Star Trek’s Inability to Handle Gender or Orientation Properly

Star Trek is essentially what every progressive would hope for in the future for humans.    Trek had a legacy since the 60s of paving the way forward, showing humanity what we could be.  The first interracial kiss on tv was done by Star Trek.  Martin Luther King Jr convinced Nichelle Nichols to continue acting her role as Uhura because for the first time blacks were shown as tv as equals, rather than some archetype.

Through the fictional series, they explored ideas of race,  environmentalism,  class & labor, various civil liberties,  poverty, the effects of capitalism run amok and a future of post-scarcity,  and at times even gender though it seemed to struggle with presenting a progressive attitude with gender and almost always never took a definitive stance on what the best ideal with gender was.

In the Pilot episode “The Cage”, Orion Sex Slaves (pictured above) became a notable part of Star Trek canon.  Funny, that a show with such progressive values made no moral statement, from day one, about female sex slavery.  Oh of course,  they weren’t Federation slaves – but they were used to titillate the viewer none-the-less.   It wasn’t that the writers were for sex-slavery, but they were willing to use it as a device to get ratings and add sex appeal to the show.  Enterprise reversed the Orion Slaver girl thing and revealed that they released a pheromone that controlled those around them, making them really the ones in control – and I suppose that’s a nice save 40 years later in the running show but even that ENT episode existed to exploit sex appeal cheaply.

The Original Series, in many ways, was a product of it’s time.    Women ran around in mini-skirts through most of the show and in the very last episode of the original – it was noted that women were not allowed to be captains of starships.  This is a little piece of canon that usually just gets ignored and disputed as Gene Roddenberry didn’t have as much influence on that last Season as he did on previous ones and Star Trek Enterprise, a prequel show, completely ignored.

The Next Generation attempted to change a lot of what TOS established too.   To begin with the tag line “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was changed to “Where No One Has Gone Before”.  And for a brief period in the first season, there were background characters of men in uni-sex skirts:

But all of that aside Star Trek never stopped exploiting female sexuality for ratings and it almost never tackled homosexuality as an issue directly.  Gender ambiguity? Sure, once, but not orientation.

Rather as the shows progressed, especially after Gene’s death – they really ramped up exploiting female sex appeal for the purpose of ratings and they did so senselessly.

Star Trek was this was supposed to be the egalitarian, democratic, socialist utopia, with a resource  based economy.  It focused hard on civil rights, racial equality, yet Star Trek, & most sci-fi (in film, tv & games) leans towards heteronormativity;  a perspective covering ideas of gender, monogamy, sex, & orientation alike.  This is why so many female characters in fighting based video games hardly have sensible armor on.

Star Trek on Gender

As I noted – TOS didn’t handle gender well at all.   Better than most shows of the time, but still not good by any means.  It was one thing to put them in miniskirts, it was the 60s after all.  But they essentially had women mostly either serving Kirk coffee & tea here & there or damned near every episode there had to be some mindless bird brained “beautiful” (& scantily clad) female for Kirk to hook up with.

While some of these things  really turned around through TNG -  it wasn’t until Genesis (in Season 7) that any female actually had a chance to direct an episode (McFadden), and only a very small handful of episodes approached the idea of true female equality, though the inverse – matriarchy – was touched on in  TNG’s Angel One.  But while TNG and  TOS occasionally touched on matriarchy – rarely did it show women in power in  the Federation itself (or it’s member races) .  And while TNG did rarely show some females in power, like an Admiral or two, that had to compete with Counselor Troi who wore the standard for-scifi Random Catsuit that displayed her cleavage continually for the first 5-6 seasons.

Star Trek, via TNG, looked like it was heading in a good direction.  That is until Voyager came along with a great idea and shit all over it, only to be followed by Enterprise nailing that coffin, and  ended with a full resurrection of the ideals in 1960s by the time Abram’s Trek is released in 2009.  Let me explain:

Voyager and Gender

Star Trek Voyager was about a crew with a female captain, a role for a woman to finally be taken seriously, a role of command & authority, not a role to whittle down women as mere sex objects, mothers, or caretakers.  A true symbol of gender equality.  They never seemed to shy away from the fact that she was a woman, in a relationship in the beginning of the show – but also a serious professional in a position of command.

A female captain gave the show a different feel, but never did I really question the professionalism nor the ability to lead that the Janeway character communicated (not at first anyways).

