Come on, Neelix was the Jar Jar Binks of the Star Trek universe for most of VOY's run, and there's not much that could redeem that.
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Was TNG considered a "family tv show" at the time? And anyway, what does "family tv show" mean?
- Thread starter Skipper
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Come on, Neelix was the Jar Jar Binks of the Star Trek universe for most of VOY's run, and there's not much that could redeem that.
It's disingenuous to assume that all discrimination is blatant and aggressive. Being a roadblock is passive by definition. It's less a matter of actively shooting things down and more a matter of declining to support challenges to the status quo. Just because something occasionally gets pushed hard enough to overcome that institutional inertia doesn't mean the inertia doesn't exist. On the contrary, the fact that LGBTQ themes were only touched on a couple of times in hundreds of hundreds of episodes proves that the resistance to them was very much present.
And of course, a homophobe could always rationalize "Rejoined" as not really being a lesbian story because Dax had been a guy when he was married to Kahn. Plus they were aliens, so it didn't really "count."
Whoa, whoa, you think men would be more offended by a lesbian kiss than women would? Have you met men? The reason we got women kissing on TV before we got men doing the same is that men generally think women making love is hot (and vice-versa), so lesbian scenes are more acceptable in a media landscape designed to cater to the male gaze.
I mean, people, do you think all that lesbian porn out there is made for lesbian women?
I've seen some hilarious videos of lesbians "reviewing" these pornos and finding them ridiculous and completely unexciting: "Of course, we lesbians put on a lot of makeup before having sex and go to bed in high heels!"
As for the supposed "orgy" in "The Naked Now": Of course, we don't physically see an orgy in all its glory, but the episode does everything it can to convey that to us within the limits of what was possible to show in the 80s. I mean, our heroes find their first victims completely naked.
Yes, exactly. By the standards of broadcast TV of the day, it was racy, much more so than he could've gotten away with in the '60s. Even acknowledging the existence of an orgy was mature, whether you showed it or not. Obviously showing it was out of the question on a broadcast show.
It's like I said above -- these days, we're so used to TV-MA sex and violence in pay-cable and streaming shows that even the most adult content allowed on commercial broadcast TV under FCC rules seems tame and family-friendly to us. In the same way that even the most mature and hard-hitting movies of the Hays Code era would probably get a G rating today, because they don't have overt bloodshed or sex or profanity.
Probably more like PG for scary moments. I think they're more attuned to that these days.
Maybe alcohol and tobacco use as well.
As I've remarked before in this thread, it doesn't work to invoke the average approach of '90s TV, because Star Trek was supposed to be the show that pushed the envelope and was more inclusive than the norm for its era, but instead it was far less willing to acknowledge LGBTQ themes than many of its contemporaries in the '90s and even into the '00s.
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