I think there’s a simple explanation for this - there were far more men employed in acting than women at the time of TOS. (Also, women frivolously dying is seen as more exploitative).
Moderating:
A reminder, disputes about moderation belong in ATMB or you can DM the Moderator/Team in question. @msmith537, I’ll respond to you via DM shortly, but no warnings issued for the polite dispute this time.
Just yesterday in another thread I said I didn’t think definitional debates are particularly useful, so I’m hesitant to get into “what counts as sexism”. That said, conceding as truth that in art men and male characters die disproportionately to women, here’s one read of that that truth that seems to me to challenge the idea that this reflects:
Men refuse to let women participate in military/combat/inherently violent roles. This is reflected in our art (and maybe even compounded by the point @Swords_to_Plowshares makes about the number of women in Hollywood in the 60s). As a result, we see many more men dying in our media than women.
Are men victims of sexism when they themselves refuse to allow women to participate in the activities that lead to men dying?
If I keep you locked in a box for your own safety and refuse your autonomy, am I the victim for having to protect the box from harm?
No argument from me. I jumped in because the discussion seemed to be bouncing off of a basic “wellacktually, men/women are the victims (not women/men)” … not saying that is your or anyone’s position, but there’s a lot of responding to one whatabout with a counter whatabout.
And of course, as you say, both are true. And it all is hard to untangle. Take my rhetorical question above about locking someone in a box. What if I don’t want to put someone in a box and protect it, but I’ve learned that that’s what I’m expected to do? And I get negative and sometimes violent social pressure if I resist that job? What if the person in the box wants to be there? What if the person in the box doesn’t really want to be there, but they accept it without complaint because of violent social pressure?
A challenge that is unique to men is that we are given much more power and autonomy in our society than women, but there are still hard limits to that power and autonomy. And when we run up against those limits, it’s tempting to compare our suffering against that of women and find it equal to or greater.
I believe it is vital for both justice and progress that we do not miss or ignore how even positions of power and dominance can be harmful imperatives (the case of the red shirts, for example). At the same time, because men (as a gender) have access to that power, we have a responsibility to make space for others to access that power (even if as an individual we do not feel that power) without making it about us.
The balance of holding how both (two of many?) genders have to navigate their power and subjugation is maybe where this thread started.
We cannot be liberated from the patriarchy without all genders caring for all genders. We cannot be liberated from racism without all races being concerned about all ‘races’. We are all in this boat together, and it is our duty to appreciate each others’ differences and similarities. In the long term there are no one-sided paths to freedom.
(sorry for the ramble).
I think the “in some ways” is doing a lot of work there. After all, women have traditionally been expected to do most of the work in caring for sick people, which exposed them to infectious disease (and disease was in fact the leading cause of death for everybody in the 17th-19th centuries). Non-elite women were also subject to all the risks that came with domestic and farm work, including constant work around open fires. (Although the risks of straight-up burning to death due to clothes catching fire have been exaggerated in modern perceptions of history, severe burns were not uncommon occurrences, and in many cases a post-burn infection was fatal when the burn itself wasn’t.)
ISTM that the crucial point here is that in patriarchal societies, women traditionally tend to be actively protected from risks that would reduce their male family members’ control over their sexuality. Situations where a woman might either be raped by, or have consensual sexual activity with, a man not authorized by the family and social structure to have sex with her are carefully guarded against.
The risks that are perceived as just a natural consequence of women’s expected gender roles, on the other hand—dying in childbirth, catching a disease from caring for a sick person, being injured while doing “women’s work” of various kinds—have traditionally never inspired any major societal impulse to protect women from them. Men as a group have not been lining up (or exhorted to line up) to take over nursing diseased people so women won’t get sick, or to handle the cooking so women won’t get burned, or to refrain from marital intercourse for extended periods to reduce women’s risks from pregnancy and childbirth.
Very true, and especially true when the abuser is female. Even more true in the case of men reporting intimate-partner violence by a female partner.
