Star Trek: The Next Gender-ation

(Hmmm… hope this is coherent. I’ve been supposed to be in bed resting all week, according to the doctor. Although I’m regretfully missing social occasions and staying away from the gym, you can probably guess how well the “rest” part is going.)

Getting annoyed at Star Trek for its implied politics feels like getting annoyed with a puppy for slobbering all over your face as it leaps into your lap and wags its tail enthusiastically. Their hearts are in the right place, bless them. And I can’t fault Star Trek: The Next Generation for its lack of in-depth philosophical analysis on account of each episode being, well, 40 minutes long and written in the 1990s.

Besides, unlike other shows, Star Trek never made irritating claims to be profound or rebellious or Speaking the Truth Everyone Else Is Too Politically Correct To Say, Man. It does what it does because it thinks its ideologies — IDIC, humanism, individual rights — are and should be obvious to everyone. But I did have to turn off a pair of season 5 episodes halfway through because I couldn’t stand to watch them all in one sitting. And I wanted to blog about why.

The episodes in question were 5×17 “The Outcast” and 5×21 “The Perfect Mate”. Both raise issues strongly related to gender and sexuality. In the first, the Enterprise works with the J’naii, a race whose members have no gender and who stigmatize any individual who identifies as male or female. In the second, Picard resists his attraction to Kamala, a metamorph who transforms her personality into the ideal partner for her potential mates, aka every male humanoid she encounters.

But the plots of these episodes weren’t what made me squirm. In theory, I would love to see plots like these done well; in the hands of careful artists with lots of time to extrapolate and tinker, they could be mind-blowing. Unfortunately, the way ST:TNG approached them, I found both episodes extremely uncomfortable to watch, which is why I had to turn them off and take a mental break partway through.

I love the idea of a science-fiction society without gender, or with different genders, or with different understandings of what gender means. One of the many roles of speculative fiction is to introduce new ideas about the real world in exciting ways, to show us the many things we take for granted. I sometimes wonder what would happen if the first extraterrestrial sentient being humans encounter has no concept of gender — what such an entity would think of us and all the weird things we think, say, and do about gender that we never consider.

But in practice, when you make up a genderless culture, it’s going to say less about what you think gender isn’t and more about what you think gender is. For example, all the J’naii wear the same drab grey uniform and have the same ugly bowl cut — a trivial design decision, maybe, but it implies that suppressing gender is suppressing creativity, difference, attractiveness, and self-expression. Worse, although the J’naii are meant to be androgynous, the perfomers playing them are clearly women, and they all read not only as female, but as conventially feminine attractive females, just with unflattering haircuts and clothes.

I find it really difficult to believe that the best J’naii the casting directors could find just happened to be female. It seems to me to speak more about the creators’ gendered hang-ups — OMG, a male actor who might come off as effeminate! And what if Riker has to kiss a character who is played by another dude??? — than about what most effectively makes the audience reconsider its understanding of gender.

Similarly, although the episode’s stance on rights for those of all sexual orientations (“we should have ’em”)  is both admirable and so thinly veiled it’s practically doing a metaphor striptease, it feels partially ineffective because the message reads less as “other sexualities are just as natural as heterosexuality, and intolerance of them is immoral” than “all gender roles are innate, and if you try to change them, you are suppressing people’s natural biological personalities.” Despite the best intentions, the plot never quite figures out that sexuality and gender identity, although related, aren’t the same thing.

To me, what could have been the most important and forward-thinking part of the episode isn’t the struggle of Soren, a J’naii who secretly identifies as female. It could have been the fact that Riker, the resident ladies’ man, is falling in love with someone who reads to him as androgynous — maybe even as masculine — and that Worf, the resident gender conservative (as seen by his anvilicious sexist lines during the poker game scene), risks his own career to support his friend’s decision. It could have been as simple and powerful as Jonathan Frakes kissing another male actor on 1990s prime-time TV in the context of their characters sharing adult romantic love.

That “The Outcast” uses Riker as the viewpoint character and protagonist is one of its most admirable choices; contrariwise, the choice of viewpoint in “The Perfect Mate” is what gives me the jibblies.

Don’t get me wrong: Picard is my favourite Trek captain, and as I re-watch old episodes, I admire even more how he has big-picture ethics. For instance, in “The Outcast,” although he obviously sympathizes with Riker’s situation, he chooses his duty to the Federation and the Prime Directive — his commitment to other cultures’ freedom and tacit acknowledgement that he has no right to judge — over helping his first officer spring Soren from forced gender-removing conditioning. This is not necessarily the right choice, or even a right choice, but a protagonist who stops and thinks and sometimes takes the long-term view instead of short-term actions based on knee-jerk moral reactions is refreshing in a society whose stories seem glutted with firebrand, iconoclast heroes.

But even a thoughtful, considerate person like Picard is the wrong viewpoint character for me in an episode like this.

I’m not interested in yet another story about a man who has to resist his attraction to a woman for her own good. It’s a trope that’s insulting to men, who apparently can’t have both self-control and a penis*; it’s insulting to women, who are made to shoulder the blame for men acting inappropriately on sexual desire; and it’s insulting to anyone who considers sex to be a mutually pleasurable experience that both men and women can healthily desire, rather than one partner “taking” something from the other.

Like other stories I’ve blogged about,  within the context of its fictional universe, “The Perfect Mate” is okay. Given that this magical lady has the powers she does, Picard’s restraint is admirable, and the eventual resolution is interesting. Exploring the tangled ethics of interacting with someone who honestly gets pleasure from and only from satisfying others could be really cool. It’s those pesky of-courses that ruin it.

Of course this story is about a heterosexual female metamorph instead of the male ones the ambassador explains are very common on his planet. Of course no one seriously considers the obvious solution to the problem of escorting Kamala around the ship (Data might be inappropriate because he’s so often oblivious to social context, but, uh, surely the Enterprise has among its crew at least one straight woman? Or a gay man? Or an asexual being? Or, heck, a Vulcan who’s already good at controlling his or her emotions?). Of course this story is about the people who interact with Kamala and not Kamala herself.

We could’ve had a thought-provoking story of Dr. Crusher or Troi or Ro finding herself attracted to some perfect man (or, hey, perfect woman, why not?), with room from the gender-playing-around for Picard to raise the question of whether this is any more or less acceptable when the partner with the “power” is female.

We could’ve had a story — or at least a side plot — about one of the ladies dealing with her own feelings about Kamala and struggling to come to terms with the idea that living to please a romantic partner is what her new friend truly wants.

We could even have had a story about a metamorph struggling with his or her own growth and ideas — what if the episode had been based around the guest star’s POV or written so that metamorphism was a condition suddenly contracted by one or more of the regulars? (Hey, Troi’s already empathic… which raises another interesting possibility: how do you define the difference between Troi’s ability to sense others’ emotions and obvious desire to make them feel better and Kamala’s compulsion?)

The point is, that annoying adverb that has singlehandedly made split infinitives acceptable is important: sure, it’s interesting to go where no one’s gone before, but if you’re going to do it, well, do it boldly. The same goes for storytelling: if you have something to say, say it loud. Don’t get caught up in patterns of thinking that came before you just because you’re used to them. Sometimes, you do have to bow to the wishes of others (like networks or publishers), but don’t be afraid to take your ideas to Warp 9 instead of puttering along under half-impulse.

After all, what would James Kirk do**?

* Although the trope usually gets played between heterosexual couples, the insult extends to men of all sexualities: it’s usually implied that male biology is hardwired in such a way that men can’t help giving into all sexual desires, regardless of the specific object of their attraction.

**Yeah, yeah, insert your own double entendre joke here.