scorpiodragon

lanning gave a wonderful heads up to this very awesome post about ST: XI and it got me to thinking about all the reasons I was drawn to sci-fi as a kid.

When I was a girl I never wanted to be the Bond girl I wanted to be James Bond or even better Q, they got to do the cool shit. When I watched Star Trek: TOS, I wanted to be like Spock intelligent, calm and able to conduct myself with a poise you couldn’t imagine. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t have or be any of these things because I was a girl or because I was black.

I never focused on color when I watched television because I was always more engrossed in the stories being told, but you can’t help but notice when the screen in front of you lacks faces similar to your own or roles for women not being as strong as those given to men in the mainstream.

I gravitated to sci-fi, fantasy and comic books when I was younger because of the amount strong women that peppered the medium. In sci-fi you have women who are strong and you have men who are comfortable with it, the ones who aren’t usually die or get their asses kicked.

Seeing strong women, regardless of whether they were in relationships or not, or what color they were made me feel better as girl growing up in the late 80's and 90's since the two main TV characters for teenage and preteen girls to look up to were Carol Seaver and Mallory Keaton, an insecure bookworm who would pretend to be dumb to get boys and a girl who wasn’t very smart at all. Then you had the classic teen movies where the hot popular girl dates a jerk who is a bully but because he’s physically attractive and plays some sport (they always play a sport don’t they) it’s alright.

Family Matters used to piss me off because you had Laura who would date attractive assholes with Steve Urkle, who, wasn’t the best looking guy but who was a good guy at heart, waiting in the wings. I got tired of the mainstream crap that was being spoon fed and went elsewhere for my TV fun.

And yes, there is still a sea of faces that don’t resemble mine but the fact that the women are more then someone’s wife or girlfriend in the hit show or blockbuster meant so much more to me growing up then you can imagine.

There’s something about growing up on a diet of sci-fi that gives a girl a little more zing when she deals with the world then one who doesn’t. In sci-fi I felt like a saw better balance in the way both men and women were portrayed that has carried through into the real world for me. The line between the ingénue and the bitch isn’t always clear cut. You have women who are fighters, mothers, lovers and anything else you can think of and even though you’re seeing them in a some type of outer space or otherworldly setting its still way closer to reality then the what was being handed down in the mainstream.