#Kirk drift

[vasquez-rocks]

my hot take is that jadzia dax is everything people assume kirk is. a bon vivant verging on a hedonist. a scrappy fighter. a playboy with like twelve sex partners on every planet, starbase, and science outpost in the quadrant. loyal to her friends to the death. always like a LITTLE drunk. in command. drawn as if by fate to an emo alien who's traumatized and repressed and has a lovely baritone. a top

[jennelikejennay]

I feel like people who write off Kirk as a "womanizer" don't really draw the lines in the right places.

To me the division is not "man who has a lot of sex | man who doesn't." It's "man who treats women as objects to collect and enjoy | man who genuinely sees women as people and loves them."

It's the post scarcity future, I'm sure there's a vaccine for every STI and we know their birth control works great. There's no reason not to have sex if you want to have it. There shouldn't be shame involved in having lots of it.

But if you watch Kirk carefully, he does not ever treat women like collectibles or disposables. He interacts with them very much as people. Some he flirts with and it's not serious (which they know). Some he's trying to help. Some manipulate him, which sucks. And some he presumably has sex with, but only because he genuinely likes them as people and wants to do this fun thing with them.

None of this fits the idea of a womanizer as a man who takes advantage, pretends to be in love only long enough to score, cheats, gropes his employees, can't see women as people because he's only looking to get as many of them into bed as possible.

So I wish people would stop painting him as that. He's a flirt, he falls for people easily, he's noticeably horny, but he's never disrespectful of women. The writers were very careful about that. They saw the world around them full of that kind of caddish behavior and wrote a man who would never. They show Kirk being tempted by Rand, Marlena, etc., and then making the deliberate choice not to act that way. Because they were making a point about how a hero acts. We even see him give Charlie a lecture about how to treat women, and it's a lesson he personally follows. It's a bit heavy handed if anything.

And then people watch like half of one episode and go "oh yeah ha ha that Kirk, such a sixties womanizer hero, so backward, I'd never watch that." I thought that initially before my recent rewatch, but....that is simply not what's in the show.

[affixjoy]

I’ve been trying to explain Kirk Drift to my dear husband and he just refuses to see it.

This man? You think this man, once described as a stack of books with legs, is a macho man womanizer? No, my love, he is a soft nerd deeply in love with his first officer and his career.

This has the potential to be our biggest pop culture disagreement since the time I told him Star Trek was better than Star Wars.

[discoonthegrass]

Kirk-drift is so prominent. I have a friend who is a SNW fan and she refuses to watch TOS since she heard Kirk is a sexist, racist, narcissistic asshole who only cares about himself. She says that she likes SNW for attempting to redeem his character.... meanwhile TOS Kirk is none of those things and is arguably very similar to his SNW characterization.

I literally don't understand 😭

[daftmooncretin]

if captain kirk irresponsible? why huge baby cow eyes???

if captain kirk bad captain? why-

you thought i was gonna talk about his voluptuous titties fat ass sparkling personality and unflinching moral character ? no.

if you say kirk is a bad captain i will kill you. I will shoot you into space like they did to bill shatty when he wouldn’t shut tf up about going to space

except unlike bill shatty ill send you up naked and defenceless into the vast chasm of space your lungs will explode and your eyes will fall out or some shit (i saw that in a doctor who episode)

kirk drift is getting out of hand and my response to this is ending all kirk drifters and repopulating the earth with kirklophiles such as myself and my dad paul.

[woman-of-many-fandoms]

It's really odd that I seem to find two different takes over how TOS Kirk was when young. In various novels from the 80s he portrayed at a goody two shoes who studies all the time and obeys every rule.

In 'modern' novels, even Shatner's own Star Trek Academy, Kirk is a too smart for his own good bad boy. (not quite AOS level but still)

The autobiography of James T Kirk does break that in that it's a more recent book and Kirk is obedient and smart.

I'm wondering if part of the reason is people think it's better storytelling or that it makes Kirk more interesting that way (maybe Kirk drift though I will argue a lot of how Kirk is known in pop culture didn't come out of a vacuum, feminist my ass). I personally do see TOS Kirk as a goody two shoes even if it is kind of boring.

