Did the opposite also follow; men doing what were considered women's jobs feeling the pressure to be tender?
Where did the “logic” in the logical Mister Spock come from?
- Thread starter billbird2111
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Cybill Shepherd on Moonlighting and Stephanie Zimbalist on Remington Steele. They played their private detective roles as warm-blooded, emotional women with well-rounded personalities.
Probably don't want to go down that rabbit hole!!!!
Emma Peel
I suppose we can add Della Street (played by Barbara Hale) from Perry Mason to that list. Surprised I didn't think of that myself sooner.
The whole point of gender inequality is that it isn't symmetrical, but hierarchical. The assumption was that women were capable of less than men, that their jobs were more menial, less important or respectable. Women pursuing traditionally male jobs were fighting against that prejudice to prove they were capable of the work. Men would have seen traditionally female jobs as beneath them and would have been ridiculed for holding them, so they would have had little incentive to pursue them. If they did take such jobs, e.g. as male nurses, they might feel pressure to act more tough and macho to counteract the perception of effeminacy.
What a lot of people don't understand about toxic masculinity is that it's toxic to men, not just women. The irony is that misogynistic social norms impose tighter strictures on men's behavior than on women's in certain ways, and if men don't act in the specific way the norms demand, they'll be shamed or ridiculed. A woman who manages to prove she's capable of conforming to masculine norms will be rewarded for it, at least to an extent, but a man who doesn't act masculine enough will be penalized for it.
We're pretty sure that's a misreading/misremembering of Roddenberry's 2nd pilot script of "The Omega Glory," where Spock does absorb energy but not through a plate in his anatomy.
It would explain many things.
No worse than what was done on TNG and DS9, where Vulcans were consistently portrayed as smug tools or outright racists. Thank the stars for Tim Russ and Jolene Blalock for restoring order.
I think the scene in Enterprise, just before the embassy bombing, where Soval admits that they are afraid of humans because humans are progressing much faster than they did, explains a lot. For all the physical, spiritual, and mental advantages Vulcans have, not to mention being a few thousand years more advanced than humanity, they are increasingly being put in the role of sidekick. Its understandable they'd do whatever possible to try to keep their culture and methods distinct, to the moment it might seem smug.
That portrayal of Vulcans goes back to TOS. Look at the icy reception Kirk and McCoy got from T'Pau, and T'Pring's willingness to throw Kirk's life away so she could get out of a marriage she didn't want. Look at Sarek disowning his son for 18 years and lobbing casual racial slurs at the Tellarite ambassador. The warm-and-cuddly image of Vulcans is an invention of fan writers who wanted them all to be like Spock. Onscreen, they were always arrogant jerks.
Nah, no sale. T'Pring was definitely a villain, sure (which makes her portrayal on SNW interesting), but Sarek clearly respected Kirk from jump and did not at all seem like a xenophobe or even particularly arrogant; whatever disagreements he had with Spock were largely over and done with in the course of "Journey to Babel." (Even if a formal admission of error about Spock's decision to join Starfleet came much later.) T'Pau obviously saw through what McCoy did in "Amok Time" and respected the Enterprise crew enough to intervene to save Kirk's career, which she obviously did not have to do.
I'm not a fan writer and had no expectations of how Vulcans would be portrayed on TNG and DS9, and was frankly shocked at how badly they were depicted at every opportunity (except for Spock and Sarek themselves). It also didn't help that the actors who played them were frequently terrible. I still can't get over "Take Me Out to the Holosuite" on DS9. As fun as it was to see the station crew playing baseball . . . wow. Those Vulcans.
I agree that guest Vulcan actors were often bad, since it's not easy to figure out the right balance if you only play the role for one week. Even Leonard Nimoy needed some time to modulate into Spock's characterization. Mark Lenard's one of the only guest actors who got it right off the bat. Tim Russ also got it right away, but he was basically doing a Spock impression. (Which I don't mean as a criticism; Tuvok was the only good Spock impression I ever saw until Quinto and Peck came along.)
But that's an entirely different matter from how the characters are written. There were a number of Vulcan guest characters in TNG who weren't written in a negative light, notably Taurik. The first notable Vulcan in TNG was Henry Darrow's admiral in "Conspiracy," but he'd been taken over by the parasites and thus his villainy was not his own fault.
And really, the fact that a number of guest Vulcan characters were written antagonistically is no different from the way guest admirals are often written antagonistically, or the way any old friend or mentor of a main character will almost invariably turn out to be corrupt and villainous. Lots of guest characters are going to be antagonists, because stories are driven by conflict and crisis. That's why guest Vulcans are more likely to be antagonistic than regular Vulcans like Spock, Tuvok, or T'Pol.
The only problem with that is that most - and by that I mean almost all - actors portraying Romulans on TNG and DS9 hit it out of the park with their performances and were far, far better-written characters. Sure, Romulans are more sinister than Vulcans, but they share the stoicism and many other traits of their "cousins." Unfortunately, it's very difficult to tell without other clues who's a Romulan and who's a Vulcan on TNG/DS9, and that's a serious problem. (At least PIC was quite consistent in that regard . . . I guess.)
Probably because TNG and DS9 mostly tried to avoid using Vulcans much, to differentiate themselves from TNG. So there was a larger number of prominent Romulan characters overall -- even though I never felt either show succeeded in developing the Romulans as well as the Klingons, Cardassians, etc.
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