action or hadn't been assigned their first ship yet or were in charge of starbases or other Starfleet faculties you had for a brief moment no female Captains who had a ship at that point in time. If she came back months or a year later it would have looked differently. She just looked things up at a fluke time.
Jason
Jason
Effort?
Jason, a Star Ship is a Capital Ship.
Its a distinct class of space ship, built for a specific purpose.
Starfleet may have had only 12 Star Ships, but they likely had thousands of other ships of many types of classes, from garbage scowl to colony ship.
And the society we see in TOS was also written in the 1960's. This is when the universe of 23rd century was created.
How would have had a effect on her career fifteen years in the future when realistically she would be in a position to become a starship captain? Look at today's US Navy, while commissioned women officers can become warship commanding officers, it pretty rare that this happens. Not having a woman C.O. when a woman enters the US naval academy would not in of itself prevent that woman from becoming a C.O. in two decades.
Culture. Commodore Stone used man owing to the professional assignment he was referring to did not include women.
I don't know that starfleet would be the ones to operate garbage scowls and colony ships. Civilian contractors instead?.
Exactly. It was much more acceptable to use the sense of "man" meaning "person" in the 1960s than it is today.
Similar threads
