Star Trek is not, and never was, particularly progressive

I'm pretty open-minded and even that sorta makes me a little uncomfortable. I mean...she clearly has emotional issues, is barely an adult and is the daughter of the man Kirk suspects of being a mass murderer.

 

Hmmm. They were middle-aged when I was moderating the forum... 20 years ago.

But, anyway.

 

Also according to Startrek.com, Amanda was 18 when 65 year old Sarek knocked her up.

Gene's Vision, etc.

 

"But different species and cultures."

Maybe so. Doesn't make it any less skeevy in context.

 

It was ( and still is) the norm. Actors get older but they cast younger and younger actresses as their love interests.

 

I've brought it up that something seems off with the Sarek-Amanda romance, especially if (per some sources) Amanda might be under 20 around the time of her marriage, and got the obligatory "So what?" response.

I mean, I get the progressiveness here. Age is just a number. My parents were 47 and 26. I have a certain understanding towards this. But people do need to mature. A 19 year old or even a 23 year old needs time to figure out who they are and what they want. There is a power disparity in most relationships, and perhaps the age is not the main issue when you pair up Captain Kirk and Lenore or Ambassador Sarek and Amanda, but it's something that raises eyebrows because it reminds us of when we were 19 and more naïve, and suspect that manipulating naïveté might be at play here (even though it's Star Trek, and they're all idealized paragons of virtue, and "GTFO with your virtue signaling...").

 

All (fictional) Aliens are human. Most especially in Star Trek.

 

Just curious. who did the "math" on Amanda's age?

 

in case you need this for testing

 

StarTrek.com explicitly says Amanda was born in 2210, meaning, when Spock was born in January 2230, she was probably 19 or maybe just turned 20, and Spock was conceived when she was 18 or early 19 (depending on Vulcan-Human hybrid gestation period, which might be different for every circumstance).

Canon is silent, and it's perfectly reasonable to assume she was upwards of ten years older. It would make more sense if she was a teacher when Sarek married her, and would match her appearance in the Discovery flashbacks and in the Star Trek '09 deleted scene. Non-canon usually has her a bit older (Sarek dates her birth to about 2202, the Star Trek Logs to the early-to-mid 2200s), but I think StarTrek.com's made-up date is trying to match her appearance in Journey to Babel (and Jane Wyatt's age, as she was born in 1910), but was written before Discovery was taken into account or without a full reckoning of Spock's age was finalized (Memory Alpha had him born a couple years later before Star Trek '09 solidified a date based on the Star Trek Encyclopedia's reckoning).

 

I agree. However, it highlights differences in what is considered progressive in any given era or culture. Just consider how opinions about Roman Polanski have shifted or how each nation has framed it. While France honored him with a national award a few years ago, the public is less on his side, and Poles generally would like to see him extradited--this after decades of condemning US prudery and zealousness.

 

Not sure, but looking at Amanda’s and Sarek’s entries at StarTrek.com she was 20 when she gave birth to Spock, and Sarek was 66, with Amanda’s birth year 2210, Sarek’s at 2164, and Spock born in 2230.

 

Historically, it was not uncommon for older men to marry young women. In a lot of cases, the man was a widower.

My grandfather was 46 and a widower when he married my 19 year old grandmother in 1918. It's not like she was a sexpot or anything, she was rather plain and grew up in an orphanage although her father was alive. In their case, they were both extremely poor and just trying to survive together.

Ironically, although it doesn't make all that much difference, her daughter, my aunt, found my grandmother's birth certificate when she was still alive in the '70s and discovered she had been born in 1896, not 1899, she had been 22 and not 19 when she married my grandfather.

Before you bemoan my grandmother's awful fate, she had five kids and later a whole lot of grandkids and she was happy. She was married to my grandfather until his death in 1955. When I was a kid, every time we visited her, she always had Hershey's Kisses for us and that's how I remember her. I can never have a Hershey's kiss without thinking of her.

But yes, a woman's opportunities were very limited in those days. With her mother gone and abandoned by her father and very poor, my grandmother's prospects were not good at all.

In case you're wondering, my grandfather was born in 1872, four years before Custer's last stand and the invention of the telephone. He even met Sitting Bull one time. He was 55 when his youngest son, my father, was born and that's how I could have a grandfather who would be 149 years old today.

Robert

 

If only your grand father was alive today to see the world as it is.

 

Again, these were American shows made with television budgets. Also, since TNG all Vulcans have bowl cut hairstyles, which is not a particularly prominent hairstyle nowadays (if ever). So at least some effort was made to make the Vulcans seem more alien, along with the pointed ears and prominent eye brows.

I'm sure Star Trek could have done the same, but as I already stated, I don't think it would been a particularly wise decision.

You claimed that "ever other country" had homogenized into a brown skin complexion, which is not the case.

There weren't Vulcans or Romulans portrayed by black actors until there were. I don't think there were Klingons portrayed by black actors until Michael Dorn. (I'm hoping I'm wrong about this.) Why should Bajorans be a special case? You're trying to make it seem that they cast a black actress as Jake's Bajoran girlfriend for purely racial reason, but without evidence, you're claim is just pure speculation.

I think you're really overthinking the intro to this show.

Discovery shows LGBT characters being treated no differently than heterosexual crew members, their sexual orientation or identity never being portrayed as something novel or noteworthy. Indeed, it's the least interesting thing about these characters. I don't know what is horrible about it.

Too bad you don't watch Voyager, the Banea are right up your alley.

Welcome to the 90s and early 00s.

I assume nothing, I go by what was shown in the series. In the series we only see two sexes: females with very obvious breasts, and a male without breasts. According to Memory Alpha, the script for "The Council" identifies the Sphere-Builder leaders as females, but I don't own a copy of the script so I wouldn't know.

 

America was just beginning to show interracial relationships in its popular entertainment in the 90s. That Jake and Benjamin would have darker skin toned actresses play as their romantic interest, I would say it is more than speculation on how that just happened in a colorblind casting but deductive reasoning as to why.

While there might not be a smoking gun statement like Eric LaSalle on ER stating around 1999 that he didn't want to play the successful Black male character who left the sisters behind DS9 was mostly before that storyline. That I can distinctively remember Microsoft running an ad campaign with an interracial couple probably black male and white female in hip clothing and portraying Apple as a stuffy white couple in business suits being such a new thing. As that had not been done before in my memory my jaw dropped upon seeing it as American culture had shifted so radically by then. Where as now it is getting increasingly rare to see an other than "white" female with a a male of seemingly the same ethnic group as a partner on TV, in advertising or supporting roles on shows.

 

For the record, there was no clear effort to pair Jake or Benjamin Sisko only with African American actresses. Indeed, it was Brooks, who at the same swssion he cast Jill Sayre (not Black) to play Mardah, also auditioned Chase Masterson (not Black), who he said should be considered for a future romantic interest for Sisko.

Moreover, Sisko only had a small number of romantic interests throughout the series. The fact that his two long term relationships were with African American women is more evidence that he was less horny than some characters, not that Brooks or anyone in production was playing some sort of racial game.

 

MIchael Dorn was probably the first black actor to portray a Klingon, but he was not the first non-white. Branscombe Richmond played one of the Klingons in STIII:SFS, and one or more others may have been portrayed by indigenous actors (and one of the Klingons looked suspiciously like Captain Hook).

 

I remember that they had Sisko not coming back from the temple at the end and Avery Brooks nixed that .. Didn't want to be the gone away Dad after his daughter was born. So added the I'll be back line. He didn't want to show that.. Him leaving a daughter.. Bad role model.

 

"Progressive" and "cutting edge" aren't necessarily the same thing.