"For the next Star Trek, let's have a show where the crew is half-Starfleet, half-Rebels who argue all the time and don't get along. Something no other Captain ever had to tolerate because they were all kick-ass enough to get their crews to cooperate from the start. Let's also have this new ship be a weakling scout vessel instead of a tough ship like all the other Captains got.
And to cap it off, let's have this Captain who can't control the crew and didn't rate enough to get a better ship compared to everyone else, be a woman! With her counterpart in the Rebel crew being a big tough man everyone respects !"
Yeah, not sexist at all.
If it was framed in that specific way, you could construe it as sexist. If that's the thought process OF the writers, yeah.
But since it
wasn't, it's not sexist. Your personal interpretation of the premise is that it leaves the door open in a glaring way for sexism, i.e. depicting Janeway as being unable to control her crew. That is not the same as "the premise is sexist", not only because it's only
potentially sexist, but also because as I said, even the potential sexism is only present in YOUR interpretation.
A state-of-the-art scout ship is still just a weakling scout ship.
It could easily be implied that it was sexist that she got stuck with a weaker ship and a nastier crew than any of the other MALE captains. They all had immediate respect, but the entire show was put together with her NOT getting respect.
Would now be a bad time to point out that Sisko's mission initially landed him on a busted, halfway-to-the-scrapyard Cardassian mining station with minimal defenses, tasked with uniting a fractured, war-torn people and preparing them for Federation membership, when half of them - including his first officer, who has no problem loudly voicing her opinions when she thinks he's wrong - don't want the Federation there in the first place? Oh, and NO SHIP at all, not even a "weakling" ship; just three little runabouts.
It was a no-win scenario: Either she shows that she's a worthy leader by resolving crew inner tensions and the show is slammed for "Giving up on its premise" or they keep them tensions ongoing for the entire series with no progress and we see just how incompetent she is for not fixing anything.
Or! Here's a crazy idea... we stop in the middle,
between those two extremes? The former is what they did: the tensions went away far too quickly. The latter is silly: the Maquis crew members shouldn't still be all bent out of shape in season freaking seven.
Voyager wasn't a scout ship. A scout vessel would be much smaller, with far less crew or support systems.
Examples of scout ships are the Oberth and Nova.
Here's what Jeri Taylor said about the ship:
"The ship is a sleek, nifty, new-generation vessel, with some improvements, though smaller than the Enterprise."
The Intrepid-class was a somewhat small (with 150 crew) rugged starship designed for long-term
...
So, far from being a weakling ship, Janeway was given a new, top-of-the-line model, designed to do what other ships really couldn't.
Yeah, and besides, these terms are not used in the same way by Starfleet as in real life. They don't even
have any battleship/warship designations, and the Galaxy is called an "explorer", yet during the Dominion War, it was one of the main frontline combatants. But that said, where was the word "scout" even used to describe
Voyager, anyway?
The show itself couldn't make up its mind whether VOY was meant to be a tough ship or not. DS9 at least kept telling us that "The Defiant is small but really tough" by having it do stuff we SAW other Fed ships be unable to do.
It what?
I certainly have my problems with the show, but the strength and capabilities of the ship itself were egregiously unclear... when, exactly?
Me frankly, I'm going to leave the "was it sexists?" replies up to the women posters here. As a man I don't think I have any place in judging what is sexist to members of the opposite sex because I personally don't believe men know 100% what being sexists is.
Uh... sexism is partly a subjective matter, since (as with many things) what one person finds offensive, another may not. I don't see why both genders shouldn't be able to participate in a discussion about it, and the idea that men are inherently less able to identify something they think is sexist seems pretty silly to me.
Most of us watch porn hoping that type of woman & those scenarios can actually happen.
Speak for yourself.
Plus, I think some folks judge Janeway based on their love/hate of Voyager, not on the actual character herself.
I don't see very many people doing that. Most of the problems people level at Janeway, in my experience, stem from inconsistent writing. Which does happen to be a problem that extends to the show as a whole.
But Voyager was state-of-the-art, not some dumpy garbage scow! A smaller vessel, yes. But it was sleek
Exactly. So it wasn't a huge ship or a battle cruiser; the show clearly demonstrated that
Voyager could more than hold her own against a variety of opponents (certainly, she made Kazon ships look really bad on multiple occasions; they could only ever gain the upper hand with numbers and/or trickery). The Ent-D wasn't a "battle cruise" either, but an "explorer." Starfleet ships are generally pretty badass, even the science-y ones (except the Oberth, which is nothing more than a flying coffin).
and even had bio-neural circuitry, which I will forever maintain was totally awesome and also adorable because sometimes the poor ship got sick.
Nooooooo
Bio-neural circuitry was such a horrifically dumb idea, IMO.
And it could even
land on planets with its silly little landing feet. Stadi even spends a good minute bragging about the damn thing in the pilot.
Plus! You don't send just ANY ship to the Badlands, this had been well-established.
Those landing struts always seemed horribly inadequate, though.
And the fact that they put J in charge of a bunch of sorry-ass misfits, ne'er-do-wells, and a burly Maquis captain is hardly sexist. Quite the opposite; it was a challenge that the other main captains hadn't dealt with yet.
Interesting point, though really, I don't think Janeway's crew says anything about her gender at all. It has nothing to DO with her gender... frankly, I find it hard to articulate my position because I find this line of discussion bizarre. Voyager's
premise was
sexist?
I can barely even wrap my head around the concept. It's like trying to respond after someone has walked up to me and said "I have a serious question for you. Why didn't the Star Wars movies have more salad?"
I'm sure she gets fleshed out in the books and stuff but there's not much there in the movies. Gotta agree with Destructor on Connor, who was pretty much just a badass brood mare, and Scully, even though I like 'em.
Or proper nouns.
