{"id":179141,"date":"2018-05-05T22:56:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-06T03:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/05\/05\/my-childhood-is-a-lie\/"},"modified":"2018-05-05T22:56:00","modified_gmt":"2018-05-06T03:56:00","slug":"my-childhood-is-a-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/05\/05\/my-childhood-is-a-lie\/","title":{"rendered":"My Childhood Is a Lie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone just did a quantitative analysis of Captain James T. Kirk, going through all the episodes of the original Star Trek<\/i>, and rather than being the promiscuous and reckless character parodied in Futurama<\/i>‘s Zapp Branigan, he turns out to be a lower key and far more cautious figure<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

We reach the point of no return when the omnijerk (really I suspect there\u2019s just one vast eldritch horror sitting in another dimension that extrudes its thousand tentacles into our own, and that each one of This Guy is merely an insignificant manifestation of the beast: they couldn\u2019t all be so boring in precisely the same way by chance, surely) decides to voice some Dinner Party Opinions on original-series Star Trek. God knows why. It\u2019s not five seconds before he\u2019s on \u2018Kirk and the green women\u2019. He\u2019s mocking the retrosexist trope, but smiling a little weirdly while doing it. His own insufficiently private enjoyment is peeking out, like a semi-erection on his face. A sort of Mad Men effect: saying, \u201cisn\u2019t it awful\u201d and going for the low-hanging critical fruit while simultaneously rolling around in that aesthetic and idea of masculinity. Camp, but no homo!<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re thinking of Pike,\u201d I say. \u201cThe captain in the unaired pilot. Some of that footage got reused for a later story, which made Pike into a previous captain of the Enterprise. And it never actually happened\u2014it was a hallucination sequence designed by aliens who didn\u2019t know what they were doing in order to tempt Pike. He rejected it.\u201d<\/span>
\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> His [the loudmouthed boyfriend of a girl invited to the party] was a common enough error, and he can claim neither the credit nor the blame for the invention. The pop culture idea of Kirk, Captain of the Enterprise for the first Star Trek series (ST:TOS) and the original run of films, has become almost synonymous with Zapp Brannigan from Futurama. To quote Wikipedia<\/a>,<\/span><\/p>\n

[t]hough famed for his bravery and strategic genius, it soon becomes very apparent that [Brannigan] is sexist, vain, and often very cowardly and inept. [\u2026] Brannigan is also completely indifferent to military casualties. [\u2026] He is arrogant, completely incompetent, chauvinistic, and stupid. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Brannigan is supposed to be part comic exaggeration of the \u201creal\u201d Kirk, part reflective take-down of the source <\/a>character [1<\/a>]<\/sup> . Per wiki, in some ways the ultimate aggregator of the vox populi, \u201cKirk has been noted for \u2018his sexual exploits with gorgeous females of every size, shape and type\u2019 [11<\/a>]<\/sup>; he has been called \u2018promiscuous\u2019 [66<\/a>]<\/sup> and labeled a \u2018womanizer\u2019 [67<\/a>] [68<\/a>]<\/sup>.\u201d (Note all those still-working footnotes for fan-publications and major papers and entertainment news sites.) The article \u201cCaptain Kirk\u2019s 8 Most Impressive Love Conquests<\/a>\u201d gives us such bon mots as these:<\/span><\/p>\n

For three glorious seasons, Star Trek\u2018s Captain James T. Kirk boldly seduced and explored women no Earth-man had been with before. Well, okay, some of them were from Earth, but Starfleet\u2019s greatest discovery was that no women anywhere in the cosmos could resist the intense gaze and oft-exposed, tanned pecs of the Enterprise\u2019s head honcho. Who can blame them, really? Of the many, many seduction [sic] committed by James T. Kirk, here are the 8 most impressive (not most exotic, which would totally include the green Orion Slave Girl, but this doesn\u2019t, because Kirk had no problems getting under her Orion\u2019s belt), which deserve to be recorded in the Captain\u2019s Log for all eternity.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What follows is an inventory of Kirk’s actual behavior, which is far milder, particularly by the standard of 1960’s television, than I recall:<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start, as people so often do, with those infamous Green Women.
<\/span>
Yes: one existed in ST:TOS. Sort of. It was a vision. On a planet Kirk wasn\u2019t even on. A captain was there: it wasn\u2019t Kirk. Captain Pike<\/cite> and this green, Orion woman [2<\/a>]<\/sup> could literally never have done the <\/a>deed [3<\/a>]<\/sup>.<\/span>

<\/span> (ADDENDUM: I should also mention here the first and only actual Orion woman we see in TOS, Marta<\/a>: an inmate of an asylum who attempts to seduce a suspicious, wounded Kirk, who is himself interested in escaping dangerous captivity. She then immediately tries to murder him. Ah, l’amour.)<\/span>

<\/span> Over the course of three seasons and six films (though I hesitate to mention the films in the same breath as the series, because even the initial run of films represents a significant, reflexive re-working of the original material), we do meet some women Kirk has had romantic relations with. These previous relationships mostly seem of a type.<\/span><\/p>\n