In 1966, NBC ordered a pilot for a show called Star Trek. It performed badly with Los Angeles test audiences, and creator Gene Roddenberry specifically recalls women disliking how it portrayed women. But NBC felt it had some sort of potential, so they ordered a second pilot. Let’s examine the changes that made Star Trek more palatable to test audiences.
And while we do it, let’s remember that I’m not alone in the opinion that test audiences, like taste tests, can give extremely misleading feedback. Malcolm Gladwell talks in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking about how you get very different results from a cola sip test in a grocery store than you get when you send people home with a carton of your cola and let them drink it when and where they ordinarily drink it – and in whole servings. Confronted with something that flouts all norms, people are often times very uncomfortable – at first. But some of the best products in history get rejected the first time they’re offered. I don’t consider a test audience’s response the final word on whether something like the original version of Star Trek could have survived. But TV does, and this sort of event is exactly why they industry believes it’s the audience forcing their choice to serve up bigoted material.
Changes from pilot to pilot
In the original Star Trek pilot – “The Cage” – we have a woman (Majel Barrett, yay!) as second in command of the Enterprise. She and all the other women wear pants just like the men wear when they’re on duty. She’s professional, focused and feels double-slighted when Captain Pike says he can’t get used to having women on the bridge, then hastens to add that she’s an exception. Her name is simply Number One. Overall, she’s rather like Spock became – we don’t see any emotions from her. Oh, and both she and the female yeoman have to be attracted to Pike because, I dunno, men have such pitiful egos and they were the only ones making TV this side of the Atlantic back then? Whatever.
In the second pilot and the series that came after, the only woman on the bridge is Uhura, who’s very professional and all that, but her job as communications officer – an important position in reality – is reminiscent of a receptionist’s duties. She answers and places calls, basically. She’s not in line to take over if Kirk’s incapacitated. She and the other women wear remarkably impractical micro-minis that often flash their little shorts underneath. None of the women are like Number One – they’re all more emotional, and therefore more the traditional female stereotype. And for a while, it seems every female historian/archeologist/academic falls in love with the bad guy of the week because bad guys are so attractive to women, I guess. (To be fair, the relationship between Khan and his future wife is strongly coded as abusive, though only to reveal his badness.)
Softening the women
The comparison interests me because Roddenberry talked on DVD extras about his expectation that women would be grateful to see women represented as competent and in charge (Number One takes over when the captain is captured), but their response was more “Who does she think she is?” His response, once NBC gave him a second chance, was to make the show’s women more stereotypically feminine. But he also presented NBC with a BLACK AFRICAN WOMAN ON THE BRIDGE, OH MY LORD and, according to Nichelle Nichols, when they told him to get rid of her, he said if she went, so would he. Hey, if you’ve got to compromise, that’s the way to do it.
Looking back, Star Trek doesn’t seem very progressive in terms of how it represents women. The show’s creative team overestimated where the space program would be in thirty years while underestimating what a walking Title IX violation Kirk would seem by that time. It’s exciting to note that the newer ST shows and movies had to play catch-up, because in reality, “men’s” professions were already becoming more open to women. Pike’s bemusement at “women on the bridge” and Kirk’s ogling of female yeomen are jarring events to watch because the attitudes they represent are already largely considered inappropriate in our society, and it’s hard to imagine there being any remnant of them by the twenty-third century.
Women in Starfleet
It’s telling that the series, which they knew in advance was being canceled, ends with an episode about one of Kirk’s old lovers using alien technology to switch bodies with him. Why? Because women can’t be captains in Starfleet at this time, and she wants to be one. It turns out she’s deranged, and she talks a lot about how much she hates being a woman. This episode bugged me because it offered her derangement as the real reason she couldn’t be a captain, and yet no explanation for her mental state other than “gender keeping her from doing what she loves and worked hard for” is offered. It ends on her having a breakdown while Kirk says none of this needed to happen, “if only…” If only what? If only she’d learned to knit and love it? Or if only Starfleet didn’t illogically assume command abilities traveled exclusively on the Y-chromosome? Given Roddenberry’s reaction to the test audience’s reaction to Number One, this episode may have been intended to chastise that audience for denying women should be in command, but it’s certainly left so it can be interpreted the other way, too.
In a supreme bit of irony, the first female (and black!) Starfleet captain we ever see appears in the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, but somehow she isn’t credited. She has lines. Two members of her crew, who each have fewer lines, are named and credited. Majel Barrett, Grace Lee Whitney and Jane Wiedlin all have only unintelligible lines as they make cameos during chaotic moments, and they get credit. But not Madge Sinclair, who appeared in the original series just like Barrett and Whitney. I suppose it’s some sort of technical oversight, but quite a facepalm.
