DS9 - The Wire

[Darth Wedgius]

Dax kept telling him no, but did she ever tell him to stop?

Those are the same thing. Even if they weren't, after the first two or three times being told no a functional adult ought to be able to work it out. In his intro in Emissary, Bashir has apparently been hounding Jadzia all the way from Earth during their journey on the USS Plot Device, and getting solid no all the way. Setting aside the genetics retcon, the guy might be a green officer but he'd been through med school and officer school, so he ought to have been able to pick up on that. The 90s might have been a bit of a different time in regards to how women were portrayed on tv, and heaven knows that even today it can still be hazardous to your health -literally, not figuratively- to tell a guy no, stop, or go away directly for fear of his reaction to his hurt ego; but even for the 1990s this was straight out of the 1970s. I think they must have been working off early Alan Alda MASH dialogue there, it is so creepy even for the time.

TL;DR. If you hit on a woman, and she says no; it means stop.

It's hardly the same thing. "No, I'm not interested in seeing that movie with you," isn't the same as "I'll never be romantically interested in you," which is still different from, "Stop pursuing me romantically." Bashir can hardly be blamed for expecting Jadzia to express herself clearly and logically.

[jstrahan]

Dax kept telling him no, but did she ever tell him to stop?

TL;DR. If you hit on a woman, and she says no; it means stop.

Not always. By experience, I have found out that sometimes, when a woman says no, she means "Show me how much you want me". It's sometimes not cut and dried.

[clearspira]

Dax kept telling him no, but did she ever tell him to stop?

Those are the same thing. Even if they weren't, after the first two or three times being told no a functional adult ought to be able to work it out. In his intro in Emissary, Bashir has apparently been hounding Jadzia all the way from Earth during their journey on the USS Plot Device, and getting solid no all the way. Setting aside the genetics retcon, the guy might be a green officer but he'd been through med school and officer school, so he ought to have been able to pick up on that. The 90s might have been a bit of a different time in regards to how women were portrayed on tv, and heaven knows that even today it can still be hazardous to your health -literally, not figuratively- to tell a guy no, stop, or go away directly for fear of his reaction to his hurt ego; but even for the 1990s this was straight out of the 1970s. I think they must have been working off early Alan Alda MASH dialogue there, it is so creepy even for the time.

TL;DR. If you hit on a woman, and she says no; it means stop.

It's hardly the same thing. "No, I'm not interested in seeing that movie with you," isn't the same as "I'll never be romantically interested in you," which is still different from, "Stop pursuing me romantically." Bashir can hardly be blamed for expecting Jadzia to express herself clearly and logically.

Plus to play devil's advocate here, Jadzia is not an ordinary woman, she has the memories of several men in her head. She should know first hand how men think, what they want, and how they react. Frankly ''not seeming as if she actually has 7 lifetimes worth of experience'' is a reoccurring problem with how this character is written.

[drewder]

Am I the only one for whom the video says it hasn't been reuploaded yet?

[CrypticMirror]

Very disturbing. No. No does not mean yes please try harder. It means no. No means no, and that means stop.

[Darth Wedgius]

I looked up the definitions, and no and stop are definitely different words and do not mean the same thing.

I believe you meant to say that "no" implies stop. However, that is assuming that the person listening should not listen to what the person actually said but substitute their own meaning instead.

If person A wants a behavior from person B and A is intelligent, logical, and knows that B is not telepathic, I would think that A would actually say what she means.

The exchange "Do you want to go out with me tonight?" "No." means "no."
The exchange "Do you want to go out with me tonight?" "No, and please don't ask again." means both "no" and "stop."

[bronnt]

Plus to play devil's advocate here, Jadzia is not an ordinary woman, she has the memories of several men in her head. She should know first hand how men think, what they want, and how they react. Frankly ''not seeming as if she actually has 7 lifetimes worth of experience'' is a reoccurring problem with how this character is written.

