Is femininity a villain in TOS?

[Greg Cox]

Is the problem in the leaving, or is it that the same wasn't said of men? It's the latter, e.g. that they never said that Chekov might fly off if he ever met the right woman, that makes it sexist, right?

Or what?

I don't think that bit was specifically about families on starships. That was simply a reflection of the very common, pre-feminist notion that women only have careers until they settle down and get married.

It's not making a statement about Starfleet or space exploration. It's just an obsolete attitude that has dated badly over the years, but which nobody probably thought twice about back when the ep first aired. It says less about Starfleet in the 23rd century than about American in 1967 . . . .

Yeah, I realized that, actually.

Doesn't really answer my question, though, and I probably didn't ask it right.

With no families on starships, what kind of statement could Star Trek have made instead that wouldn't have been sexist? Or, like the loo, was it something better left untouched?
.

Well, on TOS, it was specifically a five-year mission. Afterwards, male or female crew members who wanted to have families might well have to choose between signing up for another five-year hitch in deep space or looking for another post that better suits their current needs, depending on their priorities. Just like in real life, where what you want to do when you're single isn't necessarily what you want to do later on.

("Gee, I loved traveling for my job when I was younger, but nowadays I'd rather have a position at the home office so I wouldn't have to be away from the kids so much.")

And having a family wouldn't necessarily involve leaving Starfleet. Presumably there's a wide spectrum of postings ranging from dangerous missions in deep space to desk jobs at Starfleet HQ to positions on various space stations or Federation colonies or science outposts.

("I hear the schools are good on Alpha Centauri . . . .")

If you're a Starfleet officer, male or female, who wants a family and a career, you probably have plenty of options. Boldly going where no one has gone before is not the only career path.

You just have to make trade-offs, like in real life. It only become sexist if only the women have to make these sort of choices.

 

[Amaris]

I think part of it was that the civil rights movement was going on then, and women were also fighting for greater prominence in the public sphere, an attempt to gain equality. Shows like Andy Griffith touched on it just a bit, as did Star Trek, but with very mixed results. Sometimes women were shown as strong, even decisive, but most of the time they were shown as less than equal to men and needing help to cool their pretty little heads.

 

[YARN]

That's your right.

That's everyone's right and it's an important one too.

But to object to it effectively and persuasively, you have to have something worthwhile to say that isn't a ludicrous false equivalency like "there were male villains too."

I haven't argued any such equivalency. At most, my argument about Lincoln/Khan is that the situation is more complicated than what a lot of the analysis offered in this thread seems to recognize.

Moreover, I am not the one with the burden of proof relative to the OP. I am challenging the OP. It is the job of the OP and Co. to prove "femininity is a villain in TOS."

The hard fact is that for a vast percentage of female TOS characters, it is possible to predict whether they would be portrayed as submissive weaklings (of the villainous variety or otherwise) simply by their gender.

Another hard fact, one that has been repeated several times already, is that I agree that TOS was sexist in it's depictions of women. Again, my objection is with lazy proofs that lead to simple and inflated conclusions.

then what is happening is sexism, and it's stupid to try to wriggle out of admitting that.

Well, if I were trying to claim that TOS wasn't sexist, I guess you'd have a point here. What do you call it when you don't actually pay attention to what the other person actually said?

Kirk is the manly man stereotype and deliberately constructed to be so, right down to seducing women as a commonplace mission tactic.

Kirk also has a savage side. Indeed, there are some episodes where you can see Spock as a more highly evolved being attempting to reason with the Captain. "Shut Spock! We're fighting over a woman!" Spock can only let the drama play itself out, watch the android woman die when faced with the overwhelming choice, and then give Kirk a mind-meld roofie so he could forget what an unbelievable ass he was. After Kirk defiantly insists that the Organians have no right to stop a war, he later feels embarrassed at his indignation. Kirk tells Spock that he is embarrassed, and Spock tries to cheer Kirk up by reminding him that the Organians had been perfecting themselves morally for a very long time.Kirk is not presented to us as the perfection of man, but a man who is more evolved than a pure savage, but not quite grown up enough to earn the full approval of people like the Organians (his savage thoughts cause them too much pain) or the Metrons (who tell Kirk that someday humans might be worthy of contact). Kirk is sometimes a jerk, but for a good narrative reason, as he allows us to explore human nature and human foibles. He is a work in progress and represents both the strengths and weaknesses of the race.

What is occasionally critiqued is what the writers perceive as savagery or primitivism, which they see Star Trek as surpassing. That has absolutely nothing to do with critiquing masculinity. You're dancing and you've got to know it.

