THE ORIGINAL 'STAR TREK': JUST SILLY SEXIST SIXTIES HOKUM SET IN SPACE?

”Male and female are universal constants.”
- Kirk, 'Metamorphosis'

When Men Were Men (And Girls Green)

Is there anything left to say on Star Trek’s sexism? Certainly the show’s insistence on always presenting life, Jim, but very much as we know it has not gone un-noticed. Kirk’s line about this being what us earth creature call luuurve is one of show’s the best-known catchphrases. (Though the actual wording was “Love is the most important thing on Earth, especially to a man and a woman”.) While the green Orion slave girl is helpfully flagged up in the end credits on a weekly basis.

Its costume designer led to the term for women's clothing which is not just skimpy but almost entirely unsuited to the seemingly essential task of staying on the person wearing it. With Zap Brannigan, ’Futurama’s Kirk parody, the narcissistic girl-chasing became his central feature.

Alongside which there’s the repeat gag where Kirk has to awkwardly explain to some innocent the… ahem!… the, you know, the facts of… well… how it’s done to some youngster. And the combination of these two seems to define the thing.

Despite Scotty’s protestations, the laws of physics are broken on a weekly basis. The true universal constants are fixed gender identities and high hem lines. It seemed pretty much out of date by the time of Next Gen in the Eighties. Today it’s less notorious than risible, in the overlap between the cringy and the comic. Perhaps ’Futurama’ had it right. You don’t analyse this sort of thing, you take pot shots at it. Or can we manage more?

Take ’The Empath’ and ’Elaan of Troyus’. Okay, there was probably never a plan to broadcast them back to back. But both have women as effective children, not just in need of adult male guidance but basic socialisation. (Elaan even needs to be taught table manners.) However one is good, mute and… well, empathic, exhibiting the official feminine virtues. While the other is haughty, mouthy and downright tantrummy, but much happier once taken in line. And naturally only the second one – the one who needs taming - is sexualised. The thing’s almost schematic.

Perhaps it's better to take a slightly different question. Ideology is not about convincing people by arguments but shaping their unconscious assumptions. In short, its role is to insinuate itself as apparent common sense. As such entertainment is an ideal propagator; it’s precisely because it doesn't seem anything more than ephemeral than it slips below your perceptual radar. (Transmission is a term both for TV shows and diseases.) But then how much are their creators aware of any of this? Are they merely making their own unconscious assumptions ours by sharing them?

'Metamorphosis' is perhaps the show’s most gender essentialist moment of all. A female spirit (or, as they're described in SF, energy field) is keeping astronaut Zefram alive, long past his natural span. When Kirk asks hopelessly “How do you fight a thing like that?” McCoy shrewdly replies “Maybe you're a soldier so often that you forget you're also trained to be a diplomat. Why not try a carrot instead of a stick?” And they resolve the situation not by devising a weapon to hit the Companion with, but a translator so they might communicate with her.

Now the story’s main female character, Nancy, is a diplomat. So Kirk should be borrowing her carrots. Yet not only do we never see her perform any actual diplomacy, she’s repeatedly demonstrated to be sharp-tongued and unreasonable, blaming Kirk for every plot development. Perhaps unusual behaviour for someone of her profession.

The Starfleet directive as plot impediment, which tries to push them away from the adventure, is a recurrent device. (Like the chief in cop shows always bellowing “you’re off the case!”) And it can be enhanced by adding a Starfleet stuffed shirt they need to ferry, who can shout directly at Kirk rather than have Uhura relay orders. ‘Galileo Seven’ had Galactic High Commissioner Ferris, insisting he should be obeyed despite just being a guest on the show.

But making this permanently displeased bigwig into a woman brings up the subject of the career woman. And soon she’s saying “I've been good at my job, but I've never been loved. Never. What kind of life is that? Not to be loved, never to have shown love?”

It’s the perfect trade-off. A feminine spirit without a body runs into a woman after a career, so she clearly doesn’t want to be a woman in the first place. The natural order is restored by the closing credits.