There is a horrifically pervasive and persistent societal tendency, among men and women alike, to respond to instances of such abuse with callously disparaging dismissals. In the case of non-sexual female-on-male violence, it’s along the lines of “what a wimp he must be to get beat up by a girl”, and in the case of female-on-male rape/sexual assault, it’s “some guys have all the luck”. 
100%, and I agree with everything in your post. I knew it was doing a big ironic lift when I wrote it, but wanted to simplify in order to steer discussion away from a debate about comparative levels of suffering and instead ask the question “ok, everybody suffers, now what?”. And to me, the answer is “we all should be constantly learning about the suffering of everyone in our communities, and those with more power in society (cis white men ftw) have maybe some extra responsibility to open their eyes to things that have been obscured because of privilege/patriarchy, and to not respond to the oppression of others with ‘but us too’, even if it’s true! (or we feel it’s true).”
It’s vitally important that we open our eyes (get woke) to the realities of the world in which we live. But I also think it can be a Sisyphean endeavor to attempt to convince people of a qualitative truth.
But yes, in general we have systems in place that protect women just enough to provide children and no more. Quoting just to amplify:
No, of course it’s not a coincidence. But there are two ways of looking at it.
- it doesn’t matter if random nameless men are killed
- random people are men
It’s probably some of each. Women aren’t just “people”, and also, it is more meaningful if a woman is killed, so it’s easier to kill off the men.
I don’t think that’s the cause at all. Isn’t there a rumor that Star Trek needed twins for an episode and found a couple women who weren’t professional actors to fill the roles? If there was a role for a woman to get killed in the first five minutes of an episode, they could have found someone who was available for a couple days of work.
It may well be that there were more roles for men, and that led to there being more working male actors, but I doubt it was the other way around.
Why not? It’s not as if there’s some finite amount of compassion in the world, and every bit given to a man takes some away from a woman who needs it more.
One of the societal expectations that impacts men is that when something is wrong we should shut up and suffer in silence. This part of your post reads rather like “shut up and suffer in silence”.
Who knows, maybe if men had their issues heard, acknowledged, and addressed, that could be just the thing to get them to open their eyes to what women go through.
Do I understand the argument here correctly?
Men being the majority of prime heros, the redshirt grunts that died as minor characters, essentially the NPCs, and the main villains too for that sake, in a 1960 space western show, is an example of negative bias against men in our society?
That’s the complaint?
There were twice as many men in the workforce as women at the time.
No, the complaint is specifically about those who die in Star Trek primarily being men indicating that men are considered more disposable than women. That, sure, there are fewer female characters, but the ones that do show up are treated better.
I kinda agree, to be honest. Making it a woman who died would be specifically seen as about women, and would be seen as much more upsetting than a man dying.
But I would say it has more to do with sexism towards women, in that men are seen as the default. That women are infantilized and objectified. Killing off a woman is seen more akin to killing a puppy or a child. I think it is unlikely the motivation is that men are being seen as lesser.
Still, the result can still wind up discriminating more against men, and then not doing anything to fix that can be argued to be sexist towards men. Not nearly at the levels of sexism towards women, mind you.
But it’s one of those ways in which the patriarchy can actually result in sexism against men. Because only the prestige men are of value.
You may think this silly in a TV show, and I wouldn’t blame you. But I do think this is emblematic of a lot of the unfairness towards men we see in society. I don’t think it’s all that helpful to say “that’s not sexism towards men” while also looking at other disparities and blaming them on sexism, racism, etc.
I think the frame that is more helpful is to argue that the patriarchy and sexism towards women can ultimately result in sexism towards non-prestige men. To stop acting like sexism towards one gender precludes sexism towards another.
The actors aren’t.
The real human beings who get acting gigs on Star Trek to pay their rent, the women who do that job, were treated worse than the men. The guys playing dead redshirts got paid, the women who didn’t get to play dead redshirts got another shift as a waitress. The women who managed to get gigs on Star Trek had to deal with rampant misogyny and sexism on the set.
Yet, we’re somehow going to use ST-TOS as an indicator of how society is/was biased against men? Because of how they treated the fictional characters?