The cultural impact
It’s hard for me to say just how revolutionary the female roles on the original Star Trek may have seemed at the time, since I wasn’t born yet and don’t know the nuances first-hand. Here’s my speculation, but I’d love to hear from people who were actually around in the 60s.
- Uhura’s job may have comfortably resembled the only role 1960s women were welcome to in offices, but the vast majority of black TV characters (of both genders) at the time were servants, even if they were lead characters. (Even Julia started two years after Star Trek). Uhura’s position never resembled servitude. She took orders just like everyone else, and felt entitled to respectfully inform her superiors when they were asking the impossible.
- Yeoman Rand may only have been a yeoman (until the feature films), but she was an attractive white woman working alongside men, and she took her duties more seriously than her social life.
- That the ship’s historian/archeologist/whatever academic of the week could just casually happen to be a woman without all sorts of explanation would still have seemed startling to me in the 80s.
{ 43 comments… read them below or add one }
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That’s not massive nerd-age — there’s NOTHING WRONG with historicizing your SF/F, particularly since if you believe JK Rowling, there’re always more complicated character biographies than you get the chance to share.
Maria(Quote) (Reply)
This is true. I had a half Vietnamese half Chinese friend in elementary school, and immigration managed to butcher both her family name, and her mother’s maiden name. And in college, I had a friend from Iran here with asylum, and they managed to get her and her sister’s names switched. They didn’t dare do anything about it, in case the attention made someone re-examine their asylum and boot them back to Iran. That happened less than three years ago, so…
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
I was always under the impression that massive nerds were most welcome at Hathor.
I post here, after all…
So nerd away, my nerdy friend!
JT(Quote) (Reply)
The French line of my ancestry immigrated in the early 1800′s. Immigration added a letter to the end of the name, changing the pronunciation from a traditional French word to, well, gibberish. So it’s been going on for centuries. (And then my history teacher tried to tell me I was wrong because Ellis Island always Anglicized names and “wouldn’t” have given my family that name. Pssh, whatever.)
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
I think I saw an article where George Takei said that Roddenberry got the name Sulu from a local name of the East and South China Seas, because he liked the idea of naming a character after a sea, which touches many different countries and cultures. (It was in response to being asked if he minded a Korean playing Sulu in the reboot, and he cited the above as the reason it was quite fitting).
SunlessNick(Quote) (Reply)
“I think it is possible that some readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don’t notice, don’t care. Whites of course have the privilege of not caring, of being ‘colorblind.’ Nobody else does.”
That is certainly a valid way of looking at it.
That being said, personally, I disagree. I think what “colorblind” means as a goal is realizing that just as dogs are dogs first and their breed second as far as predicting behavior, we are human beings first and our races second — and therefore, like dogs, choosing our companions by common interests and energy level instead of by their lineage.
On a day to day level, I would hardly find it insulting if someone on the internet said “OMG, you’re white — I thought you were [insert his/her race here].” The individual in question would have assumed I was like them until they had concrete evidence otherwise — a natural and normal human reaction. Furthermore, every time someone “doesn’t notice” someone’s race, it means that they weren’t LOOKING for signs of ethnicity. If being around people of another ethnicity upset them, they’d be actively LOOKING for hints of “otherness” in order to steer clear. Not looking is therefore a step in the right direction toward that colorblind goal.
With that in mind, then, to say that people of color are INCAPABLE of reaching that step in the right direction because of a supposed handicap, cultural or biological? Absolutely not. It is certainly much more DIFFICULT to “not notice” someone being white or to view whites as the same as you when you run into as many whites who treat you wierdly or badly because of your skin, but impossible? And to say that that lack of hatred/fear is a privilege that only a certain “class” of people can attain?
No, I do not agree. I do not agree at all. Each individual chooses to notice and chooses to care what genetic traits (whether gender or race or body shape or orientation) others around him have, to let those influence his view of that person. And each individual is capable of choosing not to care, no matter the cost.
The common reply to that is, of course, “that’s just ethics” or “you’re right morally, but in the real world x and y.” Again, I disagree: ethics and morals are what make the real world, either by being held or by being disregarded (best example of that truth: Wall Street). You can’t build a house with no foundation, as the adage goes. “Nobody else does” and “it’s hard,” while reasons, are hardly excuses for failing to live up to that accountability.