And (oddly) I am enjoying Shatner novel (no, I know he didn't write it) but I feel it fits more as a AOS Kirk and Spock if Nero never happened. ( I mean they met as a strip club.)

[etherealspacejelly]

this is possibly a stupid take but i think an interesting example of kirk drift is that his line in star trekkin is "we come in peace, shoot to kill"

like. how often did he actually instruct his men to kill people. not that many that i can think of, and it was usually only in dire circumstances. most of the time it was knocking people out with a punch, vulcan nerve pinching them, or stunning them with phasers.

[ichayalovesyou]

Does anyone else feel like SNW was super low-key throwing shade at the Kelvin timeline movies Kirk Drift in that Uhura assumed Kirk was hitting on her when he wasn’t. He just wanted to see if he could be a friend cuz she was visibly stressed out while also being entertained by Spock playing chess?

Cuz I feel like it was, maybe, just a little

[electronickingdomfox]

James Kirk, the Myth: “Captain Kirk is yet another stereotypical macho hero. He’ll jump into action first, ask questions later. And jumping into action means, of course, getting into a fist fight or shooting phasers. As the epitome of masculinity, his sexual exploits across the galaxy are countless; he’s chased after every single woman that popped in the series, leaving behind a trail of broken hearts. But let’s not be too hard on Kirk. He’s a product of his time, and thus reflects the sexism from the 60′s...”

James Kirk, the Man:

Of course, when push comes to shove, Kirk can very well get into a fist fight to protect anyone. And we all love him for it:

[catemons-blog]

Kirk is a skirt chaser my ASS

He literally slapped chekov across the face several times for forcing himself on a girl

[sunless-garden]

I love him, in all his iterations. Our sad little stack of book on legs - it is a tragedy what popular consciousness has done to his reputation.

[cursedtrekposts]

[novelistparty]

learned a new word:

cathexis

noun  Psychoanalysis 

the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially to an unhealthy degree).

from this sentence:

You “know” Star Trek before you ever see Star Trek: a ‘naive’ encounter with such a culturally cathected text is almost impossible, and even if you manage it you probably also have strong ideas about that period of history, era of SF, style of television, etc to contend with. 

from this essay about "Kirk Drift" by Erin Horáková

[nonstandardrepertoire]

"We are always being robbed of our radical inheritance"

in honor of finally watching every Star Trek (yes, all 900 of them, yes all of TAS and ENT and PRO), i re-read "Kirk Drift" and it goes just as hard as i remembered

This is a pretty up-front, surface-level reading of the text that has the generosity to allow an obvious fucking Holocaust metaphor to not be about dicking—that doesn’t do the equivalent of assuming the Nazi officer/Jewish servant girl “love story” in Schindler’s List is authentically romantic and should be celebrated as such. Yet popular reception consistently makes McCoy’s mistake, collapsing plots and emotional drives down into a pablum. But that’s okay and normal because it’s straight pablum. Do you see the incredible violence this way of thinking about sexuality does to relationships, and to stories that include them? The sheer stupidity of it? This conception of sexuality does incredible violence to heterosexual romance, compressing its rich and varied possibilities and significations down to “the many, many seduction [sic] committed by James T. Kirk.”

go read the whole thing here: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-rememberd-kirk-drift/

[booksaresacredspew]

Just read this article about how popular consciousnesses has changed Kirk from a sweet, gentle nerd who is married to his job, into a reckless womanizer, and how it relates to the shifting perceptions of masculinity. Really made me think.

[puddinginthemix]

Reblogging this calls for a link to Erin Horakova's essay on how Kirk in TOS is also sensitive, gentle, thoughtful, and anti-sexist--a man who calls the words "let me help" more powerful than "I love you."

I love Spock I love him soooo much they were like let’s make a character that’s nerdy and a pacifist and a vegetarian and he’s also a mommas boy and a sensitive musician. But he should also be. A straight up Bitch