I just wanted to say I loved your long, detailed responses; I learned a lot from both of them. :)

Hopefully these issues will come up in the future with films that may adress it a little more directly than Star Trek.

Thanks again! d

And therein lies the heart of the problem. You feminists talk a good game about fighting to choose “either or both”- but it’s really a choice between both or work, isn’t it? As the above statement makes crystal clear, you and the materialist father share the view that if a woman stays home and “just” is a mother, the workload isn’t being shared adequately.

“I think it’s a little more selfish to stay at home with the kids expecting someone else to pick up the tab and spend less time being a father, than it is to expect your partner to go out to work and earn half the money needed to support a family while you reap the benefits.”

Talk about a complete dismissal of my contribution or “significance.” What about the benefits conferred on society as a whole by the fact of my happy, secure, people-loving children who understand the meaning of deep loving relationships?

I speak only from my own experience, but know this: the sad and lonely kids who hop off the bus and go home to an empty house often end up at mine- thank God. The other places they could end up don’t bear much thinking about. My husband’s office jut conducted a sting of internet sex predators and netted 35 men in a three day operation- all of whom were trolling for underage victims on an internet which opens the door to unprotected children. Elephants take better care of their young than most modern Americans.

Abigail- you wrote convincingly of the mother who would leap toward her son with all her strength. That’s me. I have chosen to leap toward my children with everything that is in me to help them navigate this artificial toxic self-serving culture of instant gratification and grow to be the decent and loving service-oriented people I am grateful to see them turning into already. Surely you can see that this, while not impossible with two “working” parents, is more possible with at least one (Mom or Dad, for the record) who is actually present for most of their waking lives? Any job is easier to do well if you have more time to devote to it, and parenting is the exemplar of that axiom.

I am not perfect- my kids see my flaws; but they love me anyway and they are left in no doubt of my love for them.

Similarly I dearly love my starship captain mother and I know she loves me now and when I was a girl. But you have to hear me when I say this because it’s a painful thing for me to say, but I did doubt her love as a child. My mother is one of the greatest people I know- but how is a kid to know that when mom is only home a day and a half a week and totally exhausted then? Evenings? My mom would come home so spent there was nothing left to give. I realize she was working for me- I even realized it then- but honestly, I would have traded the few luxuries we could afford and would have worn even less stylish clothes and lived in an even smaller place quite happily for some face time with her. The truth is that kids need time- lots of it- with their idols- Mom and Dad both.

My mom used to call me “Becky Home-Ecky” for staying home with the kids- but over the years there’s been a total shift in her attitude as she’s watched her grandchildren grow up this way marinated in time and attention. More than any pain I suffered from not being around her wonderful self all those years has been listening to her sadly say, “I would do it so differently if I could do it again.” Her pain is the pain that mostly concerns me here. Her pain and the pain of so many women who know what I know- that to choose to stay home with one’s children is to choose shabby carpet and old furniture; no fancy vacations or pricey duds; a smaller place to live and little “me” time- and it is to choose to face the pain of being cut off from today’s world of women who will assess your life as worth little to nothing- worse, you will be considered some form of parasite on the world of the “working”.

For me, I choose that. I will live with my formerly white carpet and my once-sharp figure; I choose to do laundry every day and lots of it; I choose to find time between mundane and servile chores to teach my 15 year old son trigonometry and read my 13 year old daughter’s 137 page Star Wars novel (in which interestingly, some alien creature has 83 children and is honored on her planet as a sage… I kid you not- she is however blue and has curving horns cascading down over her face). I choose not to have lunches out but to have them decidedly in- usually with stuff on the floor where my 18 month old has cheerfully deposited it for the dog to “help” him finish.

And I will live with the certainty that I am written off as insignificant by the majority of my peers for what I choose. And as happy as I am in my life, that does still carry a sting for me.

I was angry when I first read your post, Abigail- I tend to get angry when stung. But I’m not, now- I realize you really do wish to engage in a discussion about this and I appreciate your candor even when it feels like a broadside.

