We all see Melora and Crystalis in which Bashir takes an alien with a weak skeleton and a genetic augment who has been catatonic all her life, falls in love with them, and tries to medically transform them into something he can date. In both cases completely ignoring their wishes until he realizes the effect he's having on them.
But these are only the most extreme examples. As we might recall, when Leeta first flirts with Bashir, how does she does it? She plays the part of a patient. Bashir is immediately attracted. If the woman he treated in Quickening weren't dying, he probably would have fallen in love with her too. The only women Bashir shows any affection for who are not in some way or another under his treatment either act like patients as foreplay or are named Dax.
Patients to a doctor both flatter his professional genius, and give him lots of power over them, which is probably why Bashir is attracted to them. His holodeck fantasies satisfy both these requirements in a different way.
My question is, why did this seem so normal in the 1990s? In retrospect it's incredibly creepy, but in 1999 Serena just seemed like 'Aww, genetic augment love!' Were we just so brainwashed by the manifest destiny of male characters' entitlement to the female object of their fantasy back then we didn't notice these things?
