Subject: Socially conservative in a 23rd century setting.
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Posted on: 2014-02-20 08:47:00 UTC

I'll try not to repeat this in the future (the Thought Police-y thing) but...

Star Trek is set in a setting where women are allowed to do whatever they want. It is a triumph of the progressive feminist agenda which has discarded gender roles and the idea that women should aspire only to marriage and childbearing. Even nowadays that idea is still ingrained in modern society as female politicans (especially in the US) are either branded with or exploit the concept of motherhood versus career.

In a setting where Seraphina should have had the choice and a family support base to pursue her dreams of Starfleet we have her mother, Mrs Jones, who seems to only be allowing her daughter to go to Starfleet Academy to find a man to marry and have children with. This is antithetical to the ideals of Star Trek.

She gets really bad in the chapters after the ones we covered, but basically all we (me, Intel, Dawn, and Hermione) got was that this seemingly benign characterisation was actually malicious to the progressive setting that Star Trek is supposed to take place in.

That being said, I wasn't intending to thought police anyone, and I apologise if that seemed to be the case. This is probably one of the reasons why this mission felt like a feminist lens on the fic -- perhaps there are, indeed, people in the 23rd century who cling to those outdated notions, but the fact that it's so prominently displayed and portrayed as not as problematic as it should be (just like the issues of consent in the fic)... just didn't mesh with the intent of Star Trek.

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