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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I wish that too, and eventually we will get there. But there is a lot of progress and catching up before we get there.

Nowadays when I watch films or read books from the 50s, 60s, and 70s the depth of casual sexism is quite shocking. So that shows some progress. But still there’s a tremendous amount of inequality to be overcome.

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The Star Treck pilot is an example.

What an excellent example because Star Trek was itself so very progressive for its time. Yet despite that may plot lines still centered around very rigid sexist assumptions.

Sorry to go on a tangent, but I am surprised how many TNG episodes have 'alien species that is thinly veiled stand-in for some human race'. And this is a show that would have been woke for it's time.

[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Up_The_Long_Ladder_(epi...

[2] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(episode)

Well science fiction is merely a way to examine current society. The SF angle is an attempt to get a little "outside" perspective.

It's pretty hard to make truly alien aliens, as the more alien they are, the harder they are to understand, identify with etc, making the stories themselves less interesting.

The aliens in The Gods Themselves are pretty alien but still have, from time to time, a human-like mode of thinking which Asimov used to explain their behavior. The Bug Wars is the only book I've read that has no humans at all, though the aliens' mentalities are somewhat human, again to make them comprehensible.

Famously "different" aliens (e.g. Moties, the bugs of Ender's Game & sequels) are actually pretty human in motivation.

And the inscrutable aliens (e.g. Starship Troopers) are clearly inscrutable stand-ins for contemporary political enemies.

The various literature on intelligent machines has the same problem.

Arrival was a good attempt at that

Not to detract from the whole point as far as Star Trek showing its social-commentary age, but AFAIK “Code of Honor” specifically was very much an early outlier in TNG history, including starting with a director who didn't direct any other Star Trek episodes.

The writer did get it made again as an early sg1 episode - though Sam Did look cute in her steppes princess outfit

Ah, the insane early TNG episodes... For every Measure of a Man and Q Who, there's loads of this.

Here's more fun recaps:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...

Honorable mentions:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...

Yeah, it's pretty bad. Babylon 5 is super blatant about it, bordering on racist stereotypes.

Tangent on a tangent, but my daughter was recently binge-watching The Clone Wars animated series and at one point I had to ask: "So they have Space Asians there?"

Well, they already have Space Knights, Space Gunmen, and Space Witches, so why not.

The pilot is an outlier - very blatant sexism against No1 - Captain Pike being in despair and considering reigning.

I agree with the sentiment, but what I never see discussed is what the benchmarks are for reaching the proclaimed “equality”.

Often times it seems we are overshooting with attempts to create better societies - or worse shooting off in the wrong direction.

It seems that to whom? To you? To a group? If so, who? And what data lets you speak for them?

As they say, "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". So if you're in a previously favored category, it's only natural that the loss of that boost might seem like overshooting.

The real test, of course, is objective metrics. Looking at who's in Congress or who's running Fortune 500 companies, it seems like we're a fair ways from overshooting. (If you have data otherwise, please do share.)

But if we do overshoot, so what? Overshooting is common in all sorts of systems as they self-correct. The important thing to me seems to be reducing the magnitude of the swings as we converge on a new norm. Given that the previously baseline is a couple millennia of violent gender oppression, seems like we're certain to do better than that.

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