Many thanks.

Nancy, re: penultimate paragraph – Why is being a good parent a feminine thing? I honestly think by referring to feminists as ‘masculinity-worshipping feminist culture’, it lets the side down. Yes there are feminists out there who go to extremes, who demand women work and man-bash, but the vast majority of us just want to see equality, and the people that do refer to us as such are giving us a bad name.

None of us would suggest staying at home itself is ‘letting the team down’. What feminists have been pushing for for the last century – make that last few millenia – is the choice to do either or both and be taken seriously. And as for the ’selfish-materialist husband/boyfriend’ – doesn’t he have a right to ask that the workload is shared? Doesn’t he have a right to spend an equal amount of time with his children as their mother? Should he be expected to do a 9-5 everyday, pay for everything the family needs, and only see his kids in the evening and at weekends? We are supposed to be pushing for equality here! Taking away a father’s rights to satisfy a mother’s rights is another form of inequality.

And I understand that you have said you don’t refer to people who have no choice but ultimately thats most women – who doesn’t have to go to work? I know my mother went to work because she wanted us to be able to eat well, to have a comfortable home, to have the best education possible to us, and actually I look at her now as a huge role model, because she did the things she didn’t want to do for her family, because she is strong and intelligent and a fighter and because, although she loves my Dad, she doesn’t need anyone to take care of her. I don’t say this in a man-hating way, I mean she is self-sufficient and because of that, I’ve never had any excuses. And yes she feels she missed out, but unfortunately she was one of the people who didn’t have a choice. I think what I would like to say is that a mother is a mother; whether she stays at home or not, and staying at home may be great, and I wouldn’t dismiss a ’stay at home’ mom at all, but it isn’t always doing what is best for your kids, or your partner, though it might be best for you.

(And if the father is the only one who works and cannot earn enough to support the family what then? Benefits? Because what ‘benefits’ means is that other women and men are going out to work, paying taxes and paying for some women to stay home with their kids. My mom did it all her life and always hated the people who stayed at home on benefits, because she missed out on time with us and was paying for these women to have time with their kids. Thats off on a tangent, because I don’t think we’re talking about people staying at home on benefits but its a huge issue in the UK, which is why I digress….)

To sum up, kids suffer whether you go out to work or not – you go, they miss you; you’re there all the time, they don’t know how to be without you, but parenting does not belong solely to our sex and to reject being a parent is not to reject the feminine. If you go to work it does not mean you are a bad parent and you are rejecting your kids, but it could well mean that you are trying to find a balance between time with your family, earning enough money to do what is best for them, and following your own goals – which again, I think is a good thing for a parent to do. You have a kid who can look up to someone who has achieved what they wanted to in life and I don’t think thats a small thing. Coming back to Star Trek, Kirk looks up to his father because he died saving people’s lives. Parents like this are a huge influence on a child, even if, as in Kirk’s case, they never meet them.

And my main beef with this issue is that I think it’s a little more selfish to stay at home with the kids expecting someone else to pick up the tab and spend less time being a father, than it is to expect your partner to go out to work and earn half the money needed to support a family while you reap the benefits. Can I ask what would be your response if your partner wanted to be a stay at home father?

(Just so we’re clear, I’m not angry if my phrasing indicates as such, I want to discuss!)

That said, though, while I take back the “nonsense” comment, I stand by the pseudo-masculinism word– it so perfectly captures the trap I think women have walked into over the last several decades. I walked into it before I came to a realization that my feminism was a combination (not uncommon, I hope you’ll candidly admit) of the pursuit of traditionally male roles and characteristics PLUS a contempt for the traditionally feminine.

All around me I saw (and see) the female starship captains, including my beloved mother; literally nowhere in my experience did I see a woman committed to the happiness and security of her children as a primary goal.

