Tired old SF clichés

[vilakins]

Some further thoughts and a rant about the script of the Farscape episode Coup by Clam.

I was surprised to find this was written by a woman, Emily Skopov. There were some very good bits--the shellfish containing neurologically-linked bacteria which gave the people who ate them the same symptoms, and Crichton in drag which had me laughing out loud--but we had [rolls eyes] yet another society which oppresses women. Just what goes on here? Do writers think to themselves, "I know! I'll write about a culture in which woman don't count. That'll be original--it's only been done 5000 times, and it's not like it happens on this planet."

Bloody hell, why not write something really different, like a race with several sexes, all of which are needed for procreation, or one with a hive-mind? Or confound our expectations: I loved the garbage-collecting alien, Staanz, in The Flax who appeared male but was actually female, though he was cancelled out by the bloodhound couple Rorf and Rorg in Till the Blood Runs Clear who regarded females as inferior and owned by males. I think I've read only one or two stories in which females were dominant and usually this 'unnatural state' has been corrected by the end. Not that I approve of that sort of society either, but it would have been much more original, and also fun to see Aeryn and Sikozu in drag.

Sexist societies appear in every SF show I can think of. Hey, script-writers, how about a little more thought and invention and a lot less tired and offensive cliché?

Comments

[kerravonsen]

Another problem with writing matriarchies is that they just try to make the women into female men -- that is, they blindly reverse the roles of men and women and plug the women into the patriarchal-man slot. That isn't really being very intelligent. I do think that men and women are different enough, psychologically, that a matriarchy, were it oppressive, would oppress in a different way than an oppressive patriarchy would. They would be more manipulative and less violent. Men would be oppressively stereotyped as dumb brutes, only good for menial labour and procreation.

[tiamatschild.livejournal.com]

I think the big problem with the way matriarchies are often written on SF shows is that they don't treat either men or women as people. The men become voiceless and blank, and the women become embodiments of the male fantasy/fear of strong women. It's complexities inherent in any relationship.

I mean, oppressive societal structures deform lives and relationships, but they don't erase the essential separate being of the people who form the society. Marginal people do not stop having hopes and dreams and individual relationships because they are marginal, any more than dominant people become mindless tools of domination because they are dominant. What often happens in fictional narrative about these things is that the people involved are only their roles, and not their being.

That's one reason I'm more than willing to accept JMS' portrayal of the Centauri. Yes, they live in a very patriarchal society, and the Centauri character's actions and ideas are formed by that society, but they're also still individual people, with individual goals, dreams, ethics, and enthusiasms. They are people, not roles.

And that you gotta love.