“I’m not going to do it when there are 165 people whose lives I have to protect. There’s no time to jump into the sack. Plus, I don’t want girls to see Captain Janeway drop her knickers.”
— Kate Mulgrew (People Magazine, 9/22/97)
But why not? Why doesn’t she want girls to see an adult woman enjoying sex? I have no problem with the first part of Kate’s statement, but the second plays into so much institutionalized misogyny it’s infuriating. What’s wrong with girls seeing a woman who enjoys sex? What’s wrong with girls understanding, by inference, that it’s okay to enjoy sex? Girls had seen Captain Kirk, who was no misogynist no matter what JJ Abrams thinks, bed lots and lots of women. What was wrong with Janeway doing the same – Janeway who held the same position, but who was in fact responsible for fewer lives than Kirk?
Nothing is wrong with it…unless you hold a patriarchical double standard that leads you to believe it’s okay for a man to sow his oats, but it’s wrong and dirty for a woman to do the same.
This is why I find Kate, and Janeway, so problematic sometimes. She was the first woman to hold the big chair in a Trek series, but she did it in a way that feeds right into the misogyny and sexism of this century rather than showing us a better paradigm for the future.
Having a relationship on that ship, or a series of them planetside, would have made Janeway more human. And while I wanted her to be strong and smart and fierce and all the things she was, as a twenty-something viewer, I needed her to be human. More than anything, I needed her to be human.
Just my opinion, of course. Your mileage may vary.
When the show was airing, the fact that Janeway never really had sex and that her relationship with Chakotay or whomever was never fully developed didn’t bother me. As I watch the show again, when I’m in my 40s, it does. I find Kate/Janeways attitude so frustrating. I probably can’t articulate it better than was is said above.
There is so much interesting social commentaty that can be discussed here, but I don’t find Janeway that far out of the world in which she lives.
The Federation and Starfleet like to pretend they’ve overcome socioeconomic class, race, gender, sexuality, xenophobia issues, yet we still see rampant evidence to the contrary.
Just like in our modern world, people like to say we’re post-racial despite the fact that racism is still a huge problem.
There is still a lot of privilege being cis, white, masculine, human-looking humanoid in the 24th century. It makes sense that Janeway would have picked up on this social subtext and known that people still view women as weak and overly emotional, that having sex with another crew member would denigrate her status *specifically because she’s a woman in a leadership position*. There is still a scripted gender role associated, and as much as she tries to break it down, she has to live by it too in order to survive.
We like to pretend that the 24th century is so much better off than the 20th and 21st, but we don’t really have much evidence of that. They’ve made some progress, obviously, but it is far from the utopia it’s often made to be. It’s a weird mix of communist, socialist, and neoliberal capitalist, rife with oppression and negatives that are washed over instead of worked through.
I would *love* a series set in the 29th century that really does reimagine the world, that takes capitalism and sexuality and gender and twists them and plays with them, with identity itself so that we can see what a totally different world it would be if these things no longer had the power society gives them.
What is identity when it doesn’t rest on square boxes of binary understanding with value markers attached? How does that impact individuals, small groups, society as a whole?
If power is viewed and weilded so differently, so much more carefully, how does it change our world?
It doesn’t bother me that Kate Mulgrew said this about a fantastically important middle-aged feminist role model character in the 1990s.
Did it reinforce gender stereotypes and the bad old double standard of sexual mores? Yes, of course it did.
Would Mulgrew agreeing to let Janeway have sex in canon have undermined those stereotypes? Not necessarily. In fact, I’d say almost certainly not.
Look what TPTB did mid-series by creating the character of Seven of Nine as a blonde bombshell with huge breasts in skin-tight spandex and high heels. There was literally nothing about that character that required that physical portrayal. It was a decision driven entirely by a deliberate and overt desire to attract more young male viewers.
Time and time again over the run of the series, that audience was catered to. Not the women and girls to whom Kathryn Janeway was so crucially important. To the demographic that already viewed her with disdain and resentment.
I wouldn’t trust those writers, directors, and producers to give a middle-aged woman character in a position of respected authority a sexual relationship that didn’t degrade her for the male gaze. Obviously, neither did Kate Mulgrew – and she knew her industry far better than I ever will.
In the cultural language of Hollywood – and things haven’t changed all that much in twenty years, either on screen or behind the scenes (see the #metoo movement) – a woman’s authority and her sexuality are inversely related. In that grammar of gendered bodies and relationships, female sexuality exists in service to male gratification, the male gaze. Not to women’s empowerment and freedom, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.
They would never have let Kathryn Janeway simply enjoy sex. They would have had to punish her, somehow, for having sex – either directly with a disease or socially with loss of respect or some manufactured crisis putting the ship’s safety at risk because she dared give her libido a little breathing room. Or they would have subordinated her sexual expression to her male partner’s needs and desires. Or gotten her pregnant accidentally with an issue-of-the-week plotline. Or subjected her to sexual assault so her male partner could prove his virility and greater strength by rescuing her. The range of tropes for female sexuality in that era was narrow and predictable and none of them was going to end with our beloved Captain Janeway happily screwing her way consequence-free across the galaxy.
So no, I’m not disappointed that Kate Mulgrew put a chastity belt on her character. I’m disgusted, as I always have been, with the misogynistic sexual and political culture that drove that decision. But I understand it and respect it, and quite frankly, I applaud it. Because when I imagine what Captain Janeway with a sex life might have been subjected to by the frat-boy misogynists who ran the show, I’m pretty sure we owe Kate Mulgrew our thanks, not our criticism.
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