DragonLady(Quote) (Reply)
“The idea that lacking rapacious drives makes one useless is a good argument for getting rid of humans altogether, because the more good we do, the more we’d draw on that rapacious drive, and eventually anyone’s morals would fail.”
It happens every day to people in business and government: the drive to conquer their political enemies, tempered by their compassion telling them that the enemy is those who persecute the downtrodden, gets them into office… and then that drive slowly changes to wanting to stay in Washington for power’s sake, and the protecting the downtrodden part gets compromised until it goes away all together; the businessman starts out in his drive to conquer in business world, with his compassion telling him he is doing so to provide a good life for his descendants or to build a legacy, until slowly making a killing becomes the motive and he spends more and more time away from his family until that family is so in name only — or less and the charitable legacy is little more than a token tax write-off.
On the other side of the coin are the parents who sympathize with their children so much that they cannot bear to see their children suffer any distress or disappointment and so protect their child from even the negative consequences of the child’s own actions — including breaking house rules — or who are so busy “seeing both sides” of every issue that they cannot even decide what those house rules should be in the first place!
Maintain the balance between the drive to impose your will on the world no matter what and the compassionate side of our nature urging us to see through others’ points of view and feel what they feel is a DAILY struggle. Most win and lead balanced lives. Some lose and lead lives of varying stages of imbalance.
As I said, I did not see sociopathic!Kirk’s actions not as rape itself but as a symbol of conquest/aggression IN ANY FORM: economic, political, or interpersonal. Particularly since other methods of conveying out-of-control imposing-of-one’s-will — beating his child for failing to live up to some expectation until said child does so, political conquest, becoming the crew bully — weren’t really feasible given the limitations of time and situation. The dark!Kirk imposed his will/aggressed at everything, and the other Kirk couldn’t stop seeing both points of view — he was paralyzed at the point of decision.
At least that’s how I interpreted the events in the ep. YMMV, of course.
DragonLady(Quote) (Reply)
I think what Le Guin was trying to say is that Whites have the option of going through life without noticing race because their race is the default. When you look at Congresspeople, CEO’s, celebrities and models, they look like you (generic you). You begin to think, as the rational response to an irrational world, that your experiences are normal. It doesn’t hurt you to ignore people who don’t look like you. There’s no penalty for dismissing that viewpoint. But people of color don’t have that option. They can’t afford to ignore White people. There are too many in positions of power and their experiences have been declared the default.
Color-blindness, while a noble ideal, becomes a new form of racism in our imperfect society. It’s not enough to just not oppress someone. Ignoring their plight, caused by a third party, does them harm. It’s as if bullies kept stealing your sister’s matchbox cars and when she complained to you about it, you said, “Well, I don’t see sex when I look at a person, I judge them by their personalities and if a girl wants to play with toy cars that’s all right by me.” Yes, it’s good that you personally don’t steal from her (actually, it’s the bare minimum, but I digress). But other people do steal, and by ignoring the reality that they are judging her by a certain criteria, just because you know that criteria is wrong, you harm her by claiming her oppression doesn’t exist. In a roundabout way, you enable the bullies by giving them free rein to oppress and denying your sister any recourse.
Same with colorblindness. When it comes to my personal life, who I choose for friends and lovers and club members, I can strive to judge people based on their merits and not their appearance. But when it comes to the rest of the world, I can’t pretend that race doesn’t exist or that it doesn’t harm people every day. If a coworker complains to me about our boss, I can’t say, “Well, I never noticed you were Latina, maybe he didn’t either. Maybe ‘Hey chiquita, how many wetbacks does it take to screw in a lightbulb?’ was a joke about dolphins, did you ever consider that?”
Claiming “I don’t see race” when the overwhelmingly majority of faces on sitcoms and news broadcasts and advertisements are White is a shield to hide from change. It supports the status quo, because the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
@DragonLady —
With that in mind, then, to say that people of color are INCAPABLE of reaching that step in the right direction because of a supposed handicap, cultural or biological? Absolutely not. It is certainly much more DIFFICULT to “not notice” someone being white or to view whites as the same as you when you run into as many whites who treat you wierdly or badly because of your skin, but impossible? And to say that that lack of hatred/fear is a privilege that only a certain “class” of people can attain?
No, I do not agree. I do not agree at all. Each individual chooses to notice and chooses to care what genetic traits (whether gender or race or body shape or orientation) others around him have, to let those influence his view of that person. And each individual is capable of choosing not to care, no matter the cost.
