While that's certainly true, it's kind of an odd thing to say in a fandom known for taking trivial pieces of minutia and analyzing them to death.
Plus if there is an option to make it fit, then I prefer that.
Anyone familiar with my
Star Trek novels knows that I love explaining continuity minutiae. But not every inconsistency is worth the effort. Nobody actually
wants there to be a ban on women in Starfleet. It's a stupid, ugly idea and it's a blemish on the series that it was ever posited at all. So the only thing we should do with it is gloss it over and move on. Just tiptoe around it and hurry away, like a dead bird lying in the sidewalk. It doesn't
deserve anything more.
Which is what I think was happening. She had observed a real phenomenon, there being no female captains of Starship class vessels in the era when she was trying to become one, plus the stringent entrance standards, maybe some cultural bias, and of course probably not being able to gain the acceptance of her peers; and said, "Aha! See! You don't allow women to be Starship captains." When in reality there is no rule that says women can't become Starship captains.
And that's not a place I want to go. There's no evidentiary basis for assuming there weren't female captains, since we can only confirm at most 5 contemporaneous male
Constitution captains out of 12, which is no more than you'd statistically expect with gender equality. It's an
ad hoc assumption that there's no reason to make, except to justify a premise that's undesirable to begin with.
Certainly, but this line is at the very heart of Janice Lester's motivations. She wants to be the captain of a starship and she can't. So she decides to swap bodies with Kirk and become the Captain she always wanted to be.
Certainly there's plenty of evidence for
some degree of sexism in the TOS era. That's where my colonial-attitudes theory comes in. But that doesn't require an
actual lack of female captains. Lester could've experienced some regressive gender attitudes in other respects, and blamed them when she was washed out due to psychological instability. A narcissistic delusion doesn't have to fit the facts, since its holder will cherrypick the facts to fit it.
Additionally, saying, "There's no room for me in your life." makes no sense in the context of Janice Lester's character. Because her motivation isn't to be Kirk's girlfriend, it's to be the captain of a Starship.
Of course it doesn't make perfect sense, but it's preferable to the original idea that makes even
less sense. Nobody ever said that rationalizing mistakes and bad ideas in a work of fiction was a flawless undertaking. Sometimes the continuity errors and plot holes are impossible to mend perfectly, so you just have to settle for whatever leaky, makeshift patch you can manage to slap on.
I don't think Starfleet is only for humans, but I do think that it is majority humans, like at least 80% human. That's what discovering warp drive first will do for you.
Huh? Of the four founding species, humans discovered warp drive
last.
First Contact had Vulcans showing up to greet us literally hours after the first warp flight, and
Enterprise confirmed that the Andorians and Tellarites both had well-established presences in space for generations before humans did.
I quite liked the way
Enterprise deconstructed the Campbellian assumption of human superiority over aliens by establishing that the reason humans became the keystone of the future Federation was because we were the
youngest, least experienced spacefaring civilization. We were the newcomers that nobody had any longstanding grudges against, so we were the only ones all the other species trusted as neutral mediators, and thus we ended up in the anchor position, the buffer between all the others.
)
