nevermoreraven

Mostly, this started out as an analysis of why we misremember Captain Kirk so much and then turned into an analysis of Dagger of the Mind somehow. I don't know.

I am convinced that half the reason we think of Captain Kirk as a womanizer is how flirty he is (despite the fact that he flirts with everything, including, gasp, yes, men). We’ve been conditioned to see flirting as a promise of sex later on, but this is a dangerous assumption to make. Like Kirk in the Original Series, we may actually be looking for real, long-term relationships, but just like flirting to make our own or other’s days brighter. You can’t automatically know or make assumptions about anything based on the fact that ‘that person’s flirting’ other than ‘they probably think I’m attractive’, which people should usually take more as a compliment rather than as seriously as we do as a culture. The danger comes when, since there was flirtation, that consent is seen as unnecessary because—well, the other person was interested, weren’t they?

Maybe. Maybe they wanted to get to know you a lot better before they made any sort of long-term commitment (or, you know, short term huge life decisions). Maybe they just flirt with everyone (and no, being a ‘tease’ is not an excuse—that just means that you are incapable of dealing with frustration, which means you’ll have a hard time of it in the real world because that’s a place full of frustrations). You can’t know, and that’s a huge issue with our culture because it smooths the path to misunderstandings(?) that ruin lives, and no, I’m not being melodramatic there.

An example of this comes in the episode Dagger of the Mind. Dr. Helen Noel seems to have taken Jim’s flirting as more serious and constructed an entire fantasy around it (which is something that you see, you know, in dangerous stalkers like you see in Criminal Minds). It’s interesting how uncomfortable he seems around her (almost a ‘oh no, it’s that person that sexually harassed me at work; calm down, we’ll be working and around people so hopefully it’ll be okay, you’re a starship captain, you can do this’). It is also interesting how much she dismisses Kirk (if the gender roles were reversed, we’d be very sure that it was just ‘because Kirk was a woman’). Here it’s probably more…she kinda sees him as a dumb jock, incapable of understanding science or psychology, despite the fact that (due to the events of Tarsus IV) he’s had experience with psychologists and likely keeps up with the subject if his being an absolute dork fangirling out about Dr. Adams on the ship was any indication (and no, I have nothing against fangirling out, it’s awesome, I’m just amused at how many experts they were going to meet where Kirk was like ‘no, you don’t understand, look at everything this guy/girl did in the field they’re amazing I really wanna meet them’). In fact, with how easily she dismisses his instincts and the words of any superior officer (Kirk only really steps in when she’s questioning Spock, most likely because this is a science officer you should at least respect a fellow science person) I’m not sure what she thinks the chain of command is there for. (Also Kirk has good instincts for noticing when something’s wrong, and it doesn’t pay to ignore that.)

(This also makes Bones a little less sympathetic, in my eyes, which is a shame because he’s awesome, generally. She probably was the most qualified person on the ship to go, given that they don’t really have psychologists on the ship [yet, I hear] but he really should’ve known Kirk was uncomfortable and warned him at least. Same sort of thing when he had his wink-wink comment about Lenore, despite the fact that she was crazypsycho and would’ve killed Jim in a heartbeat and that they were just using each other. That wry grin could’ve meant ‘yes, I liked her’ or ‘I’d really like to talk about all the psychological trauma I’ve gone through in the last couple days not the least of which was thinking I was using an innocent girl’s feelings and then finding out she was using me and planning to murder me in my sleep but you’ve clearly demonstrated you’re not the one I should talk to about this because you don’t understand’. Then again, no one’s perfect, so it does make him more realistic. Just less of a good friend.)

And then we get to the truly sickening part. The part where Noel and then Adams use a machine to override his consent and make him fall madly in love with her. If, like in the Buffy episode Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, the victim(s) had been female, as well as the perpetrator being male, there would’ve been outrage. That’s easily dancing around the edge of non-con. I’m inclined to give Xander slightly more benefit of the doubt, because Adams as an adult knew exactly what he was doing and had already hurt people with that machine. He wanted to punish Jim for his curiosity and prevent him from reporting about what he’d seen, probably. I’m not sure what Helen’s excuse was, though she didn’t go as far as she might have. Xander wanted revenge, but he definitely didn’t intend it to affect the whole town and wasn’t planning on taking advantage of it, just wanted to be the one to dump Cordy so she’d know the pain. Neither are lightyears within okay, of course, but context and intention are important too. Noel read Kirk’s flirting as “I’d like to have sex with you but just haven’t yet” and pushed her own fantasy into his mind, while by his reactions previously in the episode Kirk definitely didn’t want anything of the sort.

Props to her, though, for telling him what was going on (thus letting his sense of duty win over implanted memories and feelings) and not taking advantage of it. (Scary thing is, I don’t know if that’s how it would’ve gone if the genders were reversed. I’d like to say of course it wouldn’t have been written any differently but it’s hard to tell.)

(On an unrelated note, if you want more examination on the good or bad of the alteration of memories, look no further than Babyon 5’s Passing Through Gethsemane.)

I’m not saying that the show is perfect, or anything like that (I still have yet to figure out how to feel about The Enemy Within), but so far in the first season Kirk’s mostly just been flirting (which some people obviously take too seriously) or using sexuality to distract/get information (kind of like a woman would be written, actually). The only ones that seemed to mean anything were two exes he was on good terms with (and long-term relationship exes no less) and a woman he fell in love with and a woman he engaged in good old-fashioned courting with (Edith Keeler).