TOS: The Enemy Within

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Just sayin'.

[Enterprising]

Yes, they very much were 60s people, hence institutional misogyny, where it's not exactly conscious decisions but based on how people were brought up to see the world, which is why women had to fight so hard to get into positions of power to break out of that view of women.

I'm afraid your eyes are cast in the wrong place, society of the time put that in place, not the institution. If society of the time had people play ukuleles on rooftops every day at noon, then hey that's what any institution would have got their people do too. So in an instance like this when one is given a "wrong" upbringing, and one makes decisions based on that upbringing, are we to instantly tar them with a brush like "misogyny" and condemn them forever with it?

It's not forever condemning people or tarring them with a brush. It's just calling misogyny what it is, and calling misogynistic statements and actions misogynystic. If I accuse you of making a misogynistic TV episode, I'm not saying you're a horrible person or iredeemable, but I am saying that thing you did showed an anti-woman attitude. Whether that is a result of the institutions you belong to, the attitudes common in your culture and time period, or personal predjudice doesn't change that it IS misogyny.

Unfortunately in today's climate that is exactly what it entails, which is why people have to be much more careful how and when they say such branding, and the consequences of doing so as they are used today far too casually. I'm glad that you personally aren't saying such a person is either horrible or irredeemable, but how would more "militant" people take such a branding as? It's not limited to misogyny, but sexual assault, domestic/child abuse and others, that see even the very accusation made towards a person resulting in their lives being destroyed. Even if later acquitted, or if the accusation was discovered to be otherwise unfounded.

It's also extremely easy to either forget, or not be aware of just what the climate in 60s America was like, and I would gently suggest to a few folk here they take some time learn about it in detail. The civil rights movement was in full gear, the Cold War was at it's height, and the war in Vietnam threatened to tear the United States and other Western countries apart. Children went against their parents, siblings went against one another, students against their teachers, and cities rose against their government. TOS was made in a climate where political assassinations in the West were at their height, Vietnam war protesters considered in the main as plants by the Soviet Union, most moves against "the establishment" had one ridiculed at best, and marked a communist at worst. It wasn't exactly a great time to give the establishment the finger.

I'm leaving the topic with this post, the discussion on this got very old, very fast as I pretty much thought it would.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Yeah don't you get it? The progressives are trying to get people fired in the past with weaponized sjw archeologist social media tools.

[Madner Kami]

You know what this all reminds me of? Universe 25, the Mouse Utopia. I'll quote the wiki:

Many [female rats] were unable to carry pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption. ...

The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioral sink. The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained. As many as 60 of the 80 rats in each experimental population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats. As a result extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations.

In short: Once every need is taken care of and survival is not the most important thing to bother with anymore, the rats and mice started to display self-destructive behaviour, by starting to build cliques that fought each other for no reason, stopped fucking or, rather, started fucking everything except fertile females, the fertile females who got to procreate still completely failed at raising their young ,even going so far to complete abandonment and infant-murder and yet others began to completely withdraw from the increasingly irrational society only caring about themselves and nothing else. Does anyone else feel a striking resemblence here?

You know what generally helped in stabilizing these failing societies before their collapse? Getting the rats and mice busy with something. In essence: Stop being a complete retard and obsessing about how a 60s TV-show displays values of a 60s society and get a fucking hobby! This is the fifth page in a thread about a review that wasn't even released yet. Geezus. Fucking. Christ.

[Darth Wedgius]

I wonder if fifty years into the future seeing people eat meat on old TV shows will be just as triggering. "It's not PC politics, it's simple decency!"

[Yukaphile]

Am... am I trying to fire the TOS writers? No. But that kind of treatment towards women is contemptible now and then, period. And they knew better even then.

[Makeshift Python]

Older generations tend to get a little miffed when they’re told their society back in the day was complicit, whether consciously or unconsciously, in something that is now widely seen as a wrong. I can understand it. Things were different, and in spite of Yukaphile’s claims, many honestly didn’t see that as a wrong but simply as the way life is (but there were few who knew better). That’s why you hear comments from old folk like “back in my day men were men and women were women”. The writers of “The Enemy Within” were not likely hateful but playing to what they saw as a social norm, and even genuinely thinking women secretly liked being roughed up a bit. When you end a show like that, you tell audiences this is okay... and that’s extremely problematic.

[Yukaphile]

Stuff like thinking women were more fearful, okay. Denying women being a captain? Or the rape shenanigans with Rand? That doesn't fly, and didn't fly, even back then.

[Makeshift Python]

Like I said, men at the time didn’t know better. Saying women can’t be captains is likely because men thought women were “too emotional” to be able to have the right composure and decisiveness in making command decisions (which is why so few women were in power). I don’t think we ever see a woman in command until TAS and that’s just because all the men were immobilized.

[Yukaphile]

A woman became governor in 1928. Don't give me that.