No, as you've remarked, women are depicted as passive supplicants and males are aggressive and martial. The savagery that is depicted in humanity is an inflection of a male-trait in the coordinating grid of the sexist thought that dominated the time (i.e., men are warriors who fight, women are the passive innocents they protect). Women, because they are not aggressive and violent, but rather depicted more like herd-animals (sheep waiting to be seduced by wolfish Kirk) are not regarded as savage in the sense of a Klingon Captain spoiling for a fight, a superhuman man looking for a world to conquer, or a Star Fleet captain issuing General Order 24 to break a stalemate in a virtual war.

The savagery and violence, therefore, is more masculine than it is feminine according to the ideology that informs the show. And like Lincoln, Kirk both admires and fears the superman, the unchained ambition which is willing to imperil the entire world for conquest. In the sense of old School Hellenic manly virtues, Kirk is at much more of a distance than a character like a Khan. Kirk realizes that the will-to-power of a self-interested and capable leads directly to oppression, which is why he rejects it (as do other men at his time). He is less masculine than Khan. Indeed, Khan outdoes Kirk, using the love mack on his own crew, using deception to learn how to control his ship, and so on. Consider these lines of dialogue:

KIRK: Lieutenant McGivers' idea to welcome Khan to our century. Just how strongly is she attracted to him?

MCCOY: Well, there aren't any regulations against romance, Jim.

KIRK: My curiosity's official, not personal, Bones.

MCCOY: Well, he has a magnetism. Almost electric. You felt it. And it could over power McGivers with her preoccupation with the past.

Khan is as much, if not more of a Mac-Daddy than Kirk is. His masculinity gives him power and charisma - Kirk's concern is that Khan's masculinity is actually more powerful than the patriarchal hold he has over her as the captain of the ship.

 

[T'Girl]

Where as I think it was idiotic in the extreme due to the danger.

And no the kids aren't at as much risk on a planet or space station since usually you need at least a fleet to destroy one of those, where as a starship can be taken out by just one enemy vessel.

But look at the numbers.

There were children at the outpost in Arena, it would be easy to imagine children present at the starbases and outposts that were "disappeared" in The Neutral Zone, the same with the New Providence colony in TBOBW.

Now the Vico had at least one child and perhaps more, the Saratoga may have had more children than just Jake Sisko. But even if there were child fatalities on a dozen destroyed Starfleet vessels a year, their combined total would be significantly less than the children on the planets and Starbases and outposts destroyed in the course of the multiple series.

How many children killed in ST Eleven with the collapse of Vulcan?

Parents want there children near them, so they can care for them, raise them and educate them.

Having a child on a starship is probably like flying on airliner, statistically actually quite safe, but you do hear of the rare disaster.


(oh and go Seahawks)

 

[Greg Cox]

Having a child on a starship is probably like flying on airliner, statistically actually quite safe, but you do hear of the rare disaster.

Except that airliners rarely go into battle along the Neutral Zone or take on giant space amoebas. Or embark on perilous voyages of discovery into dangerous unexplored territory.

Space exploration was never supposed to be "safe" in STAR TREK. "Risk is our business" and all that.

Having kids on the ship runs the risk of making it seem as though the Final Frontier has been largely tamed and civilized by the time the Next Generation comes around, so that exploring space is no more dangerous than a Carnival Cruise.

 

[Warped9]

People often bash Uhura for expressing fear. But expressing fear and being paralyzed by it are two distinct things. We never saw Uhura paralyzed by fear---that is strength of character. And I don't see Uhura as weak for expressing fear considering how often I've seen men freak out with fear in film and television. Everyone feels fear (or so they should) and everyone expresses it differently. No one think Kirk wasn't afraid when staring down the throat of the planet killer and hoping like hell Scotty got the finicky transporter working to save Kirk's ass? Indeed in "Miri" Kirk tells Yeoman Rand that "We're all frightened" as they deal with the ugly disease that could kill them. Kirk was obviously afraid for Spock and McCoy when he saw them in the arean in "Bread And Circuses."

I'm particularly reminded of the marine in Aliens who freaks out because he believes it's all over and only a matter of time before the xenomorphs get them.


On another note where is it established that Carolyn Palamas has to leave the service or even the ship if she marries? It doesn't say that anywhere. It's McCoy's assumption she would, based maybe on something he knows of her character or of something in her file. It's just his opinion. But nothing was said of Angela Martine having to leave the service or the ship just because she married Tomlinson. A female crew member having to resign her position if she marries is an assumption some are making based on the era in which TOS was made, but nothing in the series itself specifically established she has to do that. Indeed, even in the '60s and '70s there were women who continued to work after they married.