It's commonly thought of as a love story. But that's to see the thing though it's resolution. For most of the time, the Companion behaves like a Mother. (Note how her name is contingent, in fact contingent on Zefram.) When he complains of feeling lonely, she goes and gets him a play date – nabbing Kirk and co, so setting off the story.

In the story's most interesting moment, finding the energy field is actually a female energy field, he initially recoils at the notion. Not at it's ludicrousness, but at the idea they've had some sort of affair. It's resolved through her taking female form, via the dying Nancy's body. The Freudian forbidden suddenly becomes possible, becomes the… and there’s no nicer way of saying it... Mum you can fuck.

And it’s Kirk who persuades her to cut the apron strings. He's soon off on the classic 'Star Trek' bugbear, railing against the static utopia. Zefram wasn't just any astronaut, but the inventor of the warp drive – another Historically Important Individual. Yet since then he's sat back with every need taken care of. “Our species can only survive if we have obstacles to overcome,” Kirk cries. “You take away all obstacles. Without them to strengthen us, we will weaken and die.”

When Spock prompts “ask it about its nature” deliberately or not he’s being tautological. For the Companion is strongly associated with nature. For reasons entirely unexplained within the story Zefram has to go outside to communicate with her, leading to the iconic scenes of her field descending over him. She can't leave the planet for any length of time without dying, suggesting she is in some way the Gaia-like spirit of the planet.

And in this way the romance story overlaps with the Romantic. The term 'Mother Nature' goes back to the Middle Ages, but Romanticism bestowed a feminine spirit upon Nature with renewed vigour. The more technologically advanced human society became, the more important the Romantics felt it was to stay in touch with the feminine. And Zefram communicating with the Companion “on a non-verbal level” does seem remarkably similar to the Romantic poet communing with nature. The techno-futurism of 'Star Trek' doesn't deny and even plays up all that, but makes of it something which must be put in the past. The Companion, in short, is not just the Mum but also the Earth you get to fuck.

Using the Assets You Have

But let’s get back to the bad girls. 'The Man Trap', the first episode to be broadcast, started things off the way they meant to go on. Like a cross between 'Species' and 'That Obscure Object of Desire', an alien impersonates desirable women to lure in its targets. Shapeshifting is a common weapon of villainy, inherently suggesting deception. But gendering the alien as a woman is significant.

Its hunger for salt (aka the human life force) is almost an inevitable result of being a woman in a man's world. Deprived of the means of her own survival unless granted by a man, she inevitably becomes a vampiric force. At one point, prompted by events, 'it' switches genders and immediately switches from male to female targets. Yet even this underlines what a she it really is, perpetually named after Nancy, her first victim. (Yep Nancy again, they were no better with naming women than charactersing them.)

One image strikingly sums this up. We never see Nancy attack her first victim, just her standing over his already-dead body like a tableau. It's a memorable moment, making more of an impact than if they'd gone for the more obvious action sequence. But its impact partly comes from suggesting at an inevitability to all of this. For if society is made up by men, then women will inevitably become something outside, something alien. To misquote the pop psychology book title, in SF Men are from Earth, Women aren't.

Yet amid all this reactionary sexual politics there's an ecological message. This is the last creature of its kind, explicitly compared to the buffalo. Sorry, the what? Given that we’re dealing with an intelligent creature, why isn’t the analogy the genocide of the American Indian? (Besides, one was contingent on the other. Buffalo were often slaughtered as a means to either starve Native Americans or drive them into reservations.)

Further, Darren at The M0vie Blog is almost certainly right to point out that, this all being a frontier analogy, the death of those who came before cannot help but be presented as regrettable - but a regrettable necessity. Progress determines that they need to be got out of our way, and anyway our pausing to get a bit rueful about it shows how good we really are. (Making Kirk a bit like that cop in ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide’ who might shoot people but always agonises about it to his girlfriend afterwards.)