But with ratings dwindling the writers wrote the 2-parter,  Scorpion, officially involving the Borg and officially making 7of9, played by Jerri Ryan, part of  the main cast.  The ratings went through the roof.  Partially because the Borg always brought ratings to Star Trek.   Best of Both Worlds in TNG is one of Trek’s highest rated episodes. First Contact is the highest grossing selling TNG movie – and it too involved the Borg.

Jerri Ryan’s character, a rescued Borg, came to dominate the show, having more screen time in Season 4 that any other character – and in some cases, more than several characters combined.  Which wouldn’t have been a problem except for we have a a Borg who thinks everything is irrelevant except you know.. makeup, heels, a pushup bra & a skin tight suit.  Good to know the Borg are so vain and beauty conscious.

Paramount, Bragga, and Rick Berman exploited Jerri Ryan for her body & good looks.  The Borg were a race of cybernetic beings, 99.9% of them (minus the queen) were just mere drones in part of a collective.  They had no personality, no desires, no wants, and were completely stripped on individuality.     How did Seven come to find that perfect shade of eye shadow with no individuality?

We’ve seen drones disconnect from the hive-mind numerous times.  Captain Picard did after a brief assimilation which i suppose is another bag all together, Hugh did and those Hugh infected did as well.     But it wasn’t until Voyager that we had Borg that from day 1 of losing all her implants that looked as if she was concerned with how she’d appear on a cat walk (or a TV Guide cover).  It was like some hokey classic sci-fi exploitation flick like Sexxtraterstial or some such shit.  Awful.  But people at that shit up.

Kate Mulgrew complained, not about Jeri Ryan, but about the business decision (not a creative decision) to have a sex symbol enter the show and how this was what Paramount wanted.  This was shilling for money and cheapening the entirety of not only Voyager but the entire franchise.

Voyager was a show that was supposed to lead with a strong female character – instead, by Season 4 it becomes actually worse in how gender has been handled since the TOS days.  Everything they were attempting to do with Captain Janeway was completely spat upon and undermined with what they were doing with Seven of Nine.

They turned the first show with a woman in the captain’s chair upside down by pushing a Borg drone turned human with heels & a push up bra for all the nerds to oogle after.

Enterprise and Gender

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Doing a Prequel show to TOS and not involving skirts and showing female captains was a good move, but again – a main character gets exploited for sexuality.  And yet again, the chosen character makes no sense.

Like in Voyager – they picked the least likely candidate that would ‘display the goods’ on a regular basis – a Borg drone.  In Enterprise, they do it again – a Vulcan, namely T’Pol.

From Season 1 we have a ‘logical’ Vulcan woman in a skin tight uniform.  Great, just about every other Vulcan wears long flowing robes, or practical uniforms – but no, not T’Pol – she has to wear something that really displays her tits & tush.

Even after she loses her position with the Vulcan High Command & remains a sub-commander within Starfleet little changes about her uniform.   The only thing that changed was that she got a  Starfleet patch on her existing skin tight clothing. Like with Troi and with Seven – T’Pol had yet another “Random CatSuit” that we see in one sci-fi show after another.

I don’t see any men in catsuits. Or “unattractive” women. Or other women expressing themselves in how they dress (as Vulcans don’t do that). All we get to see is a member of a dispassionate species, a species without overt sexuality of any kind, wearing an overtly sexual outfit despite being surrounded, both by Vulcans and humans, by individuals in uniform. As a Vulcan, the logical uniform would have been that of her peers, a uniform like we see Vulcan men serving the High Command wear. As a Starfleet officer, the logical uniform would have been the exact same kind Hoshi Sato was wearing.

How about T’Pol during her off hours on the ship? That’s even better.   Every time anyone comes to visit she’s parading around in skimpy satin night-time midriffs.  So in case you were curious, apparently every Vulcan female dresses like a  belly dancer before hitting the hay. It’s the logical thing to do!  (or the profitable thing for network execs).

I think the worst of it though was the cheap and gimmicky use of Sickbay’s “Decon” area where characters had to rub each other’s almost-nude bodies down with some kind of “bio-gel” after visiting an alien world.

T’Pol was in two scenes like this and the camera panned over her body slowly, they ensured her nipples were hard and poking through her shirt.

Abrams and Gender

With the JJ Abrams reboot – you would think, being made in 2009 would take the gender thing forward a bit? But nope – now we’re in 2009 and we’re now back to the women wearing skirts as part of the uniforms of a now more militarized version of Starfleet, because that makes tons of sense!  Abrams has only tackled one movie and the movie was more of an action flick than anything else – so there’s not a lot to comment about, but it seems the future of Star Trek is to actually regress gender to the ideals we held in the 60s because many probably think it’s nostalgic or more eye-pleasing.