Having children is another matter. In The Making Of Star Trek it states that if a female crew member became pregnant she would be rotated to starbase (assuming she chose to keep the child to term). It does not say she has to resign the service. And nothing within TOS says that either to contradict it.

 

[Runetouch]

TOS did have a lot of casual sexism, but for it's time, it portrayed women much better then 90% of the shows of those days.

I've seen this said before, but actually...I'm not sure that it's true. Of course, it's easy to make definitive statements like this (and to refute them) because the only way to know for sure would be to watch thousands of hours of TV.

(Where's Guy Gardener when you need him?)

My friend's grandmother says that in those days, TOS was considered quite revolutionary for it's portrayal of women and dark-skinned people. And you know, people like Whoopi Goldberg also said the same.

 

[Robert Comsol]

My friend's grandmother says that in those days, TOS was considered quite revolutionary for it's portrayal of women and dark-skinned people. And you know, people like Whoopi Goldberg also said the same.

"There is a) a black woman on TV and b) she is not a maid"

Bob

 

[T'Girl]

Having a child on a starship is probably like flying on airliner, statistically actually quite safe, but you do hear of the rare disaster.

Except that airliners rarely go into battle along the Neutral Zone or take on giant space amoebas. Or embark on perilous voyages of discovery into dangerous unexplored territory.

Greg, I was drawing an analogy concerning perceived lack of safety. It's entirely possible that children aboard starships are in fact safer than children elsewhere.

The fictional federation is (by design) a profoundly dangerous place, if Picard's nephew Rene had lived with his uncle, he might have grown to be a man, instead of dying as a child.

I've point out before in discussion on this matter that I was born on a US military base in (West) Germany in 1987. If a land war had broken out suddenly between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the base likely would have been destroyed. Inspite of this my parent had their five children in base housing, or later in a nearby town.

They knowingly took the statistical risk that we could be killed, so that we could be together as a family.

Except for unusual cases like Naomi Wildman, parent who don't want their children aboard ship can either not bring them on in the first place, or get them off in a reasonable time period.

With some forewarning (not always possible) children could be removed prior to combat. The Enterprise Dee had it's rarely employed saucer separation, iirc the Odyssey disembarked it's children at DS9 prior to going into a likely combat situation in the Gamma Quad.

I like to think that except for the Saratoga the ships involved in Wolf 359 loaded their children into lifeboats and ejected them into space far from the combat zone.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

nuKirk was born on a shuttle trying to escape in the thick of battle.

Kirk's mom Winona was apparently allowed to live aboard the Kelvin with her husband George, and that fact would be so in Prime Universe continuity pre-TOS. The prevailing opinion didn't seem to be that pregnant women didn't belong on starships, and it evidently hadn't been a priority to cart Winona off to a starbase as an invalid. Either that, or the Kelvin hadn't been near a starbase in months.

 

[RandyS]

nuKirk was born on a shuttle trying to escape in the thick of battle.

Kirk's mom Winona was apparently allowed to live aboard the Kelvin with her husband George, and that fact would be so in Prime Universe continuity pre-TOS. The prevailing opinion didn't seem to be that pregnant women didn't belong on starships, and it evidently hadn't been a priority to cart Winona off to a starbase as an invalid. Either that, or the Kelvin hadn't been near a starbase in months.

That example is from a parrallel universe, so it doesn't count. Different universe, different rules, and all that.

As far as this "children on Starships" argument goes, Starfleet probably just figured that there is no such thing as "safe" and simply decided to allow their officers to live full lives, figuring (quite rightly) that civilians could just as easily be killed anywhere. So, life goes on, etc.

 

[Commishsleer]

With some forewarning (not always possible) children could be removed prior to combat. The Enterprise Dee had it's rarely employed saucer separation, iirc the Odyssey disembarked it's children at DS9 prior to going into a likely combat situation in the Gamma Quad.

I wonder about the Saucer Separation. Is it all that useful? Wasn't it armed? I mean you could tell the enemy not to fire on 'the children' but would they be compelled to morally if the Saucer Section could damage them.
I suppose its better than nothing.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

nuKirk was born on a shuttle trying to escape in the thick of battle.

Kirk's mom Winona was apparently allowed to live aboard the Kelvin with her husband George, and that fact would be so in Prime Universe continuity pre-TOS. The prevailing opinion didn't seem to be that pregnant women didn't belong on starships, and it evidently hadn't been a priority to cart Winona off to a starbase as an invalid. Either that, or the Kelvin hadn't been near a starbase in months.

That example is from a parrallel universe, so it doesn't count. Different universe, different rules, and all that.

The story of the Kelvin was in the Prime Universe, right up until the Narada came through, so, that's wrong.