They talk of not wanting to kill her. At one point, she even gets to makes the case for her life. Except, in a somewhat delicious irony, at that point she's disguised as McCoy. In other words, literally given a man's voice. (It's never quite explained why they don't just up and give her some salt. Are they supposed to be short of the stuff? Would she have fared better asking for pepper? We get few clues.)

 

And these two themes do tie up. Through Nancy's 'true' appearance, an old and ancient thing. Her long straggly hair, her lined snout and what the production crew called “ashen skin”, the “old hag” of folklore, matches the dialogue where McCoy is blinded to her grey hair.

In Tennessee Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1947) Blanche exclaims “I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.” A notion Stanley rebels against: "It’s dark in here…. I don’t think I ever seen you in the light. That’s a fact!.. You never want to go out till after six and then it’s always some place that’s not lighted much… What it means is I’ve never had a real good look at you."

And Nancy’s the Blanche Dubois of alien life forms, her devices to mask her age with appearance merely more sophisticated. But both plan to keep up her required level of desirability – the commodity which keeps her alive. Women are inherently about appearance and appearance is about deception.

And in fact we see a similar combination later, in 'Devil In the Dark'. The last of a kind is almost tragically wiped out through failure to communicate. Except one factor is reversed. Rather than impersonating humans, the Horta is one of the few non-humanoid aliens on the show. They could have talked to Nancy at any point, but only do so obliquely. 'Devil in the Dark' intentionally with-holds communication, only to devise a way to enable it. (The coining of the Vulcan mind meld.) And with it things come to a happy ending. So why can one live when the other has to die?

The real difference is of course that the woman in 'Devil in the Dark' is primarily a mother, acting only to defend her children. Unless you have a thing for duvets with varicose veins (and I concede there may well be an OnlyFans for that), she's not sexualised. Whereas Nancy’s sexualisation is associated with her predation. The only crew member resistant to her charms is Spock, and he survives her advances literally through not being a red-blooded male. Women don't have to die, at least not when fulfilling their biological roles. But female sexuality, inherently a threat, has to be killed off.

Yet ’Map Trap’ itself doesn't seem so convinced the two do tie up. Like 'The Doomsday Machine', it sets up two parallel themes then figures it needs to favour one of them. The episode is built around McCoy’s dilemma over his feelings for Nancy, with the last-of-it's-kind theme a late addition to the script. Yet that’s the one they play into. It's like the gendered stuff is so hard-wired into the story its own tellers look straight through it and instead focus on a more indirect analogy. It's tempting to argue that even on the level of metaphor it's disguised, one metaphor hidden beneath another.

And if we're taking on the show's sexism, why not go for the jugular? 'Mudd's Women' is the infamous episode which reassures the viewer that in the future prostitution will still be alive and well. It seems to have been part of Roddenberry's original pitch, suggesting it was integral to the show's world-view. (Or at least his.)

For plot beats, ’Mudd’s Women’ and ’The Way To Eden’ almost perfectly match. Both the women and Severin’s space hippies are unwillingly beamed aboard the Enterprise from a breaking-up ship, to stupefy the crew with their outrageous behaviour and scanty costumes. Both follow their leader’s instructions to seduce/befriend the crew to hijack the ship. Only when they reach their destination do their plans unravel. (Slightly bizarrely only one group uses drugs, and it’s not the hippies.) Yet they don’t feel similar.

Which may be because ‘Way To Eden’ is clearly about something. In its crass fashion it’s exhibiting an ideology in order to critique it, making it a fitting subject of critique itself. Whereas ’Mudd’s Women’ seems a relic of as time when women were goods (they’re specifically referred to as his “cargo”), better consigned to the past. Yet should we separate them that quickly?

