Where No Man Had Gone Before

Watching the original Star Trek show as a 21st-century feminist provides a very weird experience.

I got the whole series on Blu-Ray a while back, watched a couple of episodes, then got busy doing other things. Eventually, nagged by guilt at abandoning this iconic part of my childhood, I got the discs back out and started up again.

Three episodes in, I find my head regularly shaking in disbelief.

Everybody who knows anything about Star Trek understands its position as a groundbreaking work of diversity. Even amidst the social upheaval of the 1960s, it blew people's minds to see women working alongside men as equals in an environment where individuals of all races mixed freely without comment. This just didn't happen prior to Trek. Lieutenant Uhura famously inspired people like Mae Jemison and Whoopi Goldberg to pursue their dreams as though there were no longer any boundaries. Personally, I'm 100% sure that my feelings about diversity benefited as much or more from watching Star Trek every day after school as from having parents who'd taken part in the civil rights marches.

But when you watch it ... what an amazingly paternalistic and objectifying show!

Now, to give credit where credit is due, Gene Roddenberry and his collaborators did their best in two different pilots to dress the female crew members in the same shirt-and-slacks uniform worn by the men. The miniskirts came in after that as a concession to the fashion sensibilities of the times.

Nonetheless, despite frequent talk about equality, women are a distinct minority aboard the Enterprise and occupy exclusively "soft" or subservient positions -- nurse, communications officer, psychiatrist, personal assistant to the captain. Command and technical positions remain exclusively the province of men. (Roddenberry tried to make the second-in-command female in the original pilot, but even then, the character was criticized by others as being cold and aloof -- something that never would have happened to a human male first officer.)

With despairing frequency, these "equal" Star Fleet officers wilt in the face of danger and must be consoled or comforted by the men. When they leave the room, it becomes fair game for their male crewmates (and commanding officers!) to raise eyebrows and discuss their looks. If Charlie X (brought up by aliens with no understanding of human society) behaves inappropriately toward Yeoman Janice Rand, she can go so far as to tell him he shouldn't do that -- but she has to demur on explaining why he shouldn't, referring Charlie to Captain Kirk rather than schooling the miscreant herself.

Little grade-school Ian may very well have been steered toward feminism at least in part by Charlie X getting lectured on the impropriety of a man slapping a lady's bottom. But grown-up Ian can only blink and mutter at the implication that it's not a woman's role to instruct a male on basic human decency.

Don't get me wrong ... I still love the show, for all its kitsch and melodrama. Its heart is certainly in the right place, and it attempted to make statements in territories where the later shows often played things far too safe. And without its brave explorations, we very likely wouldn't be as far along as we are today.

But yeowtch! You can certainly see, watching it, why sci-fi nerds of a certain age often think of themselves as non-sexist while railing against the ascendancy of female characters like Rey in the new Star Wars.

Their childhood heroes, their template for admirable diversity, just never went there.

Coming Soon ... a Big Flipping Deal Cover Reveal for My Next Book!

Thanks to the delightful and industrious Lola at Lola's Blog Tours, I'm hoping to set the Internet ablaze with the upcoming cover reveal for my impending publication of Big Flipping Deal.

Anyone interested in signing up, please hurry over and click the magic button at:

http://www.lolasblogtours.net/cover-reveal-big-flipping-deal-by-ian-saul-whitcomb/

Thank you, thank you!

Review: Erotic Whispers by M.S. Tarot

To start with, I'll say that this book is worth getting for "The Bag Snatchers" and "A Grim Tribute" all by themselves. The latter horrified me as much as any story I've read in years, and the former showcases author M.S. Tarot's fiendish imagination at its peak.

The six tales herein span the gamut from brutal tales of vengeance to erotic hauntings to tumbling descents into madness and monsters. Tarot stays within the broad category of erotic horror, but won't otherwise sit still or be shut into any one box -- delving now into history for source material and next into fairy tales, juggling cyber-horror with seductive hauntings, sympathetic protagonists and narrators consumed with narcissism.

This is not experimental, avant garde fiction, but the author likes to take chances and defy convention. It didn't always work for me -- one tale featured a shifting narrative framework that jarred my immersion in the story and forced me to repeatedly regain my inertia. When it pays off, though, it pays off phenomenally.

Running through the entire collection is a sometimes-subtle, sometimes overt dance with ambiguity. The main thrust of each plot almost always flows clearly and coherently. But little questions of interpretation peek out here and there, because this is an author who wants his readers involved in the storytelling, so that their imaginations have room to explore along with his. One story in particular (I won't say which one) is either a Lovecraftian tale of body horror or a cunning villain's fully real-world psychological manipulation of unwitting victims. The stories often grow more complex the more you think about them, like puzzle boxes with a treasure of terror hidden away at the center once opened.

If you've an evening to spare this Halloween season, you could do much worse than to spend it reading Erotic Shivers.

Review: The Serpent's Kiss by Cyrano Johnson

There's a promise in the summary for this book of "White women being dominated by multiple Black men," and it made me nervous on multiple levels. Domination's very hit-or-miss for me, and something about the capitalization of "White" and "Black" felt vulgar. But a friend had highly recommended the story, so I decided to at least make a stab at it and try to reserve judgment.

By the end of the introduction, that reservation had fled: I knew I'd be finishing the book, and probably in just a couple of sittings.

It didn't take half a page to recognize Cyrano Johnson as a tremendously skilled author -- his use of language is simultaneously accessible and archaic, whimsical and high-minded, breezy and intricately layered. He juggles description, implication, foreshadowing, and tone with an effortless, sometimes coy grace. In the space of the introduction, preface, and first chapter, he presents three distinct narrators, bound together by the diction and mannerly prose of the Victorian setting yet each unique in style and character. Plot hooks and the allure of promised mysteries abound.

Given the intensity of engagement that the book's opening brought on, I kept expecting it to falter or subside into something more pedestrian. It's a work of erotica, so at the very least I figured that the sex scenes would lower things to a blunter, less ambitious level.

But no.

Unlike most erotica, this book is not a story in which sex is simply a natural part of the plot -- it's a story in which the sex is integral to the author's larger purpose. Don't let the word "purpose" scare you off; "The Serpent's Kiss" first and foremost delivers ripping good entertainment. But Johnson is always picking and picking at a deeper meaning, one that couldn't be brought out through any other means than the steamy, sometimes nefarious perversions that enfold Evie Stone as she ventures deeper and deeper into the shadows of Verderosa.

Hugely fun, impeccably crafted, literate without being stuffy, and devilishly, devilishly sensual, "The Serpent's Kiss" delivered on all levels for me, and at the end left me paging back and forth to more fully appreciate the passages that had washed over me in a rush on my initial reading. The book is a delight on the surface and even better as one pierces its underlying strata.

I expect to snatch up whatever Johnson writes next like a hawk.

Michelle Obama in New Hampshire

Although feminism is an inherently political stance, I don't generally consider this blog a place to address politics in a partisan, party-oriented mode.  That said, First Lady Michelle Obama's recent speech in New Hampshire struck me as important and powerful regardless of its connection to a particular political campaign. If you're sympathetic at all to my various feminism-related posts, you should definitely give it a watch. (If you're not sympathetic, you should give it a watch too. It's never too late to open one's mind.)

Obsessed With My Positions In Life ...

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