Or so Roddenberry told the tale...and past experience makes me wonder how much of anything he said about the network was actually true.
I don't see anything about percentage of men to women in the pitch linked here. Maybe I missed it.
Gene's original pitch to the network.
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I don't see anything about percentage of men to women in the pitch linked here. Maybe I missed it.
Is that from The Making of Star Trek? It sounds like another heavily-exaggerated Roddenberry-told tale to me.
The ratio was improved slightly in TMP if you take into account Rand and DiFalco. I'm not sure that the crew in the Rec Deck was 50/50. Certainly as far as the aliens go there didn't seem to be many women but I suppose we have to take into account that Rhaandarites are androgynous, saurians are reptiles (i.e. boobless), and arcturians are clones (i.e. boobless - if indeed they aren't sexless) so a casual glance wouldn't tell us the sex of an individual.
^^^
This - it goes back to him claiming:
"The network hated having a woman as second in command..."
Where it was more to the point:
- Majel Barret was intimately involved with GR at the time, and they were concerned that if the show went to series - what would happen if the two broke up? You'd have a main character actor and the EP in a bad situation with each other.
And a scandal in the newspapers...
Why not look at the military as it is today? What's the percentage of women present? I highly doubt it is 50%. And I don't think that is attributable to discrimination, so much as the number of women who actually want to join the military. It's hard to predict how that would be in the future, as it would require the cooperation of other factors changing.
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That wasn't the concern. The concern was that GR hired an unknown to be the female lead and that unknown was his mistress.
I don't mind there being an imbalance in contemporary shows like Stargate but you can't apply that to Star Trek. Firstly, Starfleet isn't military, and secondly there is no in-story support for such a claim. The other issue is that while there are a fair number of women in the Starfleet background - the issue is with the repeated and continued trend for characters in the foreground with speaking roles to be overwhelmingly male.
We need to flip the argument around. We know that the sexes are supposed to be equal. What steps can they take to demonstrate that on screen?
There is overwhelming in-story support for Starfleet being military. It has courts-martial. A court-martial, by definition, is "a court consisting of military or naval personnel appointed by a commander to try charges of offenses by soldiers, sailors, etc., against military or naval law." Also, Starfleet is unambiguously the organization tasked with the armed defense of the Federation in times of war. It was Starfleet that fought the Klingons when war was declared in "Errand of Mercy." It was Starfleet that waged the war against the Dominion. When Kirk discovered that the Romulans or the Gorn were destroying border outposts, he didn't call in the "actual" military for help, but he took onto his own vessel the responsibility to employ armed force against the Federation's enemies -- the role played by a nation's military.
More generally, Starfleet has the organization of a military, with officers' ranks and enlisted ratings. It is commanded by flag officers, and junior officers are compelled to obey the orders of their superiors. Its personnel are required to wear uniforms and observe a dress code while on duty. There is nothing about it that isn't military.
The misapprehension comes from equating "military" with "militant." Some people assume that Starfleet is not military because waging war is not its primary objective. But that doesn't follow. The military doesn't cease to exist in peacetime. A military can have many responsibilities other than warfare, including exploration. The British Navy (a model for Starfleet) conducted extensive exploration in the 18th-19th centuries. The US Army Corps of Engineers has worked on many peacetime construction projects such as redirecting rivers, building dams, and so forth. The fact that they aren't in combat doesn't make them civilian.
It is true, however, that it would be a mistake to assume that Starfleet's organization is precisely analogous to that of any present-day military organization. After all, the world's current militaries differ from one another and from their historical predecessors in various ways.
This is exactly the problem.
When the writers start coming up with stuff like "Let's shrink the Defiant!" they're not asking for scientific explanations but for an alternative to having someone say "abracadabra."
Actually they handled the science of shrinking the Defiant about as plausibly as you could handle such a premise. Clearly they read Asimov's Fantastic Voyage novelization.