I agree, this is the conclusion I was driving to as well.
I would phrase it as “the trope of redshirt men in Star Trek (and it goes beyond just Trek) is akin to the trope of women in peril. They have no agency, no character development, and no back story. They exist only to motivate the actions, or illustrate the danger confronting the main characters.”
So, I wasn’t actually kidding when I said earlier that disenfranchised men should have attempted to engage with DEI initiatives to achieve goals of equitable opportunity.
We had this great system for addressing systemic concerns of marginalized groups. But instead of trying to harness that to better themselves, the majority of white men decided it was better to destroy this system.
It’s sad and it makes their situation worse, in addition to the obviously bad outcomes it creates for people who were benefiting from DEI.
Were they? Overall than the male characters of the show?
Green Orion slave girl? Mudd’s wife? The various ensigns in short skirts? A few putative love interests and women in danger? Were the Janice Rand and Nurse Chappell characters given the … autonomy … of Bones or Scotty?
Yeah there was some ground breaking for the time with Uhura, and a handful of guest stars. But it was of its era a pretty male show with women as accessories and motivations for the men which were the default.
- True, but there is finite space in the room, finite time for discussion, and finite resources to dedicate toward actively addressing social issues. If it is impossible to address women’s oppression without men chiming in about their own issues, women’s oppression will never be addressed, other than as a secondary concern.
- Yes, stoicism as a male virtue is something that can be taken too far to the detriment of men and women. Women have also suffered under extreme taboo and social disapproval about speaking about their issues though the subject matter and the consequences of bringing it up differ. But consider, for a moment, that I am not telling anyone to “shut up and suffer in silence”. Consider that I might have been expressing something more nuanced and less imperative. Men have been holding tight control of power structures for millennia. We (as a gender) do not suffer from lack of access to the levers of power and change. Also, consider that just as there’s a lot about the male experience that women don’t see or understand, there is a lot about women’s experience that we do not see or understand. We are not going to get to a better place together by talking more- we are going to get there by listening more. I don’t know if women need to listen more to men. Maybe? I do know that men have been hearing from themselves for a long time and ignoring women for a long time, or listening, but only on their (men’s) terms. Making some room for other voices to take center stage might help move the dial for all of us in a way that it has not moved in the past.
- As I just mentioned, men have been in the position to have our issues heard, acknowledged and addressed for quite some time. The fact that some of those issues might be ignored, not addressed, or not addressed constructively is itself a consequence of our social system (patriarchy, and other things).
And, just reiterating that yes, we are all victims of the patriarchy, and not all men are literally in positions of extreme social dominance (though most of us, in most spaces, experience power that women do not, whether or not we always feel it). A consequence of a society that does not allow women to fight in wars is that more men die in wars. However, men have had the opportunity to rectify this injustice for 100s of years. Now, a scant few generations into some social movement on women’s position in society, it is maybe time to let them run with the ball instead and err on the side of non-interference and support, as opposed to making sure our own suffering under patriarchy is addressed.
Returning to early themes:
100% recognized that unskilled non college educated men have been really left behind in this country.
But men with skilled jobs and or college education? Sorry to be harsh but they can cry me a river. As a group they are doing just fine and are still the beneficiaries of many built in biases for them. Especially if they also have other privileged identities.
For decades I’ve been hearing that how characters are represented in fiction matters. By your rationale, we should celebrate every woman who gets a damsel-in-distress role because she’s getting a paid acting gig, rather than something which doesn’t pay as well.
There were throwaway, eye-candy female characters, and others that were in positions of responsibility. By no means am I saying the show was balanced, but it’s not fair to only single out the worst characters to prove a point.
Kind of like the way a thread about male inequality is regularly hijacked with discussions of women’s issues?
For a long time, men were not just “allowed” to fight in wars, they were drafted and required to fight them.
How many? I can think of a couple of female guest star characters at most. The overwhelming majority of characters in positions of responsibility were men. Women were generally accessories for the men when the plot or eye candy need demanded. Otherwise the default: male. As was normal for the time in science fiction and Westerns!