Their ability to seduce and enchant the male crew into doing their bidding comes from the magic Venus pills they take. (Leading to McCoy’s classic line “are you wearing some unusual kind of perfume, or something radioactive?”) Much of the episode is like one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons when the guy’s heart honks and eyes bulge uncontrollably out on stalks. While men feel sex, as a drive, women possess sexuality – like it’s a weapon at their disposal. But without a regular supply of pills, which they fall on like junkies, they fall back into plainness. In a fairly direct echo of 'Man Trap', women are associated with illusion and deception. Let’s remember glamour originally referred to a magical enchantment, a possessing spell.

Perhaps the most interesting sequence in the whole episode lasts only seconds. A scene of the women holding the Venus drug in their eager palms cuts to Spock with the lithium (not yet named dilithium) crystal needed to power the ship. For if the women in 'Mudd's Women' are to navigate a man's world, they need their power source as much as a starship does its. They’re simply striving to survive, using the limited options left to them. What else are they supposed to do? Study at the Academy for years and finally be allowed to answer the phone? Get to serve the Captain his coffee, hoping he notices your legs? And this segue admits as much.

One segue, of course, does not a redemptive reading make. We should remember that in selling themselves they require a pimp, who rations their drugs and whose ownership of them is telegraphed even in the episode title.

Let's note something about Mudd. He's built around the gag that his salesman's patter continually falls on impervious ears, making him an irresistible force continually bashing into an immovable object. This recurs so often you might wonder why he doesn't take one of his own pills, and stroke his beard alluringly at Kirk. He doesn't seem to have much to lose. But his inability to do what 'his' girls can is neither played up nor explained away, it's just accepted as a fact of life.

In 'Naked Time’, when the insane Riley usurps Kirk's place as Captain, he issues a decree that women shouldn't wear too much make-up. It’s a gag, but the moral of 'Mudd's Women' is oddly similar. Imagine it as a set of instructions for a young female viewer. Your chief asset is your looks, but you only have ‘em for so long so make sure you snag your man and settle down before they’re spent. And don’t overdo it even then. Powerful medicine.

Notably, the plot contrives to switch the women’s attention from the crew to a planet of well-off and available miners. And even then the deception fails when one of the girls won't go along with it. Which dodges something not just about plot resolution but ‘manhood’. To successfully resist them would suggest the crew were not 'real men' at all. While to succumb would mean they couldn’t be heroes. This dilemma surfaces elsewhere, and most consistently over Kirk.

Watching ’Star Trek’ all the way through, and in defiance of the cocksure Zap Brannigan stereotype, it’s notable how fallible a character Kirk is. He snaps at underlings when under pressure, makes small mistakes, very nearly makes big ones. But when this seems to happen over attraction to women it turns out to be a feint. He’s often shown seeming to do the wrong thing, abusing his command and even jeopardising missions by chasing skirt. Yet this always turns out to be part of some overall plan of his. See for example ’Conscience of the King’. 

(There’s precisely three genuine exceptions, where Kirk truly falls in love, in three series - ’City On the Edge of Forever’, ’The Paradise Syndrome’ and ’Requiem For Methusaleh’. Each of which is presented as something out of the ordinary.)

Jules Feiffer said “our cultural opposite of the man who didn’t make out with women has never been the man who did – but rather the man who could if he wanted but still didn’t.” (‘The Great Comic Book Heroes’, 1965) Kirk can be shown getting his wicked way, with some off-screen shagging nudged and winked at (especially in ‘Wink of an Eye’). But mostly scripts repeatedly find mission-critical reasons why Kirk needs to seduce or counter-seduce the girl of the week. It’s victory, more than sexual gratification which drives him. “So that was your plan”, Kirk cries in ‘Mark of Gideon’ after another entrapment via seduction scenario. “That I would fall so under her spell that I’d give up my freedom and become a willing sacrifice”. And note that “spell”.

If women of the era only have power via sexual allure then, reassuringly, Kirk is shown as constantly able to out-allure them. Take ‘Elaan of Troyus’. Elaan’s plot is to get Kirk to fall in love with her, using evil juju, which jeapordises the Enterprise’s peace mission. But of course it’s her who falls in love with him, despite the absolute lack of magic affects on his part. Women endlessly launch themselves at his manly torso, but persistently miss and end up at his feet. About the only girl of the week he doesn’t seduce is Miranda in ’Is There In Truth No Beauty?’, and she turns out to be blind.