What happened to the Star Trek that was supposed to give everyone something to look up to? That taught children, teens and the public at large – no matter of race or gender, that it was your mind, your accomplishments, your moral values that mattered?  They covered so many issues but always just seemed to drop the ball when it came to women.

I guess that’s not really a priority when compared to tv executive needs for yet another teen male masturbatory fantasy.  Or hell – maybe the writing staff on their own accord are just as guilty?

There’s nothing wrong with, I guess what Hollywood deems, beautiful people on television shows.  I don’t have a problem with it at all.  What I do have a problem with is the rabid focus and exploitation of it, to use that imagery to try to drive the show – or hell – even a scene.   It is not only ethically vapid, but it cheapens the art form by resorting to something so simple, so cliche.  It’s little more than a gimmick made to hook simpletons and if this was any other show, I probably wouldn’t be mentioning it, but it seems to be in such stark contrast into every thing Trek is/was.

At least when Deep Space Nine had someone parading their tits around it was fitting to the character (a dabo girl).

The last thing I’ll note on the gender-normative side of things – was that DS9 did once approach gender equality head on,  but the late 1990s and a show that was easily over 90-100 years beyond the launch of the first Enterprise it just felt tired.  In the episode, Rules of Acquisition,  we get to watch the repressive, sexist and greedy race, the Ferengi, try to handle the idea of a female working in the marketplace alongside of males which is forbidden.   The Ferengi are so repressive, it’s forbidden for women to even wear clothes.  Episodes that focused on Ferengi women seemed more about us humans puffing our chests – both in the though and as a viewer living in the real world – about ‘how far we’ve come’ and looking down unto these lesser and more primitive people (though some areas on this earth conditions for women are worse, but i don’t bet many of them watch Star Trek).  The issues broached by the Ferengi episodes would have felt challenging in the 1960s to the status quo, in the 90s – they’re little more than humor pieces.

Star Trek on the Gender-Queer

This is actually where I give unfettered praise for Star Trek.  While it didn’t come up often, and TOS surely stayed away from this – Trek twice took on the idea of Gender-Queerness.  It was always outside of humanity though, but none-the-less, they did touch on it.

In TNG’s The Outcast a race that supposedly has suppressed all notions of gender and are completely androgynous is found to have a minority of members who do express gender and they have been Outcasted because of this.  One of course turns out to be female falls in love with Riker and his sexy, manly beard.

The was often sited as Trek’s “gay” episode, but I always felt this episode had more to do with gender identification and the struggles of the transsexual and gender-queer communities than it did with homosexuals.   Though, the “T” and “Q” in LGBQT do stand for Queer and Transsexual – not because they have anything to really do with gays, lesibans or bisexuals, but more because society shoves them together as one and the same because people outside of these labels don’t understand them very well.  Either way, this was the 1992 so TNG gets an A+ for broaching this issue.

ENT”s Cogenitor took the idea of gender and added asexuality unto it.  In the episode a race is discovered to have three genders, a normal male and female, but also a neutral third which is generally asexual in orientation.  The third ends up being a slave to the males and females of the race, as the third is needed to facilitate the mating process.  Through the episode Trip interjects his human morality unto the situation and through the balance of being stuck between moral outrage and non-interference , we get to explore both the idea of a third gender AND asexuality at once.  Bravo.

While I feel hard to complain about this issue, it would have been nice to have seen this issue broached without having to use aliens and with at least once mentioning a human case of asexuality or gender-otherness.

Star Trek on Orientation

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People always say about trek that the producers & writers didn’t care to push the agenda of homosexuality.  I don’t know whether they did or didn’t.

I assume even if they wanted to executives would have told them no.  Not no, but hell no.  American males, even many of the liberal variety just don’t click well with gay issues.  But you got to figure – even in the 1980s and 90s anti-establishment musicians that hailed from very political punk rock and hip hop groups were still commonly using words like “faggot”.

The studios needed their pretty female sex objects paraded around on tv to get their ratings up & if they’ll stoop to that level of patriarchal heteronormative behavior for a few bucks, you can bet on the fact they avoided the subject of homosexuality usually to prevent any viewer losses.

I’ll try not to go on and on about this particular subject, not because I don’t care but because it has been done elsewhere better than I could cover the subject, mainly this article over at Salon and over at Wikipedia

But I really do feel yet again, this subject came down to viewership and ratings.   Gene Roddenberry was quoted as to have wishing to just have a gay couple holding hands in the background of a couple of episodes – to show gay people just being free to be themselves rather than to make an episode about it.  That  would have been fine, but when he died I feel that idea went with him. I also felt even Gene’s idea was a bit of a cop out as so many other controversial issues had been taken head-on.