This wasn't the first time TOS was retconned by a prequel. The first was ENT.

 

[Warped9]

nuKirk was born on a shuttle trying to escape in the thick of battle.

Kirk's mom Winona was apparently allowed to live aboard the Kelvin with her husband George, and that fact would be so in Prime Universe continuity pre-TOS. The prevailing opinion didn't seem to be that pregnant women didn't belong on starships, and it evidently hadn't been a priority to cart Winona off to a starbase as an invalid. Either that, or the Kelvin hadn't been near a starbase in months.

That example is from a parrallel universe, so it doesn't count. Different universe, different rules, and all that.

The story of the Kelvin was in the Prime Universe, right up until the Narada came through, so, that's wrong.

That's an opinion that can certainly be argued given how different the two realities look from each other. And many, including myself, don't interpret it as the same. Ditto with ENT.

 

[Timewalker]

You just have to make trade-offs, like in real life. It only become sexist if only the women have to make these sort of choices.

It's been my understanding that in TOS, female crewmembers who got pregnant had the choice of having an abortion or leaving the ship (whether to take a planetside position, or on a starbase, or to resign). Since a male crewmember who fathers a child never had to make that decision, it damn well is sexist.

Thank goodness they dropped that attitude, even if it was only implied, by the 24th century. Voyager would have been screwed if they'd had to kick Samantha Wildman and B'Elanna Torres off the ship just for being pregnant.

 

[Warped9]

You just have to make trade-offs, like in real life. It only become sexist if only the women have to make these sort of choices.

It's been my understanding that in TOS, female crewmembers who got pregnant had the choice of having an abortion or leaving the ship (whether to take a planetside position, or on a starbase, or to resign). Since a male crewmember who fathers a child never had to make that decision, it damn well is sexist.

Thank goodness they dropped that attitude, even if it was only implied, by the 24th century. Voyager would have been screwed if they'd had to kick Samantha Wildman and B'Elanna Torres off the ship just for being pregnant.

Realistically a male crew member would also face a choice if he wanted to be near the mother and child or not. If so then he, too, would eventually have to leave the ship.

What would happen today if a woman serving aboard a destroyer or carrier got pregnant?

 

[ALF]

Great thread/topic, but I've nothing to add beyond the contemporary observations.
Are there any viewers in here who watched the series as it originally aired, and if so, can they speak to any indication that "femininity (was) a villain" back in the day?

 

[Timewalker]

You just have to make trade-offs, like in real life. It only become sexist if only the women have to make these sort of choices.

It's been my understanding that in TOS, female crewmembers who got pregnant had the choice of having an abortion or leaving the ship (whether to take a planetside position, or on a starbase, or to resign). Since a male crewmember who fathers a child never had to make that decision, it damn well is sexist.

Thank goodness they dropped that attitude, even if it was only implied, by the 24th century. Voyager would have been screwed if they'd had to kick Samantha Wildman and B'Elanna Torres off the ship just for being pregnant.

Realistically a male crew member would also face a choice if he wanted to be near the mother and child or not. If so then he, too, would eventually have to leave the ship.

That's a different kind of choice. With the woman, it's a biological fact that forces the choice on her. With the man, it's a lifestyle choice.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

It's been my understanding that in TOS, female crewmembers who got pregnant had the choice of having an abortion or leaving the ship (whether to take a planetside position, or on a starbase, or to resign). Since a male crewmember who fathers a child never had to make that decision, it damn well is sexist.

Thank goodness they dropped that attitude, even if it was only implied, by the 24th century. Voyager would have been screwed if they'd had to kick Samantha Wildman and B'Elanna Torres off the ship just for being pregnant.

Realistically a male crew member would also face a choice if he wanted to be near the mother and child or not. If so then he, too, would eventually have to leave the ship.

That's a different kind of choice. With the woman, it's a biological fact that forces the choice on her. With the man, it's a lifestyle choice.

Exactly. A man in a similar situation wouldn't have to choose between being a parent and staying aboard the ship.

If we're going to be realistic about it, then realistically it's not the same sort of choice at all. Men being free to leave the ship to be with their families wouldn't cover up the difference.

 

[T'Bonz]

I don't really worry about the portrayal of women in TOS, because it was filmed in the 1960s when attitudes were much different.

I had more of a problem with Seven of Nine's appearance (special suit to show off her assets, heels) and the "ice queen" type impression one got when looking at her (see the fanboys drool, maybe she'll whip their asses!) because it was done in more modern, supposedly enlightened times.

There were plenty of strong women in TOS, mixed in with the more traditional 1960s-era type portrayals.