#I do not like the Kirk x Janice angle at all for either of them

[bardicious]

Thinking of Spock's ridiculously dated comment at the end of The Enemy Within from a less fucked up standpoint. Spock was joking about Kirk's hidden affections for Janice and her feelings to Kirk. (Lets just ignore the sexual assault, lmao)

[luanna801]

Note to self: Write a post about how the treatment of Janice Rand vs. Nyota Uhura in Star Trek: TOS is a perfect example of sexism against white women vs. sexism against black women and how what seems more ‘progressive’ isn’t always what it seems to be.

Because Rand is constantly treated as a sex object, usually in ways that are incredibly sexist and often involve her consent being violated. Her first filmed episode starts off with Kirk giving this (incredibly OOC) speech about how he can’t stand having a female yeoman because it’s ~soooo distracting~. ‘Charlie X’ is all about Charlie feeling entitled to her love and eventually getting incredibly rape-y with her. In ‘The Enemy Within’ we get a very similar situation where Evil Kirk tries to rape her (and as others have pointed out, the episode handles this horribly - at least ‘Charlie X’ treats Charlie’s behavior towards her as the abhorrent thing it is.) 

When she’s not outright being violated, the show keeps trying to sell this... weirdly half-hearted romantic angle with her and Kirk that just feels very lazily written and sexist. She wants him to look at her legs! He can’t because he’s too professional! Oh, the drama. He gives this whole speech in ‘The Naked Time’ about how he has a beautiful yeoman but isn’t allowed to notice because he’s the captain, etc., etc. And while that conflict makes sense and is done well, it honestly just comes across more as Kirk making Rand his generic placeholder for the idea of the romance he’d like to have than either of them having meaningful feelings for the other. Is Kirk attracted to Rand for any reason other than her being ‘beautiful’? Does Rand want Kirk for anything other than him being hot and the captain? (Actually, I’m being generous in assuming that’s where she’s coming from - the show never really bothers to give her motivation here at all.) We don’t know, because the show never tells us. Both characters certainly have admirable qualities that could attract them to each other, but we’re never shown that they see or appreciate those things in each other. The conflict between them having real feelings for each other but not being able to act on them because she’s his subordinate could be really interesting and compelling, if the show bothered to create a meaningful relationship between them and properly flesh out both characters. If they gave the audience a reason to want these two together. But as it is, the show just seems to feel like Rand must exist for romantic drama because she’s a pretty blonde white girl, and that’s not enough.

And then you have Uhura, and... there’s none of that there. (In the episodes I’ve seen so far, anyway - if that changes later on, let me know.) No one is pining after her. There’s no romantic drama. No one, thank the lord, tries to molest her. Kirk apparently doesn’t consider it too distracting to have her working on the bridge, even though she’s every bit as much an age-appropriate, attractive woman as Rand is. The closest you get to the kind of Rand-esque romantic angst is in ‘The Man Trap’ where she asks Spock why he never tells her she’s attractive or asks her if she’s been in love, but that’s the very first aired episode and that angle quickly gets dropped. (Sadly, because unlike Kirk and Rand there actually seemed to be potential there for a compelling romance.) But for the most part, she just shows up and does her job and is damned good at it.

Which you would think means the show is being less sexist in how it writes her, but when you scratch the surface that’s not the case. Uhura isn’t made a sex object, no, but the flipside is that she’s not allowed to be a romantic or sexual being in the positive sense. She’s not allowed to be the object of romantic or sexual interest from the white male characters, to the point where it’s almost ignored as a possibility. (Again, outside of a few scenes with her and Spock.) And a lot of this is not the show’s fault, because given how hard they had to fight just to get the (nonconsensual, in-story) kiss between her and Kirk aired, they probably wouldn’t have been allowed to do any romantic subplots with an interracial pairing. But the end result is what it is, and here that result is that the black woman gets desexualized and de-romanticized, while the white woman is a sex object. Both are sexist, but they’re sexist in markedly different ways.

(And to be clear here, I’m not writing this to hate on Star Trek. I love Star Trek, and it’s undeniable how incredibly progressive it was for its time. But it definitely had some major missteps too, and I think the treatment of these characters is very revealing.)