Quite so. They went with some ridiculousness that only made it seem more unbelievable. I'd much rather deal with TAS's "the radiation from the star caused them to shrink to 2cm" and even TOS's "the polution in their environment sped them up beyond our ability to see them." You can argue the plausibility later, if you want, but you don't spend 10 mins discussing it.
The middle ground on just how much of a military Starfleet is might be that while their organization and training is military in nature, their overall mission is one of exploration, whereas the basic purpose of a military is to kill people and break things.
As for the shrinking discussion, they shrunk a runabout, not the Defiant. Personally, I think what helped sell that whole plot point was Kira laughing her ass off over the ridiculousness of the whole thing, a nice way to tell the audience to just go with it, we know it's dumb, but it'll be fun.
As for the shrinking discussion, they shrunk a runabout, not the Defiant. Personally, I think what helped sell that whole plot point was Kira laughing her ass off over the ridiculousness of the whole thing, a nice way to tell the audience to just go with it, we know it's dumb, but it'll be fun.
Yes, I consider Starfleet to be quasi-military. There are certainly branches (like the MACOs) whose primary purpose is military but the exploration branch doesn't really fit into a neat military definition, since the crew spend most of their time functioning as scientists, aid workers, explorers, and diplomats (wagon train to the stars doesn't conjure a view of a military organisation) and security staff seem to function more like police officers and bodyguards rather than soldiers. In times of war the ships do function like a navy, in TWoK the civilian scientists viewed Starfleet as military, and in NuTrek they've been defined as a 'peacekeeping armada' (is it just me or does that sound creepy?).
It's also true to say that some cultures do have a history of involving women in the military to a far greater degree than the UK or USA.
Again, I come back to the point: what should they do to demonstrate equality on screen?
The MACOs were not part of Earth Starfleet at all. The Earth Starfleet seen in ENT was explicitly a non-military organization (despite its use of military ranks -- kind of a conceptual glitch there), and so needed to team up with the actual military, the MACOs, when a wartime situation arose. But that has no bearing on the status of the Federation Starfleet, which obviously is the primary (and seemingly exclusive) military organization of the UFP.
As I already said, those things are, or at least can be, included in the definition of a military. No nation is at war 100 percent of the time, so a military cannot be assumed to exist exclusively for combat purposes. Again, don't confuse "military" with "militant." There are plenty of scientists, engineers, aid workers, and explorers within the armed forces of the United States. Yes, Starfleet's priorities are more heavily shifted toward such activities than those of our military, but it's a matter of degree, not type.
Further: In "Errand of Mercy," Kirk told the Organians, "I'm a soldier, not a diplomat." Interestingly, not long thereafter in "Metamorphosis," McCoy told Kirk, "Maybe you're a soldier so often that you forget you're also trained to be a diplomat." In "Obsession," Kirk asks Ensign Garrovick for his "military appraisal of the techniques used against the creature."
Then there's this exchange from "Whom Gods Destroy":
GARTH: You, Captain, are second only to me as the finest military commander in the galaxy.
KIRK: That's very flattering. I am primarily an explorer now, Captain Garth.
GARTH: And so have I been. I have charted more new worlds than any man in history.
There's no question that Kirk considered himself a military man first, an explorer second, and a diplomat a distant third. He was modeled on Horatio Hornblower, after all. Picard considered himself an explorer first, a diplomat second, and a military man a very distant third or not at all, but he still belonged to an organization that had the structure and function of a military and that bore the primary responsibility for the Federation's defense. Any armed organization charged by the state for its defense against external threats is, by definition, its military, no matter how infrequently it actually participates in war or combat.
The best they can. I don't think it should be a matter of mere quotas, although it certainly wouldn't hurt to see the occasional female-majority bridge crew to balance out all the male-majority ones. (For what it's worth, the current bridge crew/senior staff on the Enterprise-E in the post-Nemesis novels published by Pocket Books is predominantly female; Picard, Worf, and Geordi are pretty much the only male core characters left, though there are several male supporting characters as well. This was not an intentional choice, but just something that happened as assorted authors -- myself included -- decided independently to add new female characters to the cast.)
