Why Star Trek sucks

Ryan has an interesting post up about whether Star Trek has a heterosexist bias. I think he makes some interesting points, but I think I disagree with his ultimate conclusion.

Star Trek is somewhat biased,but I think it's unfair to say the writers are homophobic. Rather, I think Star Trek has a mainstream bias. I suspect studio executives think so little of their audience, that they are afraid that putting in a gay subplot would either drive away viewers or cause too much "controversy".

The Old Series was somewhat groundbreaking, covering issues like race and feminism. Roddenberry wanted Kirk's second-in-command to be a woman, but the TV execs said absolutely not. So instead, women were nurses, the space telephone operator, and space secretaries. In miniskirts. It wasn't until The Next Generation that we got actual strong women in positions of authority.

I think the reason for this is that Star Trek was really forced to appeal to a mainstream audience. It had to be the sort of thing that audiences could pick up immediately, be entertained for a while, then put away, maybe to watch it next week. It was episodic television in its purest form and entirely plot-driven. By the end of an episode, everything was exactly as it was at the beginning of the episode, with the exception of a disposable redshirt or two. I can't help but attribute some of this to a desire to syndicate the show, where episodes may be shown out of order. No matter the reason, when the goal of your show is to maximize the franchise possibilities of your idea, that's not conducive to telling a story or even deep characterization.

Think about it. Who in Star Trek actually developed as a character? Heck, over the course of one of the series, who even changed as a character? Virtually no one. You might make he case about some of he characters in later series, but not many.

And I think that's due to the need for mainstream appeal in ST. When you get a creator and writers for whom the story is paramount, you can make magic. Buffy is the obvious example here. Hush, where there's absolutely no dialog for most of the hour-long episode, really was TV unlike anything I've seen before or since. The Body, where Buffy's mother dies is heartbreaking. One of he characters even becomes a lesbian, forms what is probably the healthiest of relationships on the show, loses her partner, becomes the evil villain for a season, then is redeemed for the final season.

Instead of getting more TV like this, we get SciFi's Crap Movie of the Week where Stock Male Character fights poorly-CGI genetically engineered livestock/alien/unknown jungle creature before rescuing By-the-book But Brilliant Scientist Love Interest Woman from imminent death before riding into the sunset.

I'm not saying episodic TV is nothing but crap. I really enjoy Star Trek, Farscape, Stargate SG-1, and others. It's just really frustrating to see great shows like Firefly, Buffy, Firefly, B5, and Firefly -- not just enjoyable TV but as close to serious art as anything on television can be -- only get shuffled around from network to network, get given crappy timeslots, and completely ignored where it counts (*cough* Emmys *cough*).

To save the world, Buffy actually damned the love of her life to Hell. All Tony Soprano did was whack a few people.

A dumptruck full of stupid

This is really making the blogger rounds, so I'm probably the last person to weigh in on it and you're already probably tired of hearing about it. But, just in case you live under a rock, here it is: Jim Rutz, a columnist at World Net Daily, has written a column about how soy-based foods make you gay. Seriously. I am not making this up. The title of the article is, "A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals." After reading it, I'm honestly surprised such a short piece of writing can contain such a high level of weapons-grade stupidity.

There has got to be at least one factual error, stereotype, or just flat-out fabrication in every sentence, if not every word of this article. His thesis is that soy products contain estrogens, and those are "feminising" and that's bad. This is basically the money quote:

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That's why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products.

Oh, Stupid, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

1. Rise in homosexuality? There are really more gay people now than previously? Based on what, he doesn't say. Maybe it was all those studies on gay people done in the 1880s that he's referring to. If there's been such a big rise in queers, that just makes it doubly frustrating that I can't find a date.

2. Note the implication that gay men are feminine. Fags lack masculinity. We all walk around lisping, bending our pinky fingers when we drink tea, and carrying a purse. A pink purse. With sequins. Good God, someone get this man to a leather bar, quick.
3. So soy leads to femininity, which leads to small dicks and all the faggotry, huh? The only study I've been able to find suggests that gay men have bigger dicks, not little ones. (Bogaert and Hershberger. "The Relation Between Sexual Orientation and Penile Size." Archives of Sexual Behavior. 28. 213 (1999).)

I could go on, but I'm trying not to. (Did you notice I didn't mention his claim that childhood leukemia has increased by more than one-fourth in a single year? One-fourth! Argh.) There is so much stupid in this article, it burns on contact.

This was published on World Net Daily, and there's a reason it's sometimes referred to as World Nut Daily by people with a functioning cerebellum. What I fear, is that there are people that use it (and probably FOX News) as a primary source of information, and will read this, internalize quite a bit of it, and never begin to suspect the yawning chasm of stupid that lies within it.

Others, smarter than me, have already weighed in: Sing a Song of Sixpence, Feministing, Ex-Gay Watch, Americablog, Pam's House Blend, Wayne Besen, and Pharyngula are a few.

(Just no one tell John Bambenek about this article, please. He likes to quote studies done by the Heritage Foundation and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and calls it "research.")

Anyway, Jim Rutz is a putz.

Yeah, but what about Chip?

Wow, that was quick:

Lance Bass and his boyfriend, Reichen Lehmkuhl, have called it quits, People magazine reported on its Web site Monday.

Bass, who was part of the boy band 'N Sync, revealed earlier this year that he is gay and was in a relationship with Lehmkuhl, a former Air Force captain and winner of season four of CBS' "Amazing Race."