I remember also in one of the early episodes she says something to Bashir along the lines of "Trill don't pursue relationships the way other species do." Which later turns out to be bullshit, based on all available evidence.

Why be evasive like that when you're like 450 years old with a plethora of experiences in your head? Just say, "Not interested and stop bothering me."

There's generally just bad writing in DS9 when it comes to romantic relationships, though. As much good as the show is in being Star Trek, it is at its worst when focusing on these Dawson's Creek plotlines because they have zero memory.

For instance, I've been binging, and just watched Looking for Par'mach in All the Wrong Places. That episode is the one where Worf decides he's interested in Grilka. The old Klingon guy asks Worf, "Have you ever pursued a Klingon woman before?" And Worf says "no," apparently having completely forgotten K'ehleyr, despite putting a baby in her. And it's all because they decided that Jadzia has a thing for Worf for some reason, showing how inconsistent her tastes are.

[Deledrius]

TL;DR. If you hit on a woman, and she says no; it means stop.

++

And yet, as Ezri stated later on, if Worf hadn't come along, it would have been Bashir that she married.

In fairness though when she said that Ezri's brain was scrambled so she might have been remembering wrong.

I think I prefer this reading of Jadzia, because otherwise the lesson is the old "just keep wearing her down/she's just playing really hard to get" trope which is problematic at best. If Ezri is filtering Jadzia's recollections through her own present feelings for Julian, it makes this all a lot less of a sexist fantasy conclusion. Instead, it's simply that Ezri finds the season-seven-mature Julian attractive in ways that Jadzia could appreciate but was never interested in for a relationship. It's a nice example showing Jadzia's personality separate from her symbiote and a subsequent host (and again, Ezri gets more of being her own person in one season than Jadzia had in six).

[bronnt]

I think I prefer this reading of Jadzia, because otherwise the lesson is the old "just keep wearing her down/she's just playing really hard to get" trope which is problematic at best. If Ezri is filtering Jadzia's recollections through her own present feelings for Julian, it makes this all a lot less of a sexist fantasy conclusion. Instead, it's simply that Ezri finds the season-seven-mature Julian attractive in ways that Jadzia could appreciate but was never interested in for a relationship. It's a nice example showing Jadzia's personality separate from her symbiote and a subsequent host (and again, Ezri gets more of being her own person in one season than Jadzia had in six).

Beyond that, a big part of Bashir's character growth is that he stops hitting on Dax at every opportunity. When she meets her boyfriend on the disappearing planet he doesn't show any signs of jealousy and is happy for her. There's basically no sign that he's still interested by the time Worf joins the cast, so perhaps he'd matured to the point that he'd decided all his feelings for her were superficial. It's strongly implied that his feeling were superficial in the early episodes since she pointed out that he kept making eyes at other pretty women on the station.

So Bashir spends the next few years showing basically zero signs of jealousy or even interest in Dax up until the end of Season 6, where they decided, once Jadzia started trying to get pregnant, that Bashir was still holding a torch for her. It seemed to undermine his character arc: Remember Starship Down, when they're trapped in an isolated part of the ship with failing life support and cuddling for warmth? The whole point of that scene was that he'd grown out of his infatuation and was just acting as a friend and comrade instead of making romantic overtones.

So in short, I do hate that he was essentially retconned in a way that undermined what seemed like character growth on his part.

[CrypticMirror]

For instance, I've been binging, and just watched Looking for Par'mach in All the Wrong Places. That episode is the one where Worf decides he's interested in Grilka. The old Klingon guy asks Worf, "Have you ever pursued a Klingon woman before?" And Worf says "no," apparently having completely forgotten K'ehleyr, despite putting a baby in her. And it's all because they decided that Jadzia has a thing for Worf for some reason, showing how inconsistent her tastes are.

Being charitable here, K'ehleyr did not self identify as Klingon in a cultural sense. A lot of her interactions with Worf were basically "stop acting like I'm a Klingon woman, dude". She identified mostly with her humanside, especially culturally. So Worf is just admitting that.