Those are interesting quotes. Plenty of justification to view Starfleet as a military organisation that is just filling its time because it has no wars to occupy it.
No wonder Kirk was so annoyed with the Organians.I'd prefer random ethnicity/race & gender determination after creating the character to quotas (love interests notwithstanding) - computer programs to do that are simple. But it is interesting what you say about the books and that is sort of how it should be.
For a few years the X-men had more female members than male. There have been a lot more male X-men than female ones but the membership at this point was just 4/3 in favour of the ladies. I don't think it was a conscious choice but it was just the way certain character had percolated through to be members at the same time (Storm, Rogue, Shadowcat, & Rachel Summers/Phoenix vs Colossus, Nightcrawler & Wolverine - although Professor X and Magneto were around in the background too).
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Those are interesting quotes. Plenty of justification to view Starfleet as a military organisation that is just filling its time because it has no wars to occupy it.
Again, that's making the mistake of assuming that a military exists exclusively for purposes of war. That has historically been the primary duty of a military, but it is not the exclusive duty of a modern standing military. Starfleet is a military that has multiple primary responsibilities including, but not limited to, the armed defense of the Federation.
Starfleet was probably inspired by the US armed services' role in the exploration of space, as well as by Hornblower and the British Navy. Virtually all US astronauts for the first few decades of the space program were active Air Force or Navy officers, and almost all the rest were ex-military. It wasn't until the 1970s that anyone without a military background went into space for the United States (though Valentina Tereshkova was the first civilian human in space). So it stands to reason that a TV show in the '60s would've perceived space exploration as a military responsibility. But it's not as if the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts were going out there to shoot down flying saucers or conquer moon men. They were military, but they "came in peace for all mankind." The military's responsibility isn't just to attack or destroy, it's to face danger on behalf of the people back home. Exploring space is a dangerous profession, especially in the early days, and thus it was treated as a military responsibility.
That's what I meant: "We come in peace (shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to kill, men)."
Yeah becuase that's what Army Captains Lewis and Clark were doing alright and not exploring
Again US Army Captains Lewis and Clark and British Royal Navy CaptainJames Cook disagree with you.
Those are interesting quotes. Plenty of justification to view Starfleet as a military organisation that is just filling its time because it has no wars to occupy it.
Again, that's making the mistake of assuming that a military exists exclusively for purposes of war. That has historically been the primary duty of a military, but it is not the exclusive duty of a modern standing military. Starfleet is a military that has multiple primary responsibilities including, but not limited to, the armed defense of the Federation.
Starfleet was probably inspired by the US armed services' role in the exploration of space, as well as by Hornblower and the British Navy. Virtually all US astronauts for the first few decades of the space program were active Air Force or Navy officers, and almost all the rest were ex-military. It wasn't until the 1970s that anyone without a military background went into space for the United States (though Valentina Tereshkova was the first civilian human in space). So it stands to reason that a TV show in the '60s would've perceived space exploration as a military responsibility. But it's not as if the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts were going out there to shoot down flying saucers or conquer moon men. They were military, but they "came in peace for all mankind." The military's responsibility isn't just to attack or destroy, it's to face danger on behalf of the people back home. Exploring space is a dangerous profession, especially in the early days, and thus it was treated as a military responsibility.
And again the military was doing the exploring in the age of sail with is more like TOS Starfleet's setup.
^Right. I don't want anyone to think I'm being a military apologist; I detest war and violence as much as anyone, and I can certainly understand having a negative opinion of the combat side of the military's duties. But my personal preferences don't change the objective facts, which is that modern standing militaries often have numerous non-combat responsibilities including exploration, disaster and medical relief, large-scale public construction works, and so on. And they don't stop being military when they aren't on combat missions. This is not a question of ideology, but one of objective definition.
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