Shelley Winters (left) advised her roommate and sister-starlet Marilyn Monroe in the 1940s how to assume the cheesecake look: tilt your chin up, cast your eyes down, (or chin down, eyes up), and part your lips slightly.__________________________
The physical blind spot is on the retina (on the back of our eyeballs), where the optic nerve passes through. This spot lacks any light receptors necessary for vision. Because our brain fills in the missing image, we don't realize we're not seeing something.
Psychological blind spots are gaps in our mental vision we don't even know we have. Star Trek's view of women is a textbook case for demonstrating these, as Donald Rumsfeld called them, "unknown unknowns."
Star Trek set out to challenge social stereotypes, and they did pretty well for the time pushing the boundaries of race and nationality.
Kirk and Uhura's kiss, for instance, is the first interracial kiss on fiction TV, which counts even though aliens made them do it. Star Trek used a bunch of classic Grade-B-movie tricks like that, a la film director Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows," etc.), to fly under the censor's radar.
But the makers didn't question the stereotypes that fell in their own blind spots, and it seems the collective blind spot where women were concerned was enormous.
Long story short: look at those ridiculous uniforms the women crew of the Enterprise wear. Doesn't all that airtight polyester scream, "guaranteed yeast-infection"?
But, boy, does the show mess around with gender where men are concerned. It's a big part of the fun.
Let's start with those high-heeled boots the starship's men wear.
Anything that destabilizes the body and elevates the rump, like high heels do, accentuates vulnerability and sexual receptivity, which is traditionally what sexy clothes for women, not men, do.
OK, cowboys wear boots with high heels, but that's to hold their feet in the stirrups.
Star Trek boots look like a version of men's flamenco boots* (left). Wikipedia comments that male dance shoes with Cuban heels are "not considered effeminate." Maybe not in Seville, but when you have to tell a North American audience that something is not effeminate...well, 'nuff said.
I got thinking about the S-T boots when Captain Kirk does not wear them in "Arena."
In that episode, he has to climb lots of rocks (real rocks! not those spray-painted styrofoam jobs), as he evades the enemy lizard captain.
I can imagine Mr. Shatner (or the insurers) insisting he not risk twisting his ankle in the usual boots. He wears instead what look like black leather high-top tennies.
So why are unsafe boots standard Starfleet issue, except that they are considered cute in the 23rd century?
And speaking of cute, the biggest gender-bender is the captain himself.
He's all manly and decisive, sure, but why does he wear eye liner? I don't know, but I like it--it makes him look pretty.
Spock wears blue eyeshadow, true, but he is never girly.
But girly? How 'bout the way Kirk sits in his captain's chair, legs crossed tight, thighs closed? Manly men in the 20th century were supposed to rest their ankles across their knees, thighs open.
Less obvious is one of the most feminine things Kirk does:
he parts his lips slightly, like Shelley Winters. The look is more about being kissed than kissing.
In fact, Shatner reminds me of Winters.
Don't think The Poseidon Adventure (or priceline.com)--look at Winters when she's young.
Both actors, when young, had a ripe, sexy fleshiness that promised an overblown-rose old age.
(The type for whom temptation came covered in whipped cream.)
There's a whole realm of Star Trek fandom--slash--that explores a relationship between Kirk and Spock as lovers.
That's not what I'm talking about here.
Kirk and Spock make goo-goo eyes at each other, and they're obviously crazy about each other. But whether or not they fuck doesn't really matter; it's beside the point. Gender and eroticism are not the same as sex.
No, I just think that by the 23rd century, men get to wear high heels and eye-liner, sit like sissies, and make pouty, kissy faces at other guys if they want--and also beat the hell out of giant killer reptiles. Who they go to bed with is a separate matter.
That's a future I'd sign up for. But not if women are still wearing pantyhose to work.
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[Update] I'm glad I hadn't read Mark Simpson's hilarious article "Captain Kirk's Bulging Trousers" before I wrote this, because I wouldn't have bothered, when someone else had summed up Kirk as, among other things, a "rug-wearing bisexual WASP jock captain."
But he missed the Shelley Winters connection, and I still think that's worth pointing out.
*August 16, 2010: I posted "Tight Trousers and High Heels", about the evolution of the Star Trek high-heeled men's boot.
