I am watching DS9 for the first time (some observations)

My mother was born 1931.
It was restrictive. The virgin thing, not really a way to prove that one. As long as you weren't walking around pregnant.
Colleges would usually only allow women to take specific majors, because when they got married and had children most of them quit their jobs.
My mother had the option of being a nurse or a school teacher.
I knew an older lady and she majored in home economics because she actually wanted to major in economics.

 

Surely remaining abstinent until marriage(while maybe not seemingly as fun on the surface) is a good thing, and good for the marriage and family that results.

 

A system which allows people to make choices, that doesn't base policy around outdated notions of gender and sexuality, and that butts out of people's medical histories is best.

 

How does,what Prax said have anything to do with gender?

 

Not at all. First, sex is important to the marriage and two people may or may not be sexually compatible even if they are of the preferred sex in general. If they don't try beforehand, the marriage is likely to be miserable and/or end in divorce.

Second, back in the 1600s and 1700s children were not just a joy but also old-age insurance. A childless marriage was a disaster. So it was not unusual for a courting couple to try to conceive and not wed until they did.

And third, the divorce rate rising in the 1960s and 1970s reflects women's ability to earn a living on her own rather than be forced to stay in a miserable marriage. Plenty of earlier marriages were bad but not legally ended.

 

The notion that pre-marital abstinence is "a good thing" is hardly a self-evident truth, nor universally accepted these days.

That's a very traditional view, but times change. And I suspect that, even back in the "good old days," that was more of an ideal than a reality. Modern people are less preoccupied with old-fashioned notions of chastity and protecting one's virginity.

If there's one thing that SF teaches us, it's that nothing stays the same and the future is going to be different than the past. As societies change and evolve, people's expectations regarding marriages, families, and sexual mores are going to evolve as well.

And that's probably a good thing.

 

Perhaps not self-evident to everyone, but factually evident, physically, emotionally, and psychologically healthier. Cultural trends on morality aren't on some permanent upward movement of progress. Standard of morality in a society are more cyclical. There is nothing unique to the current standards of morality that you have adopted in your small corner of the world that hasn't existed countless times in the past elsewhere, nor are your standards universal even in your own culture today.

But yes, abstinence till marriage, and a monogamous marriage is a healthier practice by any measure of "healthy."

 

Whether or not s/he had, I would be remiss not to bring up gender, given how messages about sexuality and comportment fall differently to women as to men.

Perhaps they give benefits to the individual practitioners in many cases, but abstinence and monogamy are by no means panaceae against unwanted pregnancy, sexually-transmitted disease or abuse. Indeed, abusive behaviors don't tend to manifest until some time after couples wed.

 

Comportment sexuality differences between men and women in western society, and others, and in various time periods.

And I do think that abstinence will, in fact, prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

 

As long as one's activities (not a good word choice) are consensual and one's partner is trustworthy. Moreover, unwanted pregnancy and STD do occur within marriage--one is not guaranteed of sexual health.

 

This.

Seem to endlessly run into people (including here) who think the future is going to be basically a version of what today is, or what they think today is.

Culturally and socially.

 

And checking back in on this thread shows that I've been away too long.

I promise that I will finish "Cardassians" tomorrow and do a write-up. There's been a lot going on lately.

 

What about people who are forbidden to marry?

 

By choice?

 

You're entitled to your opinion but those are a long way from established facts. Being in a romantic relationship is the happiest condition for most adult humans, but that doesn't mean they necessarily should marry as soon as the relationship starts.

 

As interesting as the topic is, it would seem this thread has gone off course.

@CRM-114 I hope you enjoy "Cardassians", it's Garak's second appearance and really the first that starts to show how complex his past is. If you didn't like him from "Past Prologue" you'll definitely be keeping a closer eye on him after this one

 

A year ago I tried a similar thread but nobody ever replied.

It seems to me that DS9 had the most successful first season of all the Star Trek spinoffs. TNG's season 1 is widely regarded as abysmal. VOY's good episodes are generally after Basics, or indeed Scorpion. ENT took until the fourth season to figure out where it was going, by which point it was probably too late. Many on this board have had a negative reaction to DIS on initial viewing and are hoping that the quality will improve by the third season.

Deep Space Nine does not exhibit this effect. The pre-Dominion episodes are certainly very different to what we see later on but they are not generally regarded as a dark age through which one needs to skip.

 

In the conversations I've seen, there is definitely a similar effect on DS9. Season 1 is widely considered to have some of the worst episodes of the series and many people will tell those who are new to the series that 'it really gets going in season 2 (or even 3)'.

However, it is definitely much less widespread and DS9 season 1 also contains a few episodes DS9 fans largely consider classics, so it is still almost certainly the best received first season of all the spin-offs. It's just that it's the best by degrees, not the best by being considered fundamentally good/great from the outset.

 

I think the people behind DS9 had a clearer idea of what they wanted the show to be, even if they fell into the trap of doing something weird like "Move Along Home" or bringing in Q. Once they really started focusing on stories that were unique to the show's premise, DS9 takes off.

 

A TV show will always be finding its feet in the first season, but should always have something that will hook views (such as the look or feel of a show, an actor or character, something that will get them tuning back in next week or jumping straight into the next episode). From the word go, DS9 stood out from TNG, the darker tone and story angle didn't sit right with many TOS/TNG fans, though the shows producers and writers weren't quite sure how to work with a space station, which is why there are so many alien-of-the-week episodes (though with the aliens visiting our heroes) and bringing back Q and Vash to try and keep it familiar to the wider audience. When they realised that actually the main driving force for the show was the chance to dive deeper into bigger themes, they ran with it. The darker tone fitted the show, because it was a more "realistic" depiction of life, where Sisko and co had to face the consequences and couldn't just warp away and forget about it.