Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift

13th November 2018

Link reblogged from argumate with 88 notes

Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift →

urpriest:
argumate:
I forget who posted this but it’s a good read
I feel like takes like this are missing the real reason why Kirk gets parodied as a womanizer.
Yes, part of it is because of Berenstein Bears-esque false memory. But part of it is taking a step back and asking why the narrative was written that way.
Kirk doesn’t actually womanize all that often, yes. When he does romance alien women, it’s due to coercion, or because he’s trying to achieve something for his crew. But it should be surprising the sheer number of times he has to seduce his way out of a situation.
(I haven’t tallied these, so maybe it’s roughly as often as Picard and Sisko and Janeway. If so, the following is probably wrong.)
If Kirk was a real person, it would be absurd to blame him for these situations, for being a repeated survivor of sexual violence. But he’s a result of writers making particular choices, and while those writers were telling a very progressive story I don’t see much evidence they were telling that story.
There’s a worthwhile Bond parallel here. Bond absolutely is a womanizer, but he also frequently gets into situations where a woman rapes or tortures him, or where he has to seduce someone to save others. I don’t think anyone would disagree that whatever the difference in-universe, from a writing perspective these come from the same place. The writer wanted to put Bond in situations that he found sexy.
(I don’t think that’s quite what’s going on with Kirk, precisely because it doesn’t fit his character. Instead, it’s one step removed. Kirk gets into these situations because sci-fi and adventure protagonists typically got into these situations, because somebody, probably Burroughs, was into it. Kirk isn’t unique in that respect, he’s just the most memorable heir to that tradition.)
Parodying or deconstructing Kirk by characterizing him as a womanizer isn’t saying the character is depicted that way, any more than Evangelion and Madoka are claiming that kids in anime are depicted as child soldiers, or Worm’s “you needed worthy opponents“ is claiming that the worst supervillains are depicted as existing purely as a foil for superheroes, or Cabin in the Woods is claiming there’s a government conspiracy in the background of every horror movie. It’s saying that the way the universe is set up is weird and dissonant and breaks suspension of disbelief in a way that wasn’t apparent at the time but is to modern audiences, and asking what would need to be true about that universe to make it actually work that way. The message of Brannigan isn’t “Kirk was a womanizer, he was probably also a jerk”, it’s “Kirk gets coerced into having sex with beautiful women pretty often, wouldn’t it make more sense if that was just his excuse for harassing them”.
And yeah, that’s importing in a pretty negative view of masculinity. It’s probably unfair to the writers of Star Trek. But I’m not sure it’s unfair to Burroughs.
what about Kirk ripping his shirt all the time, is that fake too

Kontextmaschine

Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift →