Josh and John wrote:
>>I'd suspect it's less intentional than that, though. I, and others whom I
>>know are non-religious, spend about 0% of our time worrying about or
>>participating in any sort of religion. If writing about people living their
>>lives in the future, unless I was intentionally making a point,
>
>That's the way I see it......
I don't see it that way either, actually, and I'm not religious -- y'all know
my misgivings about religion, personally. But religion is and has historically
been an important part of life for most of humanity. It currently is still that
way for most of humanity. I think that ignoring it in one's depiction of a
world is probably a flaw in conception, and/or wishful thinking. I think that
not dealing with it in *any* fashion (however cursory) is about as problematic
as not dealing with, say, issues of politics or, for that matter, just
inventing new laws of physics.
To turn your statement on its head, Joshua, I wouldn't *not* deal with religion
on some level, however miniscule, in a long work of SF (as opposed to short
stories, for obvious reasons) unless I were trying to make a point. Which is to
say, I might do it to make a point, but otherwise I think missing that issue is
like, oh, a lesser version of leaving out, say, women from SF novels (as some
people have done) or leaving out, say, politics (of some type).
It'd be like a gay SF novelist populating a whole Earth with gay men and women
and saying, "Well, I wouldn't include heterosexuals unless I wanted to make a
point." *grin* Beyond a certain scope of your core characters (who could well
all be homosexuals, in this example), you really ought to throw in a few
straights, because you know they're out there somewhere. At least throw in a
straight working in the local grocery store or janitorial office or something,
if you're going for something marginally realistic. Again, this is probably
only true beyond a certain scope of characters: we don't have room to be so
conscious in short stories, and anyway, if there's one thing we all know now it
is that EVERYONE is biased in many ways, some of which may not be clear for a
few centuries. I'll talk more about the scop thing and more below replying to
John's comments.
>>While not trying to defend ST's juvenile portrayal of sexuality, all we can
>>truly say is that based on observation, the major characters of all 4 shows
>>tend towards being heterosexual. You can't prove a negative assertion with
>>evidence. That said, looking a the numbers, it's clearly a biased portrayal.
>>An overwhelming number of simple heterosexual relationships have been shown
>>explicitly; no simple homosexual relationships have been shown.
>
>It is not clearly biased at all. Even assuming a 10% homosexuality rate,
>which I suspect is rather high,
On what grounds? And of course that raises questions of what basis you think
various sexualities have, which is a nice long cycle of answers and questions,
but in any case I'd suggest your skepticism is rooted in your assumptions
rather than in any evidence . . . just as is mine that *exclusively*
heterosexual and homosexual identities are probably at least to some degree
social constructs which are internalized to a very high degree from early on
and the percentages register beahviours and not natures, thus leaving the
possibilities for other human societies up for grabs, within certain limits
(such as, viability of sustainable reproduction for a given community).
>that means only one out of every 10
>charachters who engage in relationships could be expected to have a
>homosexual relationship.
Again, this reveals your assumptions. You're overlooking the possibility of
practicing bisexuals, of generally heterosexual-identity individuals who might
engage in homosexual behaviours at some point (just as several "straight" guys
I know did when they were younger), and you are proclaiming the lines of
sexualities declared normative in our society (exclusively homo and exclusively
hetero) as fundamentally normative, when they simply aren't universally
normative in the area of exclusivity. One person on this list suggested once
that he thought individuals had different natural tendencies that could be the
product of both predisposition and development, and environment would help
shape that into social roles.
But I suspect, John, that it would probably disturb you to think that if you'd
been born in another time and place, the normative sexuality you'd engage in
(just as you ascribe to normative sexuality now) could be far different from
what you think is true . . . though, it's probably true for most of us. And
bear in mind, I am noting that you have normativized homosexuality as a
sexuality, because you posit it as discrete from and opposite to heterosexality
(along the lines of the common conception of human sexuality in our culture).
Expected exclusivity of a form of sexuality is a good signal of that sexuality
being "normativized", even if it is still in some circles reviled and see as a
kind of "other". This might be why bisexuals and bisexuality seem to be an
undiscussed group/issue, politically ignored and not fully supported by
gay/lesbian political lobbying (from the little I've read and seen on TV).
