Jim writes:
<< On Wed, 03 Jan 2001 23:03:35 -0500, JDG wrote:
>I don't buy this at all........ there is an awful lot of sleeping
>around on Star Trek. Premarital sex is virtually accepted.
>Abortion is completely accepted. Sleeping with co-workers is
>completely accepted.
>
>All of these represent significant changes.
That's very true. What my original point was that despite, or rather
*because* of these changes, certain things become interesting by their
omission, particularly how Star Trek is held up by its fans to be, for lack
of a better expression, the social conscience of the future.
In light of that, I thought it was ironic that in a future where romantic
liasons with aliens (which even today might be called miscegenation by some)
is not uncommon, we've never seen even a peripheral character in what is
these days still often considered an unacceptable relationship.
>>
I think ST has done what it classically does with touchy issues of it's day
-- that is, hide the real social issue behind the facade of alien to human
and human to alien relationships.
In the 60's the touchy issues were race relationships and gender-power. We
still had mostly caucasians and men in the structure of power in the
Federation in the old Star Trek, but where ST was progressive was it's
depiction of gender-power and race relationships within alien societies.
Some examples that come to my mind are the episodes where Kirk steals the
Romulan cloaking device and the one where 4 of the crew are transplanted to
the "evil" parallel universe. In the first, we see the high-ranking and
powerful Romulan Commander as an uncaucasian-like woman and in the second, we
see that the captain's mistress and fellow cabalist is an un-caucasian-like
woman.
The idea is to be socially conservative appearing and very very progressive
in substance when you depict aliens, because, after all, we lack real aliens
in our society and it is natural to at once distance the touchy issue from
ourselves by using theatrical alien species and to comment on it by implying
that those touchy issues can be applied to "human" society.
In the Romulan cloaking episode, the Romulan commander questions how Spock
can remain a subordinate to captain Kirk who isn't of the same blood
relationship as he is to the Romulan commander. Or something like that. It
is the issue of race placed in the realm of the fantastic -- and placing
touchy issues into the realm of the fantastic is a theatrical trick that has
been done all the way back to Shakespeare (_The Tempest_) and before that to
writers like Chaucer and whichever angst-ridden person came up with Beowulf.
So in the later versions of Trek that came out in the 80's and 90's we get
progressive views on homosexuality and sex in general in alien societies, but
a rather conservative depiction in Federation society. "If a 'freak' like
Neelix can do it, then why not me?" or "I associate more with "Spock" and
"7of9" (one gets it on every 7 years only and the other never) anyway, than
with Kirk or Wesley Crusher!"
