By David Futrelle
It’s not exactly news that former space show actor William Shatner can be something of a dick. And in the year of our dark lord 2017 all dicks end up on Twitter, so it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Shatner has been acting like a dick on Twitter.
But I have to say I was a little bit taken aback to see Capt. Kirk adopting not only some of the opinions but the lingo of the terrible people who congregate in or around the Alt Right. In a series of recent tweets, Shatner has railed against so-called SJWs and castigated his opponents as “snowflakes,” a term that seems to have almost replaced what seems to have been his previous favorite patronizing putdown, “sunshine.”
He’s also picked up one of the favorite terms of the Men’s Rights movement: “misandry.” He started using it earlier this year, slipping it into his disquisitions on the evils of political correctness and feminism and whatnot.
Needless to say, his thoughts on the subject are not particularly enlightening, consisting mostly of assertions that “misandry exists.”
Misandry is real. Sorry. https://t.co/HzNcwWhbhV
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) February 20, 2017
You can say that about misandry all you want but it exists. 🤷🏼♂️ https://t.co/fKhNpEt6h1
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) May 1, 2017
Misogyny exists. Problem is that she didn't want to accept misandry does, too. https://t.co/f1mlk7wKek
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) May 1, 2017
Misandry does exist & toxic masculinity is a skewed definition. So boohoo that I used a word you don't believe exists & 🙄 on a phrase. https://t.co/kAaBVj4lXn
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) June 2, 2017
He is also keen for his Twitter followers to know that, yes, he in fact sometimes uses the word.
All of that is true. I also use words like snowflake and misandry. What's your point sunshine? https://t.co/3Z0Zj1USIX
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) July 31, 2017
And this is your failure of logic. SJWs stand for inequality, where they are superior to any one else hence my use of Misandry and Snowflake https://t.co/8uBGuFFM7a
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) July 31, 2017
Tweets reiterating these two points pretty much make up the entirety of his commentary on the evils of misandry.
I look forward to his further contributions to misandry theory.
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes
Janeway unilaterally decided that not only her crew, but the crew of a ship not under her command, must for some reason seek Earth rather than settling down anywhere else simply because she said so.
She pretended once or twice to feel a bit sad about this decision but it didn’t change her behaviour one little bit. She made 150 or so people act the way she decided for no reason whatsoever. They didn’t really have a choice.
There was no complexity at all in the Janeway character. She was a bit edgy sometimes but the reset button was stamped on by an elephant by the next episode.
And she had an annoying voice.
Kate Mulgrew, on the other hand, seems to be a nice person.
Although, according to her Wikipeda page, Kate Mulgrew is an opponent of abortion, which is’t nice at all.
@Freemage, Grumpy: If I had to hazard a guess, “eating meat that wasn’t grown in a vat” might be one of the bigger ones.
@latsot
That was what I was trying to remember. Kate Mulgrew was awesome in Orange is the New Black as Red IMO.
Voyager is no DS9, but I found it entertaining, which is good enough for me. I’d at least rather watch it than, say, The Big Bang Theory.
@ scildfreja
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1-BM_dLkyZQ/Tf0ibK7e79I/AAAAAAAAAUI/wSu3GIfXnqc/s1600/B-0020_Battle_Beyond_The_Stars_quad_movie_poster_l.jpg
If you haven’t seen this you’re in for a treat; it’s surprisingly good. Designed as a quick and cheap star wars cash in, some great performances and a delightfully witty script.
Meh, I stopped liking Shatner after the autism incident earlier this year. It was something to do with Autism Speaks, and lots of autistic people said ‘can you not’ and explained why they don’t like A$. Shatner couldn’t accept the legit criticism and started Twitter-screaming that he was being harassed.
I was a Next Generation watcher in the 1990s, and have only seen a handful of TOS, so I’ve always preferred Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard anyway.
OK… this is getting interesting again…
Who knew that WH Interns were part of the “Checks & Balances” on the President?