Harpies and Jezebels

Let’s look at a comparison, or at least what should be a comparison. ‘The Outer Limits’ ran from 1963 to 5, just before ‘Star Trek’, effectively passing the baton of TV SF. If there’s less temptresses in titillatory costumes, it was a different show, chasing a different market. One opens with a portentous all-knowing extra-diegetic narrator, the other with a triumphalist speech by it’s heroic lead.

But it was still a Sixties show with unsurprisingly Sixties attitudes. Women are “pretty nurses,” dutiful lab assistants, dutiful wives, or dutiful lab assistants doubling as wives. Admittedly, there’s exceptions. In fact Joanna Frank’s otherworldly performance as an elemental femme fatale in ’Zzzzz’ is more mesmerising to watch than all of Mudd’s Women put together. But exceptions is what they are. Women’s secondary nature is simply taken as an established fact. No need to hold them down there, it’s just where they are.

As much as they have a role, it’s as a necessary counterbalance to man’s rationality, with their handy ‘feminine’ virtues such as sensibility. See for example ’The Architects of Fear’, or ’The Borderland’ where a wife’s loving hand pulls her husband back from an experiment gone awry. The closing narration spells it out for us:

”There are worlds beyond and worlds within which the explorer must explore, but there is one power which seems to transcend space and time, life and death. It is a deeply human power which holds us safe and together when all other forces combine to tear us apart — we call it the power of love.”

Needless to say, such notions try to sell confines as virtues. But the bigging up of male virility and power… the “no we’re in charge, honest” is largely absent. It doesn’t feel like it’s insistently about sexism the way ’Star Trek’ does. What could have changed in those few years?

The short answer is that the early Sixties were not like the late. A rough and ready history of the rise of American feminism would be the publication of Betty Friedan’s ’The Feminine Mystique’ (1963), the formation of the National Organization for Women (1966) and the Miss America protests where the supposed “bra burning” took place (1968), which roughly equate to base camp, shoulder summit and highly visible peak.

’Star Trek’ also ran into Black Power and the counter culture head on, as much as it did the Romulans. You can almost see it happening in real time, from mildly indulgent inclusionism to identification of a perceived threat. But its relationship to feminism, while as heated, while more heated, is less distinct.

So ‘Star Trek’ fluctuates strangely in it sexism. ’Mudd’s Women’ is very much a pre-feminist story, about the role patriarchal society assigns to women, then in its paranoia panics over them having. But in ’Metamorphosis’, as seen, they had to deal with a woman diplomat who issued orders. Its sexism becomes a war on two fronts, against temptress jezebels and demanding harpies.

And there may even be a point where this switch happens. ’Requiem For Methusaleh’ is another story where Kirk goes off-mission and falls in love. (Though least credibly of all. The other stories at least allow some span of time where this might happen. Here, it’s during the ads.) He ends up scrapping over Rayna with his rival suitor, Flint. (Flint having built Rayna as an android companion for his life on a remote planet. You know, like you do.)

Horrified at their violence, seemingly on the spot she formulates the notion that maybe she could be the one making the decisions about her life. “Please stop. Stop! I choose where I want to go... what I want to do. I choose. I choose... Do not order me. No one can order me!” This might sound like a good starting point. In fact, out of shock of this strange new notion, she’s promptly struck dead.

While a later story, ‘Turnabout Intruder’, starts with a woman presuming she has that right to choose. Naturally she’s the villain...

Janice Lester plans a body swap with Kirk, as it’s her only chance to command a starship like the Enterprise. (Yes, the same series that dismisses racism as “primitive thinking” insists women can’t captain starships.) Now a feminist tale might involve the yeomen and telephonists getting together to agitate for more equal pay and less leering, something like what was starting to happen in the real world at the time. You know, collective action, based on shared identity, that sort of thing.

