Sci is going to ignore what is inconvenient and twist whatever else to emphasize his perspective: the creators of TOS were misogynist pieces of shit and we’re degenerates for not calling it out at every opportunity.
I haven't called anyone names in this thread; I haven't denigrated anyone's character here.
You, on the other hand, have denigrated mine on several occasions.
I have gone so far as to say that I still enjoy "The Cage" and that it is okay to enjoy a work of art that contains problematic elements. I merely insist that we not pretend those elements are not present.
That's part of it but I also viewed as Una being analytical, pointing out that Vina is not a reliable source of information. The comment related to the context of the current topic of conversation, calculated to shut down Vina's criticisms so she could better assess the situation. It was Una lowering herself to Vina's level of trash talking but it wasn't just about that.
Maybe, but just having that subtext present -- "You're old, I'm hotter" -- automatically disqualifies the character of Una from escaping the "dominant male/submissive female" power fantasy dynamic that "The Cage" sets up in its depiction of how Pike and the female characters relate to one-another.
I would agree though TOS and TNG had a habit of bigging up female character qualifications and then failing utterly to demonstrate them in the story as they fulfil (usually) the victim or love interest role. Like Kate McRae in the Black Hole, whose actual role was to be the daughter and the telepath. Her qualifications were just window dressing.
The enduring quality of the yeoman character (at least until after Mears) was that she wanted to bang the captain (although they swapped Mears onto McCoy when Rand was replaced). That this character trait has to be universally preserved does say a lot about Roddenberry's mentality.
Agreed 100%.
Yes, as a subordinate her job would be submissive to Pike's authority
Yes, their relative positions in the military hierarchy is used to help rationalize the writer's preferred ideas about power dynamics in intergender relationships. But, again, that speaks to part of the misogyny at play -- Roddenberry seems to have taken it for granted that of course a man would be in charge. And in fact, Pike's dialogue makes it clear that the presence of women within the military hierarchy at all is a relatively new phenomenon to which he is not yet accustomed.
but Colt is not submissive as per the definition of being humbly or unresistingly. If she was "submissive" would she cut off her superior officer in the middle of loudly berating her?
Sure she would -- if her goal is to get him to realize that she's done a good job and should have his approval for it.
There is insufficient data for many aspects of Colt but the bridge interaction showed that she was not submissive, IMHO.
It literally ends with her wanting to know if she would have been his favored paramour.
So are you suggesting that every piece of fiction should be viewed as an act of advancing or opposing a given societal viewpoint, whether the creator meant to, or not?
I mean, broadly-speaking, that's just what
happens. That's how storytelling
works. Storytelling functions by generating alternating feelings of tension and catharsis within its audience, and to do this it must provoke in the audience feelings of tension by contrasting its plot developments against the audience's expectations of what "ought" to happen. It cannot do this except by either affirming or conflicting with the audience's value system.
Thus all stories fundamentally either confirm a status quo as preferable and depict dynamic agents who disrupt that status quo in a negative light, or they condemn a status quo as undesireable and depict dynamic agents who disrupt that status quo in a positive light. Elemental examples: Superman is good because the society of Metropolis is good and characters who disrupt that society are bad; Batman is good because the society of Gotham is bad and he disrupts that unjust society.
This one reason is why children often have a hard time engaging with adult dramas -- they are not yet invested in the cultural value system which the story is reacting to because they have not yet developed a cultural identity. Similarly, this is why it can be difficult to become invested in dramas about conflicts occurring within cultures that are foreign to one's self -- if one has not developed the necessary cultural values to either accept or reject the ideas the story is depicting, then the conflicts the story presents can seem arcane or irrelevant.
So the decision in 1964 of having a male captain and expecting audiences of all backgrounds to see through his eyes is some kind of "reinforcing gender stereotypes," or the like?
Of course it is. There have always been women with natural leadership abilities, who have tried to become leaders; it is only because the cultural values of 1960s America precluded depicting female leadership as natural and good that Roddenberry (and the vast majority of Hollywood writers) did not feature female leaders in equal proportion to male leaders.
Would you have expected any forward-thinking series creator in 1964 to have insisted on a female captain, just so that that creator could claim to be a part of a move towards better representation?
That's not the question. The question is not, "What should Roddenberry have done?" The question is, "What elements are present in the text?" The text's elements are patriarchal. That's all there is to it.
So then, what I get from your point is that the makers of "The Cage," and therefore also TOS, is that they followed the storytelling conventions of their time to tell there tale, and therefore, in your view, reinforced stereotypes of their time. By that logic, you might as well argue that there are issues with "The Odyssey."
Yes.
The Odyssey reflects and reinforces the normative cultural values of ancient Greek society. So, too, do ancient Greek plays like the
Oresteia (in which Aeschylus is essentially advocating for the moral superiority of achieving justice through due process of law rather than through personal vendettas and revenge -- the superiority of the Greek city-state is affirmed over other political forms).
One could, by your logic, argue against the use of larger-than-life creatures in it shaping events instead of modern science, because that was a storytelling convention of Homer's time.
Indeed, there is an entire school of thought which holds that what you might call the equivalent of the "Great Man Theory of History" in fiction ought to be abandoned in favor of a more sociologically-oriented view.
This article argues that the reason
Game of Thrones got worse over time was that its style of storytelling switched from sociological to reliant on these sorts of larger-than-life characters as the drivers of the story.
Kirk drift…. This is more like thread drift.
As is often the case, people discover they cannot communicate until they identify and define the
a priori assumptions they hold which are in conflict with one-another. That leads to thread drift, since suddenly your thoughts about X turn out to be deeper concerns about Y.