1. President talks to foreign leaders, being his usual “I don’t really get it, but I’m right” self.
2. Someone makes transcripts for historians to use later.
3. Someone leaks transcripts for press to use now.
#InternalResistance ?
ETA: Battle Beyond the Stars was followed by a nearly identical movie using most of the same footage. Cashing in on a cash in.
Her voice was a big part of why I like the character. It isn’t feminine, it isn’t pretty. Janeway’s voice is a brave brass horn that grabs you by the ears and says shut up you clowns the boss is talkin’. It cuts through conversations in a similar way to how Janeway cuts through nonsense. Perfectly suited voice to the role.
(Thought exercise on this point. I can recall plenty of time it’s been said that a woman in a lead character role has an annoying voice; don’t recall a time it’s been said of a man. Is that confirmation bias on my part or is that a thing?)
(also, apparently I have feels about this topic because I sorta went over the top in the following. Mea culpa! Read your discretion, apply salt liberally.)
As for the “we’re going on an Endless Journey!” and “No complexity!” points, they’re fair, but that’s the problem with the whole series, and it was sort of how TV was done at the time. Voyager was at the tail end of the episodic TV era, when it was going out of style and being replaced with overarching storylines. The fact that the “edginess” she displayed in some episodes disappears in the next is just how it was done. That’s how character is shown and developed there – a series of stand-alone vignettes. You can’t ignore those moments because they’re gone in the next episode. That’s how those characters showed their development in those sorts of series.
I think that if they had been more brave with Voyager and gone for an actual overarching story it would have been incredible, and we would have seen so much better out of all of those characters. As it stood it was a series that seemed to be controlled by trope and by Paramount direction moreso than creative drive. It makes me sad, because I love the premise so much.
I think that Kate did what she could to breathe life into Janeway given those restraints, and I think she did a great job! That’s why I like Janeway. Within the context of the restrictions of the series, I think she is an inspiring figure.
Well, yeah. Neelix is the worst.
I don’t get all the Janeway hate though. I think if the character would was male, that wouldn’t happen so much.
She was in a shitty situation and did the best she could. People complain about her being inconsistent with her choices, but I think that’s realistic. Nobody in that situation would deal with it perfectly. If she was unfailingly wise in every episode, people would complain about her being a Mary Sue.
Female characters can’t win. If they’re imperfect in any way, they are seen as irredeemably flawed while male characters with flaws are seen as complex and realistic. See also the fan reactions to Skylar vs Walter in Breaking Bad, Sansa and Catelyn vs all the male characters in Game of Thrones or Betty vs Don in Mad Men. Yet if a female character is too competent, talented and tough then the Mary Sue complaints begin. Such as the complaints about Rey learning to Jedi too fast even though male characters in action/adventure/fantasy/sci-fi movies are constantly learning skills improbably quickly without people getting too mad about it. It was hilariously lampooned in Wet Hot American Summer so it’s not like people never noticed it. It just doesn’t inspire internet rage fests.
The few times female characters who aren’t just there as sex objects or love interests but are active movers of plot are acceptable is when they consciously reject everything coded female. Such as Arya Stark.
I don’t think people even usually realize that they’re holding male and female characters to different standards, but it’s problematic because it doesn’t just apply to fictional characters. There was a similar dynamic in the expectations and standards for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the presidential debates.
Okay. That went on longer than I meant
It’s a subject that’s been on my mind lately so I went off a bit.
Space Raiders, it was called. Used many of the FX shots, and the music, too. I saw both of them in theaters when they came out. It was a bit surreal when they cut from the movie I was watching to the one I had seen a few years before. I wasn’t sure, because I’d been 11 or so for the first, and 14 for the second, but after the first few cuts, it’s like… Really??
“Battle Beyond the Stars, now with all new dialogue footage”
Not bad for B-Movie though.
Er, Mulgrew’s anti-abortion position I mean. That was what I was trying to remember.