Whereas this goes straight for the single woman with a glass ceiling obsession. (Even her henchman’s a… well, he’s a man.) But it is a story which encounters feminism, is specifically anti-feminist. In a nice touch she gets to do the expository Captain’s log, as if threatening to take over the show.

Except of course her plan is deranged, and its execution merely reveals conflicts within herself. Her desire to be a starship Captain is casually conflated with her desire for a starship captain, she’s (yawn) another old flame of Kirk who feels spurned. And they’re not done yet...

Almost immediately on their being switched, she exults to Kirk “now you’ll know the indignity of being a woman…. Believe me, it's better to be dead than to live alone in the body of a woman.” While the temporarily feminised Kirk refers to “her intense hatred of her own womanhood.” At a time when the call for equal rights was commonly parsed as “we don’t want to be women any more”. It’s as if even she can’t really imagine herself in the big chair, at least not as her self.

There are those who imagine all wrongs can be handwaved away by use of the phrase “of its time”. It’s more mantra than argument. Yet the irony is that this is a time the description fits, just in the opposite way to their imaginings. ‘Turnabout Intruder’ is typical of a story produced not in the absence of feminism, but precisely because of it’s presence. Feminism is raised, but only to be repudiated. This panic reaction is a hysterical reaction to something it tries to pass off as hysterical. The dread threat of a woman after a Captaincy powers the episode, as the very same time we’re supposed to find that idea a total absurdity.

Race-swapping stories, such as ’Black Like Me’ (1964) or ’Gentleman’s Agreement’ (1947), where Gregory Peck poses as Jewish, were films in the tradition of George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out In Paris and London’, undercover agents exposing the situation of poverty and discrimination. Can criticisms be made of them? Yes. But, particularly in their time, they were progressive. In both cases, the protagonist is a crusading journalist gone undercover.

Whereas gender-swapping stories are more traditionally played as comedies, such as ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959). They’re associated with Shakespearian tradition, where the drama lies in the world being turned upside down and the resolution of it being righted again as the men re-don their trousers. Yet here, when facing off feminism, Lester’s threat seems more real and the humour is dissipated. Except even then it can’t quite be expunged. Scotty calls Lester-as-Kirk “red-faced with hysteria”, and Shatner’s embracing of hissy fit drag cannot help but draw laughter. (It’s also tempting to suggest that with the preening, narcissistic Lester it’s the closest he ever came to playing himself.)

Formally, this is very similar to to good Kirk/ bad Kirk of ‘Enemy Within’, except noticeably the crew’s reaction becomes more foregrounded. Everyone, up to and including the regulars, notices the change and rejects the new Captain. In fact the script seems confused over whether resolution should come by the Shakespearian route of body-swap reversing (revealing it’s essential unnatural-ness) or the anti-feminism of Lester’s command being stymied by mutiny (revealing the absurdity of the situation). The two happen at about the same time, as if double booked.

So, in short, ’Star Trek’ didn’t insist so hard on strict gender roles and a boys-club Starfleet because this was all some innocent time before feminism, but precisely as a reaction to feminism. Yet the feminism it was reacting to was still emerging, perhaps even nascent. So there’s other times where it comes across as pre-feminist, with a quite different set of concerns. And by fighting both fronts it comes to feel obsessive on the subject, like sexism condensed.

It effectively launches with a Jezebel (‘The Man Trap’) and ends with a Harpie (‘Turnabout Intruder’). But we shouldn’t be seduced by that superficial neatness. In practise, the show switches arbitrarily between these two types, there’s no overall shifting from one to the other as feminism became more widespread. It seems more the case that feminism stirred up a more general anxiety, which stoked both simultaneously.

PS Should you wish to read more by a bloke about women’s rights (over which I’m supremely unqualified to comment) and SF (alarmingly over-qualified), with particular reference to the Amazon planet trope, go here.

Coming soon! And finally… about time we showed some class…