Not THE primary goal, but up there on the list. Latchkey kid? How sad a term is that? I realize some people have no choice; I do not refer to them here.

I am sad about the price we all pay for rejecting the feminine; the kids suffer; I know I did. But I see women suffering all around me from this stifling of their desire to be with their children. No, no- says this masculininity-worshipping feminist culture- you will let down the team if you “just stay home.” No, no, says the selfish and materialist husband/boyfriend trained by decades of “equality education”- you get a job and contribute to this family or else.

This is what I meant. I never meant nor said that women cannot be starship captains; I mean that they should not be dismissed as insignificant for choosing not to be.

I really hope we don’t always have to preface things with “not to say that motherhood isn’t a great and noble thing…” or anything else like that.

Films in general need to externalize everything because it’s a visual medium – and action films especially! So what makes Kirk Sr. a great dad in an action flick wasn’t just that he was a dad – but it was the fact that he sacrificed himself to save those hundreds of people. Kirk & Spock’s moms were just mothers – not because mothers are inconsequential, but because they didn’t do anything else in the film except that. In fact, in the podcast lizriz referenced the writers seemed to say that Kirk’s mom was in Starfleet as well – not that you can tell that at all by the film.

In an Entertainment Weekly online article, they listed the top action films, and this is what the author(s) said about Ripley from Aliens: “Ripley isn’t a vixen like Lara Croft or Charlie’s Angels. Yet Weaver wasn’t forced to turn Ripley into a man, either. (Remember Linda Hamilton in T2?)” – their emphasis.

I wanted to refer to that comment because on the other end, this is what I feel like I am fighting all the time. When you look at Sarah Conner’s character, she did everything in line with what you would expect an obsessed, fierce, devoted person to do when dealing with the gravitas of the end of the world. Yet, because she doesn’t do the usual touchy-feely stuff that people expect of women, they considered her a man.

I like to say I don’t want to eat my own – but I had also hoped they wouldn’t eat me, or what I like, either.

thanks.

I would have loved to see more of Kirk’s mom and I agree that Winona wussed out on the role of Spock’s mother- though maybe she got “vulcanized” over all those years on the planet of deeply repressed emotions…hmm… vulcanized… maybe she could have bounced? Just a thought…

AJ: Agreed. Not to say that Saldana’s Uhura wouldn’t have been a great character, but she had so few lines I couldn’t decide what I thought aside from ‘good’, and I’ve seen it twice.

Nancy: I think the objection is not to the roles of mother/girlfriend/child-bearer but the representation of women in films as solely mother/girlfriend/child-bearer.

I understand what you were saying about celebrating women as women. It is unfortunate that women who get to the top in any business tend to demonstrate masculine qualities (eg aggression); even physically so, eg in the world of modeling there are few breasts/butts around. Where are the women who look like women? However I think at the moment and over the past century it’s been ‘get there any way you can’ because they were and are so few opportunities for women to do so.

I’m not saying that all women should be ‘feminine’, far from it, but I would like to see women on film depicting all the roles we play in society – that is to say, nearly everything that men do, we do, and should be seen doing on film. Yes, we should celebrate the fact that we bring life in to the world – its an amazing gift – but what about celebrating a female captain in a war, who dies for her country? How about the women who overcome their differences to fight a greater evil? What about the women who go to work every day to feed a growing family, or to fight for change, or to follow a dream?

Re: Melissa’s last comment. I definitely would have liked to see Kirk’s mother again, partly because it felt odd that we did not (he didn’t even say goodbye to her when he left with Starfleet!), partly because as depicted in Star Trek, she wasn’t even really a mother, she was basically a ‘woman who gave birth’; she was completely passive, ie, evolution gave her a womb, and, as all species on the planet, our instinct is to reproduce, hence: baby. If we had seen her bringing Kirk up, then she would have actually been a ‘mother’ – someone who worked hard, made sacrifices, made choices, lived a life.

