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Anyone else disturbed by La Forges sexual harrasment of Leah Brahms?

Crazyewok

Crazyewok

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I think La forges treatment was stalker ish and would in most work places be considered sexual harrasment.

The hollodeck program itself was shocking but watching him perv over her and stalking her via her personal data? Yuk!

And at the end she appologised to him!

Hell he should of bern given a repramand and sent on a starfleet sexual harrasment course!
 
I don't think it was sexual harassment but I do think it was incredibly stupid of him to not just tell her up front about what happened. It makes no sense. As soon as he met her he should have explained that he worked with a holographic version of her to get out of that boobytrap. There was no reason to keep that a secret.
 
The purpose of the episode was to comment on the issue, obviously. And since it's Trek, the commentary is a bit timid, but also manages to give the viewer a new angle, allowing him (?) to sympathize with the stalker for a change.

In-universe, our heroes would have to live in a post-stalking society, with the social mores to match, because stalking is so ridiculously easy as to be unavoidable. And indeed holodeck use follows intriguing, perhaps counterintuitive social mores - no privacy, say. This should affect how LaForge, his colleagues and his "victim" view the situation, and we can argue it indeed does.

Timo Saloniemi
 
I can't deny I wouldn't be tempted to create a program on an unobtainable high school crush or particularly attractive classmate.

If holodecks at the scale of TNG were ever invented it would certainly be an issue.
 
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Technically, in Naked Now, Tasha was arguably clearly in a state where she was not capable of giving consent.

I don't think Geordi crossed a line in Galaxy's Child. He never touched her and he backed off when she made it clear she wasn't available. He was a little dense in signal reception, and he never specifically asked the computer to create the duplicate in Booby Trap. Geordi is no worse than the protagonist in every romantic comedy, just he's probably seen too many of those movies and assumed he would get the same result.
 
JirinPanthosa said:
Technically, in Naked Now, Tasha was arguably clearly in a state where she was not capable of giving consent.
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Also, Data was a superior officer in her chain of command. So even if the status of her ability to consent was up in the air, *that* should have stopped Data from allowing anything to happen. BUT, she initiated it, and if I recall correctly it wasn't clear to everyone that there was a medical issue at hand, and Data is used to doing what people want when it doesn't interfere with his duties, AND it may have been the first time he was offered an opportunity to experience that aspect of human interaction - so his motives in participating go just a bit beyond the idea that he was some kind of perv who took advantage. Aside from the technicality of rank and an unknown outside force that I don't think even she was aware was influencing her, she clearly had the experience and the upper hand in that situation.
JirinPanthosa said:
I don't think Geordi crossed a line in Galaxy's Child. He never touched her and he backed off when she made it clear she wasn't available. He was a little dense in signal reception, and he never specifically asked the computer to create the duplicate in Booby Trap. Geordi is no worse than the protagonist in every romantic comedy, just he's probably seen too many of those movies and assumed he would get the same result.
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Admittedly, it isn't screen canon, but I was left with the impression that while Geordi's simulation of Leah may have started accidentally with the events of "The Booby Trap", he didn't stop bringing up the holographic version of her after that point. Which is kind of creepy. But, to be fair, their encounter with the holographic Moriarty a season earlier may have blurred the ethics of that for LaForge - because holographic Brahms certainly seemed REAL, so who exactly could say that she wasn't just as valid an individual *separate* from the original Dr. Brahms as Tom Riker was from Will Riker?
 
Crazyewok said:
A sexual holodeck program is no diffrent if not worse than me collecting photos of a unsuspecting work college and creating a weird stalker shrine out of them.
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Whew, I'm glad I'm not the only one who does that.
:whistle:

Sideways related - I'm nostalgia-watching Spenser: For Hire on DVD. Second to the last episode of the series featured Susan Gibney! It was shot about a year before Booby Trap. She played the daughter of a USN Captain, in love with one of his African American crew members. She of course gets killed in the opening scenes, and he of course is blamed, but of course it wasn't him...
 
Disturbed? No. Sad? extremely
Crazyewok said:
A sexual holodeck program is no diffrent if not worse than me collecting photos of a unsuspecting work college and creating a weird stalker shrine out of them.
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But she's not a colleague. They don't know each other. It's more akin to developing a crush on a celeb & having all their movies & posters, knowing everything about them, fantasizing about them etc... Certainly that can become stalkerish, but just as I'm sure celebs have many encounters that run the gamut from benign to stalking, & every nuanced step in between, I'm sure Geordi was one of those terribly awkward steps in between, & she reacted badly to it because she's not use to strangers thinking of her that way, because she's not a public figure, & once Geordi realized what a catastrophic ass he'd been, he adjusted appropriately
 
Even when I first watched it as a teenage girl, Geordi seemed like the typical creepy sexist nerd to me. You know, the kind of guys I had to deal with in nerddom. The Leah Brahms episodes are really awful.
 
JirinPanthosa said:
Geordi is no worse than the protagonist in every romantic comedy, just he's probably seen too many of those movies and assumed he would get the same result.
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Romantic comedies are guilty themselves, even to the point of romantacising harmful behaviour. Stalking, Actually as just one example is a film about how different men harrass different women under the guise of "loving" them.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/03/rom-coms-women-stalker-myth-study
 
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