@ JS
Well that kinda was Roger Corman’s business model. He’s responsible for jump starting a lot of careers in the film industry though; and he does make pretty entertaining products.
My favourite low budget maverick film producer though is Menahem Golan. There’s a great documentary about Cannon Films where people recount a meeting he had in relation to a movie that would have featured Clyde (the orangutan), and he tried to cut Clyde’s owner/agent out of the way, and do a deal directly with Clyde. 🙂
I recently heard a trans friend of mine talking about how her work life changed after she transitioned. She started getting written up for doing the exact same amount of work as she had always done. She literally had to do more work as a woman to be seen as competent as she had been as a man.
@Gussie Jives
McGill has a reputation for being a good school (maybe on the level of UCLA, UC Berkeley, UNC Chapel Hill, UT Austin, etc.), so I’d guess they really don’t need Shatner to look good.
I went to a similar public “top school” for my undergraduate, and I feel like some graduates do have a certain degree of snobbery. I went to grad school in my STEM field at more of a nowheresville state university, and I felt as though the education I got was just as high quality. The instructors had more time and seemed to care more about students. The instructors were better at teaching in general, in contrast to having more or less no reason to pay attention in lecture in undergraduate (everyone was good at learning in a highly self-directed way, though there were a few good teachers who made lecture worthwhile).
@wwth, you are my faves <3
I was skirting around that point and you just kicked the can. Yes, that. Janeway is a big honky goose that has had it with these cheap-ass breadcrumbs, and I love her to bits.
“I don’t get all the Janeway hate though. I think if the character would was male, that wouldn’t happen so much.”
Not that’s something I agree! My problem with her is that her character is defined by constant burden of responsibility, she constantly jumps back&forth from being like a mother for ther Voyager faimily to captain Ahab-style hunt for Earth. It’s especially annoying when she shows both these sides in one episode… Note: in one episode she allowed all the crew to leave the ship and noone left (not very psychologicaly plausible… BTW).
I don’t get Neelix hate even more. He is a typical jester archetype of the show: without him it would be just boooring. And note: he was in relationship in Kes before she was rescued.
Re: female starship captains
A controversial topic in ST circles as I’m sure you know; and one where the great bird of the galaxy wasn’t on top form. (Although ironically with the pilot episode he had a much more progressive stance.)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekS3E24TurnaboutIntruder
@Valentine
I love Red Dwarf, too. When I was younger I would sit next to the VCR so I could record the show but pause for the PBS fundraiser bits between episodes. 🙂
The argument that Rey is a bad character because she figured out the Force on her own strikes me as incredibly misogynistic as I’ve never seen a similar argument against a male character who is a fast/instinctual learner.
You’re right, they didn’t do much with him in season 1, but he went from “guy who does the post-screen quip” to pretty much the go-to guy for anything requiring competence. By season 7, he was the helmsman, medic/nurse/backup doctor, shuttle pilot, spy and basically the ship’s commando whenever they needed one for rescue missions. He also went from “bad boy ex-con” to mellow family man over the course of the series. Torres also had a similar mellowing-out arc, and for me the interactions between those two were always a highlight of the later seasons (as stupid as a lot of those episodes were).
There’s a fan theory that the concept of midi-chlorians was invented by the Republic government to limit Force users to mostly male humans. It’s more or less an ideology created to justify privilege. Rey, in that scenario, wouldn’t be a bad character.
So my feeling was they’re hinting that Rey is incredibly instinctively Force attuned. So she’s going to end up being a super-powerful Jedi. Hence the Force Awakening.
He was fined for domestic violence in the 70s so it is no surprise that he is still horrible.
I unapologetically use, and will continue to use, the word “snowflake.” It’s a perfect term to describe someone so fragile that they melt under the slightest breath. The overtone of “flake” is a bonus.
Not to throw shade on a fellow Canadian, but seeing the test footage of Genevieve Bujold in the role… Mulgrew was far and away the better Janeway.