> Given the number of charachters on a given show,
>there is nothing outside reasonable probablility.
This is about as mistaken an approach as someone using Derridean deconstruction
to argue against Einstein's theories of relativity. Statistical analysis is
fine when you want to analyze a reality. When you are looking at a *depiction*
of reality, though, that's something different. Depictions are built up from
biases of inclusion and, therefore implicitly on exclusion as well. Every
definition of a norm is also the negative definition of an "other". If one
consistently excludes something from normativity, then one negatively defines
it as aberrant. This is precisely how homosexual behaviour was negatively
defined in Western culture for a long time and into the recent past (and
currently still, in some circles).
Now, that said, recall that Star Trek's universe is a constructed thing, a
piece of fiction which depicts not a *reality* but a imaginary universe that
(supposedly) reflects the concerns, interests, ideals, and questions of our own
society. The mass absence of *any* depiction of homosexuality in a program that
tries *so* hard to do this -- to the point of discussing some issues in our
world in a way that strikes me personally as hackneyed and offputting,
sometimes even unwatchable because the parallels are so overt and superficial --
is to me problematic. Of course, I also say to myself, "Who cares, it's just
Star Trek?" But then again many people watch that show and invest a lot in it
emotionally and imaginatively. Far be it from me to insist someone deal with
this or that issue in their program . . . *but*, a glaring omission must be
recognized as a bias.
And even so, even aside from the omission itself, the assumption of the
future's culture having roughly the same sexual norms as ours is biased in
another way; toward simplistic futurism that fails to imagine really
significant change in many aspects of culture. ST has always felt to me like
the Twentieth Century in futuristic drag, though. So that's not a great
surprise either. The bias isn't so much *against* homosexuality as it is
*toward* one (!) version of normative twentieth century western sexuality -- a
fairly conservative one, at that.
I tend to try to not discuss my writing here, but on this thread I will make an
exception. You can skip this paragraph and the next if uninterested in that
topic. The bias I aspire for in my own writing, by the way, is toward a
multiplicity of sexualities being acceptable and "normal". One of my favorite
characters is a person who loses her lover in an accident. She happens to be a
woman losing a female partner, and this is not all that relevant to the story --
it could have been (and originally was) written as a story about a man losing
a woman. The lesbianism emerges in the story without much comment or
hullabaloo, because what's more important is the relationship itself: the
issues, the problems, the differing interests and worries and committments and
so on of the kind that really are issues in all intimate relationships. But I
found in the process of extensive revision that the character worked better as
a woman when I rewrote her (sometimes characters want to be themselves despite
your best intentions to make them someone else), and the complexities of their
relationship aren't rooted in their sexuality as much as in their differences
as individuals and their relation to the world they live in. To me, the change
was significant, but only in that it made the character more real for me. That
is, I think that if one is telling a cheesy love story, one should be able to
tell that kind of love story about two men just as easily as one can about a
man and a woman . . . or, with a little imagination, about three men, or two
men and three women and an alien, or whatever.
Of course, I know that I am still likely be biased in my writing anyway (as I
am in my personal life and my thinking), but . . . well, *trying* to see past
one's biases is, I believe, worthwhile. I would argue that an inclusivist bias
would generally be more desirable than an exclusionist bias, just as one that
seeks to see the similarity and more importantly dignity in the face of
apparent difference would be more desirable than one that sees apparent
difference as sin.
>(This is especial true
>if you discount the original series where even if a homosexual relationship
>was written, it would certainly never be aired.)
Do you see how you just contradicted yourself, John? This, of course, means
that those early shows are *necessarily* biased, because homosexuality was
implicitly expected to be a taboo topic and was treated as such by all
involved. If that's not bias, I don't know what is... and I say that knowing
full well how groundbreaking it apparently was in other areas, such as in the
multiracial crew (of course, led by a nice oversexed white male jock, but we
can't expect too much, can we?). But implicit taboo = necessary bias.
Gord