In fact both Star Trek’s mothers were passive figures – the first watches while her husband makes the choices (I’m not blaming the character for not doing anything here, I’m blaming the writer for not making her possibly a little stronger); the second… spock’s mother… I was a little disappointed with Ryder’s portrayal of this women. She seemed so weak, she spoke thinly, there was nothing really there. I know she was a symbol of emotion and kindness for Spock, but emotion and kindness could have been shown through passion and pride – this women married someone form another species and moved to another planet because they loved each other – where was the fire in her belly? She watched as the world was punctured by a drill and then held still whilst the rock beneath her crumbled. If her character was so infused with love and life, surely she would have jumped or shouted out and tried to reach or call for her loved ones? I would have. I would have leapt for my son with every bit of energy I had in me. A mother is active because they love their child; these women were passive…

So I guess it’s not only the portrayal of women in film as solely mothers/girlfriends, but also the portrayal of mothers/girlfriends in film as passive characters that I object to.

Great comment. I think that what I was trying to say and should have written better is not that being a mother is insignificant, I so don’t believe that being a mother is insignificant. What I would have liked to have seen from the mother character is more character and time spent on her than just the act of giving birth. She didn’t die like Kirk’s father. She raised him and even one scene with the two of them just to acknowledge her role in her life might have gone a long way for me.

I’m sure you’ll be shocked (mild irony) to know that I’m at home raising a bunch of beautiful children. I’m delightedly married and deeply fulfilled and happy. Go ahead and call the female characters thinly written and you may have a point; I can even see wanting to see more females at all in the movie; but I do take serious issue with the dismissal of the said roles as insignificant. No one’s saying women can’t be starship captains; but what I’m saying is, why is being a starship captain more significant than giving birth? Simple answer: it ain’t.

Refusal to understand this objection will hamstring feminism with young women like myself almost as much as the total denial of post-abortive women’s suffering has. I’ve got a bunch of friends who refuse to call themselves feminists because these truths have been rejected by the movement; it is only concerned with women so long as they fit neatly into feminist molds. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Anyway, thanks for reading what I have to say.

as a character, there’s no *there* there. she’s a multilingual mannequin, and throughout the flick more is made of her physical appearance than her skills and competencies. and don’t get me started on the nonsense of the spock/uhura relationship – without a single shred of actual warmth or attraction between the two characters, one can only assume it was thrown in there solely to titillate a bunch of slash fic fanboys.

and spock? i, for one, wasn’t terribly impressed with the alternately smug and sulky attitude of the character. the one moment that rang true (for me, anyway) was when he expressed puzzlement at kirk’s defeat of the kobayashi maru scenario.

It is not dismissive to want more than the standard gendered roles in futuristic films – especially those that takeplace on a ship in deep space.
Lawd, people

I’m a mother, sister, auntie, I’ve been a girlfriend and a wife, etc.
I’m proud, valued -a single mother to boot- so I value myself, thank you very much.
and ya know what?
As awesome as all that is, I do a hell of a lot of other things too. I am a well developed character, aren’t you?

So goodness forbid some sexist film maker define me by only one of the roles I play in my life- one where I am supporting others. Were the male characters depicted as the father, boyfriend, or at a birth?
I bet their characters were well developed, their roles were action packed, they were the leaders and the heroes.
Unlike what I have experienced in real life- where women tend to step up to the plate and deal with *&it.
anyone else share this experience of women being the heroes in real life and wonder why we are not in film?

I know it won’t look like that on the surface, but I see the comments by Walter and the comments by Nancy the same. Sure they are coming from opposite poles of the argument, sort of, but the conclusion is similar: you cannot have what you want, it violates something that others feel, so let it go.

I couldn’t tell Walter whether your comments were supposed to be incendiary or not, but I thought it was interesting that women have to be window dressing, and not the heroes. Why not both? Everyone looks good in hollywood. I can’t even think of an unattractive woman; why can’t she look good and save the day? I mean this is not an action piece centered around 1 character; Kirk in some ways shares his spotlight with the other guys. Why shouldn’t Uhura also share in this as well. Is a guy going to be so disgusted, that somehow he won’t want to see it? It’s interesting because I always thought a guy would – but I know women who will veto a film if there is just too much rampant sexism.