Is an incredibly privileged statement. First, you’re putting the burden for addressing or resisting that “supposed” handicap on POC/other marginalized groups. If white people (or ppl with other kinds of privilege) are acting out of line (and that’s not an “if” statement — part of the definition of privilege is that you often, unconsciously or not, work to maintain systems of oppression), that’s NOT indicative of a moral imperative on the part of POC/other marginalized groups to ignore that oppressor’s race, sexual orientation, etc., in order to be a better person. It’s on the shoulders of members of the oppressing group to call out their fellow group members on that privilege, and to consciously resist working with that particular system of oppression.
Hell’s bells, that’s like saying that women who are traveling alone at night should get over themselves for noticing that the only person in the train car with them is a man.
Maria(Quote) (Reply)
The individual in question would have assumed I was like them until they had concrete evidence otherwise — a natural and normal human reaction.
Maria, let’s add this one to the Bingo card list (you guys will find out soon enough).
What you’ve said above, DragonLady, is both inaccurate and privileged. It’s true for whites, but ONLY for whites. However, it’s a very common misunderstanding so we should probably address it more broadly, and that’s what the above-referenced Bingo card project will be about. Anyhow:
No. People assume folks of an unknown demographic are The Default – if they are not the default, like you and I are in this case, then they do not assume “this unknown person is black like me” or whatever. When, after all, is the last time you read a novel that described a character as “A white guy around forty.” No, the race is presumed to be white unless otherwise noted. People of color would be very confused indeed if they went around assuming everyone in novels was of their race unless the novel stated otherwise. Imagine thinking everyone in Anne Rice’s books was Chinese-American because you are, and she rarely mentions race because she rarely includes people of color. No, it doesn’t work.
And to confirm, I’ve seen multiple forums informally poll people with this:
–What’s your demographic?
–What do you assume to be the demographic of another commenter who as yet has said nothing about his/her race, gender, etc.?
The overwhelming majority of people from ALL demographics from English-speaking websites assume people are white, male and American until they learn otherwise (unless the site has its own demographic, of course – say, a dating site for African-Americans or a site like Hathor, where people – incorrectly, in fact – presume a mostly female audience).
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
It happens every day …
That demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of basic psychology. Adults can’t lose their consciences. Those who appear to do so were actually sociopaths who used to mimic conscience and empathy, but then reached a point where that act wasn’t necessary to ensure their survival.
The other side of that coin is simply having a conscience. It’s simply ignorant to suggest that if one isn’t sacrificing morals to personal will, one will be indecisive to the point of uselessness.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
“I think what Le Guin was trying to say is that Whites have the option of going through life without noticing race because their race is the default.”
…see, now that does actually make sense.
I’d always understood colorblind to be strictly an interpersonal decision, such as colorblind hiring policies where the race is undisclosed and the HR professional isn’t allowed to look for “clues” like seeing if the candidate’s high school is in a black neighborhood, or not using the race of the protagonist as a determining factor in whether or not to read a book/watch a movie.
But colorblind being perverted into “la, la, la, I don’t see race therefore race does not exist and therefore there is no racism” — yeah, only whites can pull that kind of stunt. And it’s absolutely true that people do such “redefinitions” to avoid confronting an unpleasant reality.
My point was solely on the true definition: a black person [for example] assuming a white person is racist solely based on the fact s/he is white is just as morally wrong (though does not inflict as much suffering) as a white person assuming a black person is incompetent/dishonest/stereotype of choice because s/he is black. And therefore LeGuin’s statement that only whites can be colorblind threw me — because any human being can choose not to use genetic traits to determine character or worthiness of spending time with/on, though making such a choice is much more difficult when so many people with a certain trait have hurt you in various ways.
“Ignoring their plight, caused by a third party, does them harm. It’s as if bullies kept stealing your sister’s matchbox cars and when she complained to you about it,”
This is absolutely true.
Attendum to that, though, is that if I go to bat for my sister against the school bully stealing her matchbox cars, she better bloody not turn around and wear a “boys are smelly” t-shirt or start throwing dirtclods at him. Yes, it’s my job to stick up for my sister, but it’s her job to then not go picking a fight in retribution or taking it out on some other boy who really has nothing to do with it and is probably just as scared of the bully as she is.
DragonLady
DragonLady(Quote) (Reply)
“The overwhelming majority of people from ALL demographics from English-speaking websites assume people are white, male and American until they learn otherwise”
I did not know that until know, but that is incredibly sad.
DragonLady
DragonLady(Quote) (Reply)
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