I see SF as a combination of science expedition, police force, firefighters, disaster relief group, defense force, and diplomatic corps all in one organization.
Why no women captains?
- Thread starter uniderth
- Start date
Oh I agree---just threw that in for the "Gene's Vision" crowd.
The psychological test for any woman trying to be a Star Ship Captain, is going to be deciding between their command codes and the life of their baby.
Speed and The Usual Suspects.
The answer to that moral quibble is to shoot your own baby.
Only a Vulcan or an asshole is going to pass that test.
Speed and The Usual Suspects.
The answer to that moral quibble is to shoot your own baby.
Only a Vulcan or an asshole is going to pass that test.
Yes, but so is the US military in peacetime. You can do all those things and still be a military. It's not exclusively about waging war.
I thought it's about following orders.
A military is a machine that acts with out thinking, following orders.
Starfleet questions bad orders.
A military is a machine that acts with out thinking, following orders.
Starfleet questions bad orders.
To the o.p.: the reason is that all broads are wacko!
Shoot the baby, Spock: it's the only way to ensure the safety of the Enterprise!
Shoot the baby, Spock: it's the only way to ensure the safety of the Enterprise!
None of the explanations offered make sense to me. If women were barred from commanding starships, Number One would never have been assigned as second in command. First of all, because she could succeed to command exactly as she did in the episode, and second because that position would be used as a training opportunity for a man who would go on to be assigned as a starship captain. Revoking that established equal opportunity later on seems like a really unjust thing to do.
It's hard to take them as an indication that she wanted to be a starship captain in the time frame she was taking about, since that would almost certainly preclude her from roaming among the stars together with Kirk.
Sort of like the British Royal Navy 1815-1914.
It's hard to take them as an indication that she wanted to be a starship captain in the time frame she was taking about, since that would almost certainly preclude her from roaming among the stars together with Kirk.
Sort of like the British Royal Navy 1815-1914.
The fan film series Star Trek Continues did an episode all about this: "Embracing the Winds."
In it, they say that the Tellarites have a very strong cultural aversion to women in command and that, while no official regulations bar woman from command, the Tellarites have enough political sway that Starfleet doesn't want to ruffle them and so they very rarely promote a woman into that particular role.
You can find it on YouTube. It's very well done and I suggest you watch it.
--Alex
In it, they say that the Tellarites have a very strong cultural aversion to women in command and that, while no official regulations bar woman from command, the Tellarites have enough political sway that Starfleet doesn't want to ruffle them and so they very rarely promote a woman into that particular role.
You can find it on YouTube. It's very well done and I suggest you watch it.
--Alex
It's always seemed far simpler to me just to interpret Lester's line "your world of starship captains doesn't admit women" to mean that it left Kirk no room for relationships with women. Either that or that Lester blamed sexism because she couldn't face that she was rejected due to her mental instability. It's weird the lengths some people will go to in trying to justify a single line from a single bad episode, even if it requires extreme contortions of logic. I mean, it's one thing to explore the hypothetical "what if it were true?" in a BBS thread like this, but justifying that one stupid line hardly seems worth producing an entire fan film over.
I get where you're coming from, but then again, the writing staff on DS9 were sufficiently bothered by the throw-away description of why Bashir flubbed that question on his final exam that they wrote another episode to retcon it. Twice.
Yeah, but...
At the end, the oppressive Tellerite chauvinist is revealed to be a modern male who had actual valid concerns for doing every thing he had done that seemed sexist, and felt offended and slighted for being thought of as so backward.
Well, by that token, the simplest thing of all is to simply ignore it and to trouble oneself for no interpretation of it whatsoever.
I get where you're coming from, but then again, the writing staff on DS9 were sufficiently bothered by the throw-away description of why Bashir flubbed that question on his final exam that they wrote another episode to retcon it. Twice.
I was surprised by the way they interpreted that. When Bashir said he mistook the preganglionic thing for the postganglionic whatever, I always assumed it was on a written test, that he misread the question. So all that handwaving about why he couldn't have mistaken one for the other and it had to be a cover seemed unnecessary.
Anyway, the test of whether a throwaway reference is worth addressing is whether you can get a good story out of it. It's not something you do as an end in itself, just as a means to the end of finding a story worth telling. They did find somewhere new and interesting to take Bashir, so that justified it.
It's a little more than that one line, there are many lines about being a woman is horrible and she hates being a woman...bah, bah...but it is clear, Lester really wants to be a starship captain at all costs, and she plans to continue as the captain once Kirk is dead. In hind sight, she would never to able to carry off the impersonation and her odd command decisions would undo her eventually as noticed by Spock, McCoy, Scott, Sulu, Chekov, Lysa. It was a crazy plan by a crazy person. 
Nope. Rewatch it. The Tellarite ambassador is no way offended and doesn't justify his government's stance even a little. He is very much in favor of putting down chauvinism.
The whole episode is interesting.
--Alex
That's different. None of that requires accepting that Starfleet actually forbids female captains.
So this becomes "Future Man".
The reason we worry about no women captains is that I with my 2020s ideals do not like the idea of Starfleet having a blanket ban on women captains when we can clearly see there were no bans in our enemy forces. That us the good guys are blatantly sexist . First woman cosmonaut - 1963, first woman astronaut 1983.
When I watched it in the 70s/80s I as a woman was grateful that the were even women on the ship - now I'm greedy for more.
That sexism is reflected in the military in the 60s, 70s, 80s. Even now how many women captains are out there in the military?
Well, of course, nobody's saying that it should be the case in the actual franchise. This is just an exercise in speculation -- if, hypothetically, such a restriction did exist in some alternative version of Starfleet, what could be the justification for it in that version of the universe? As I said, we don't have to approve of a hypothetical scenario in order to imagine and explore it.
To me the scenario that Starfleet agreed to oppress some of its citizens to placate an ally is as offensive as saying that Lester was right.
Its like a big corporation saying they won't have any women in management positions as some Fundamentalist Christians and Muslims men are not allowed to be told what to do by a woman according to the Bible. My opinion is that the Federation wouldn't make such an agreement especially as you never see any Tellerites in Starfleet.
I like to think the Federation is a nobler organisation than that.
I'm happy for all different explanations to be discussed though. I've proposed an implausible scenario myself.
For instance I'm happy with the Lester is mistaken scenario and even with the colony scenario (maybe a plague wiped out lots of women throughout the Federation and they were just recovering) but it has to make sense.
Its like a big corporation saying they won't have any women in management positions as some Fundamentalist Christians and Muslims men are not allowed to be told what to do by a woman according to the Bible. My opinion is that the Federation wouldn't make such an agreement especially as you never see any Tellerites in Starfleet.
I like to think the Federation is a nobler organisation than that.
I'm happy for all different explanations to be discussed though. I've proposed an implausible scenario myself.
For instance I'm happy with the Lester is mistaken scenario and even with the colony scenario (maybe a plague wiped out lots of women throughout the Federation and they were just recovering) but it has to make sense.
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