To Nancy, I’d love to answer your question, if it’s not rhetorical. I think we’ll move beyond this nonsense, when words like “nonsense” and “psuedo-masculinism” aren’t used. What exactly is man-like? Thinking that a female character could be more important to the plot than being the mate or mother of the male characters? Is it man like to actually be a character that is unattached or without a child? I can tell you that that is probably quite woman-like, considering that I have met so many guys who’ve virtually admitted to hating women, but still felt the need to pursue and be with them. I can name dozens and dozens and dozens of great and terrible films with women as mother characters. But not just mother characters. Only mother characters. There are plenty father characters in movies, but somehow, many of them seem to do more in the plot than only be a father. I would love to think that as great as any mother is, that there is more to them than being a mother (or a girlfriend). Why not see all shades of who she is, and not just the one? Why is that such a radical, controversial, upsetting thing for so many people? But how many movies can any of us name where there were great action females who did things.

I actually personally find it disturbing how in this day and age, that we are still narrowly defining what is intrinsic to a man and a woman. All that does is isolate the people who don’t fit that tidy mold.

And what I guess I have found interesting too, is that even if it is all wrong, even if somehow people want women to do something that completely violates what women are, so what!?! When the Da Vinci code came out, people complained bitterly about Hank’s hair; talk about a superficial critique. But now the sequel is out, and the hair is changed. Whatever happened to satisfying the demand of the people? Some men want movies where women are just there to look cute, and we have them. So if some women want a film where the hero saves the day, then why not just make them and satisfy the niche audience? I think Lizriz was onto something when she said producers et al may feel like it’s pandering. But so what? Many companies are successful specifically because they pander to their desired audience! But yet somehow this shouldn’t apply?

So go write your script lizriz! If it’s made, I’ll go see it! And I have proof: I’ve seen both Elektra and Catwoman in the movies. :)

Come on. Hasn’t feminism moved beyond this dismissive nonsense yet?

When will we get the message that to be of value, we don’t have to be man-like? What, exactly, is insignificant about being a mother, about giving birth? When will we stop hating some of the very things that make being a woman magnificent and inimitable?

This is why my generation rejects the term “feminism”- its irony is palpable- it should be called pseudo-masculinism.

A woman can certainly be a very competent and interesting starship commander- a la Maggie Thatcher– or a very competent and interesting mother- a la ME.

I felt ’slammed in the face’ just a little bit – in the middle of an otherwise awesome movie, I felt a little bit disgruntled, and I realized it’s because there is a lack of women in the control room, and it grates… it feels odd that there are so few women, and I’m not in agreement about the ‘in the original series there were so few’ statement. There were lots of women who passed in and out of the Star Trek world in the original series and some who disappeared without explanation (which also grated), but this is an alternate reality in which Starfleet has called ALL of its trainees to man the ships as the main fleet are away in another star system, so it would figure that, even if the original ship had fewer women, this USS Enterprise could ostensibly have 50/50 crew members.

I’m also in agreement with the fact that Battlestar Galactica was awesome, and a pioneer in equality, not only featuring a lot of women but disregarding the different sexes entirely, so that anyone could do any job, or play any role.

is bad business, dude.

Terminator I, II, III
and the
SARAH Connor Chronicles

Aliens

Buffy

whoever thinks only men go to science fiction flicks ought to research more.

I’m assuming you’ve never seen Aliens, or an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Of course, I already felt “slammed in the face” by Chekov’s presence, since the character wasn’t introduced until the show’s second season.

To address that *and* the gender issues, I found myself wishing they’d either Starbuck’d Chekov or put an older sister on the bridge crew, which would still allow them to bring Pavel in some time later.