wewearshortjorts: eubalaena: hagfingers: I...

wewearshortjorts:

eubalaena:
hagfingers:
I know someone who is absolutely convinced that TOS Kirk was an abusive womanizing Sociopath
and admittedly they’ve actually watched TOS (granted, a long-ass time ago) and I never have, so I don’t really have room to argue?
but that is not the impression I’ve gotten from feminist!tumblr at all
@wewearshortjorts this is basically your special interest and you are the best person I know to address this
nah
he was definitely an asshole sometimes (especially to janice rand in the first season) but i can’t think of any time that i’d consider him abusive (i’m sure he smacked a woman once, so did mccoy, but i don’t think a single smack of a woman who was being terrible qualifies as abusive, nor does using sexuality to get what he wants)
womanizing, eh, he had some one episode girlfriends, and some chicks he banged in order to get information or something but the image of the womanizing Kirk is definitely overstated. I guess it depends on what you consider womanizing.
sociopath like wow i don’t think that person knows what that word means tbh
The times I can think of that he’s terrible in are like one off instances that seem really out of character. Like The Enemy Within, he gets split into two Kirks - one is his good side, one is his bad side - and the bad side is really awful, like attempted-rapey and gross. But it’s not played for laughs or anything and it’s definitely treated as a bad thing but definitely has realistic treatment of his near-victim in that the men are kind of like oh are you sure about what happened??? and a little dismissive.
I mean I guess it comes down to definitions. If you consider a couple of plot-induced one offs or sometimes being a bit of dick to be abusive, then yeah he is, along with everyone else on every show, movie, and like you know real life.
One thing TOS did was be pretty inconsistent with characterization. Not so much with Kirk and Spock, but with everyone else. Scotty and McCoy were whatever the episode needed, so if we needed a smooth southern gentlemen type one week then that’s what McCoy was and the next week he was back to crotchety and accentless. If we needed a raging misogynist then ok *throws dart* Scotty it is, etc. So yeah there’s some instances where the characterization doesn’t always make sense.
Regarding TOS in general, like it was made in the 60s so it absolutely has some sketchy shit in it and is sometimes very much a product of its time, but I’ve spoken to many people who were fans of it when it originally aired, and it was mostly considered revolutionary in a lot of ways, sometimes ways that we look on as bad (like the short dresses on women - all the older women I’ve spoken to thought that was amazing and wonderful to see on TV because it was for that time amazing - to our eyes now it’s objectifying and weird).