Nimoy echoed similar sentiments by saying: “It is entirely fitting that gays and lesbians will appear unobtrusively aboard the Enterprise — neither objects of pity nor melodramatic attention.”  Unfortunately, they never did.

It seems the only times homosexuality was used – was never to make an issue out of homosexuality, but like Trek’s take on gender – to arouse the mostly male viewership.  Again, it was just a tool to exploit female sexuality.  This is where Ronald Moore’s Star Trek Deep Space Nine fails.  DS9 is probably the least bad when it comes to cheaping out, but even they did it too from time to time.

The rare times homosexuality was actually used in Trek,  it was exploited just like 7of9 & T’Pol bodies. It was virtually always in the mirror universe, and it was always girl on girl, mostly performed by the Alt-Kira.  I never saw an Alt-male that was gay.  I’ve seen people use the mirror universe to explain Kira’s blatant bi-sexuality, but where are the male bisexuals? Or the male homosexuals? If it’s the “inverse” – shouldn’t they be around too?

The  Dax lesbian kiss though rides an ambiguous area to me.  Even in the normal universe, when they found a way to get Dax to re-fall in love with a lover of a former host, it was just felt like a cheap bar-sexual thing to turn on the male viewers.   I suppose some comparisons could have been made to the TOS Kirk-Uhura kiss in how this was done but I felt DS9 was such a gritty show, such a more realistic show, and was far more in-your-face with it’s plots and ethical dilemmas that tip toeing around the subject the way interracial kisses were in the 1960s just somehow didn’t fit.  But I always feel torn – they did actually show a lesbian kiss.  But..they also had to use 2 fairly attractive women by mainstream hetero standards  (with spots that ran all the way down) to do anything queer.   Maybe I’m just misjudging what you could and could not get away with on tv in the 90s? Who knows.  So this one I give a pass and a reluctant thumbs up too.

Rather than feel revolutionary, it felt cheap like Susan Ivanova and Talia Winter’s brief lesbian ordeal in Babylon 5.   At least Trek creators actually showed the kiss I suppose.  But I don’t know – I just feel many other shows at the  time were handling homosexuality in a better way.  Shows like: Melrose Place, Golden Girls,  90210, etc..  Why couldn’t the show that was founded on prophetic and hopeful visions of our future tackle this issue when garbage like Melrose Place took it on just fine?  And why when it was tackled was it done by “two hot chicks” rather than any other pairing?

Trek’s ventures with homosexuality was mostly to get the ladies kissing/flirting & turn on the male viewership, I feel.  What was done with Dax, was repeated with Alt-Kira.  It would’ve taken an act of God (or Q/Trelane if you will) to show 2 gay guys, or hell – even Bi guys.   Or 2 women who didn’t conform to gender-norms in appearance to show romantic affection to one another.

The one character who i think broke the norm was Garak in Deep Space Nine.   The actor has been quoted as saying that he played the character as a bi-sexual and/or a pan-sexual character, but this is not anything officially noted in the show and the only relationship Garak was shown to have was a hetero one.

Conclusion

Trek was a show that in the 60s took real risks.  Everybody equal? A united earth & end to national sovereignty?  Blacks & whites smoochin? No capitalism? And this was shown on TV in the height of us hating “commies”?  That’s quite something IMHO.

Even as late as Enterprise, Trek briefly touched both on the AIDs virus (through metaphor) and polyamory (directly) in the same episode.

But in the end our view of  socialist egalitarian utopia, this image to show human beings what we CAN BE gets watered down & influenced by merely what we are today, creative choices get made either bywriters blinded by their own biases, or by executives with agendas & if they have to avoid certain topics & whip out the Barbie dolls to bring the numbers they want, well egalitarian utopia is just going to have to make some exceptions.  All those red blooded, white male scifi nerds need to keep tuning in to keep those advertising dollars rolling in.

I love star trek through & through & accept it for its faults – but it’s pretty blatantly obvious the stereotypical demographic they were consistently trying to please.  And as the show has progressed over the years – from the pilot in the 60s until JJ Abrams version – it’s clear that it’s less & less vision, & more about capitalizing on a huge franchise with a very specific demographic of viewers & fans.

I’m a red blooded American male & i love beautiful women too.   But being that the show had so often established itself as willing to explore progressive ideas i just felt at times what was done, and at times – not done, with Trek was just out right cheap.  The series deserved  ‘better’ than that bullshit.