Homepage > Joss Whedon’s Tv Series > Buffy The Vampire Slayer > News > Sci-Fi and Sex - Vote Buffy As The Sexiest Sci-fi TV Show
« Previous : Michelle Trachtenberg - ’Ice Princess’ Movie - Medium Quality Promo Photo
     Next : James Marsters / Spike - Wallpaper By Patrish »

From Scifi.about.com

Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Sci-Fi and Sex - Vote Buffy As The Sexiest Sci-fi TV Show

Friday 31 December 2004, by Webmaster

Click here to vote :

http://scifi.about.com/library/weekly/aa022003.htm

Andromeda prefers black leather and sultry looks. Enterprise has tight uniforms that get stripped off for decontamination chambers. Star Wars and Powerpuff Girls either ignore it, mock it, or villify it. Babylon 5 uses it for laughs. Solaris (2002) gets completely caught up in it, yet says nothing about it. Superheroes get rewarded (chastely) with it. Stargate SG-1 hasn’t got time for the temptations of it. X-Files did it, I think.

When it comes to big-budget, mass-media sci-fi, sex is on display in just about every way — except as an essential aspect of daily life that must undergo radical change (in practice, in culture, in art, in law) when so much else in the world is altered.

As any anthropologist will tell you, sexuality is one of the primary keys to understanding any culture. Look at the cultural distinctions in sexuality throughout the world in 2003, and you’ll get a good idea of how fractured human society really is. In Egypt, young girls are routinely castrated to prevent their enjoyment of sex, and thus their temptation to fornicate or commit adultery. In some Latin American urban societies, young men surgically insert BB-gun pellets into their penises to increase their partners’ pleasure. In some African tribes, nudity is not equated with sexual behavior. In many American states, sodomy is illegal even between married couples, while girls can be legally wed before they’ve reached puberty. Here in New Orleans, flashing your breasts or genitals at Mardi Gras can get you beads. In some Arab nations, it can get you beaten to death.

Sexuality is as fundamental an aspect of society as what we eat, how we work, and whom we worship. And accordingly, the possibilities of sexuality are explored in great depth in sci-fi literature, even in bestsellers and celebrity fic.

* William Gibson’s cyberpunk world describes sex as a highly profitable commerce in a virtual age. People wanting some quick cash can rent out their bodies without their minds as "Meat puppets," holographic sex shows are well-attended performance art, and a few bucks can get you all the virtual sex you can stand.
* Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World describes a population completely controlled by the state, including the forbidding of the unauthorized "productive" exchange of bodily fluids. Citizens instead masturbate and have their reproductive samples collected for the labs.
* In Solaris, Stanislaw Lem uses sexuality between a man and the image of his dead wife as a symbol of desperation and the cruelty of irrevocable loss. The act of discovery itself seems to have a sexual component.
* William Shatner’s Tek War books ease the pain of couples’ separation through virtual sex.
* Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness posits an entire world of androgynous people, in which sexuality (during "kemmer") plays key social and political roles. After all, "The King was pregnant."

Of course, without a few thousand more words, it’s hard to demonstrate that sexuality isn’t simply mentioned in these books, but truly plays central roles in plot, theme, character development and, of course, spectacle. You’ll have to take my word for it, or read the books for yourself. By contrast, sci-fi in mass-market TV and film might raise some of these titillating possibilities — we get plenty of human sexuality that’s just like our own, and we get plenty of weird alien sex things to make us go "ew" — but inevitably ignores their repercussions.

Take the whole Star Trek holographic sex thing. We certainly hear about it often enough. Quark rents holosuites by the hour, Riker goes for Holodeck 2 when an unavailable woman gets him in the mood, and Janeway has a hologram for a boyfriend. But not once on any of the episodes have we gotten any discussion of just what this extremely free, safe and fake version of the sex does to the general perception of sex. Are there still prostitutes in worlds with holograms? Do some religions or societies ban it as a mockery of sex? Do they teach holographic sex education in classrooms? Are people still considered virgins if they’ve only had holographic sex? Is it considered adultery if you’re married and do it with a hologram? What if the hologram is of your spouse? Since people don’t seem embarrassed by it, are other forms of masturbation more acceptable as well?

So the difference here isn’t just a question of television’s PG-13 limitations, nor simply a mass-media let’s-not-offend-anyone prudery. By offering us sexual scenarios and then never following them up, by using sex for laughs and villainy, sci-fi on TV and film offers us a sexuality that is relentlessly immature, and likely to get even more so.

Take a look at the biggest sci-fi moneymaker ever: the Star Wars franchise. Children in this galaxy far, far away seem to be delivered by the stork. Luke is in love with Leia for years without doing anything to cause discomfort when he finds out she’s his sister. Nor is there any sign the princess and Han do more than kiss twice. In Jabba’s Hideaway, however, sex slaves dance around in bikinis and get eaten by monsters when they don’t put out in. Jedis, of course, must be celibate, so Anakin and Amidala are doomed by their mutual lust/love. The only example of a "happy couple" is Owen Lars and Beru Whitesun, who never touch each other, end up childless, and get burned to death by stormtroopers.

Alien Nation probably comes the closest to giving us an adult treatment of sci-fi (alien & alien/human) sexuality. Tenctonese "Newcomers" hum along erogenous zones as foreplay, and poor Matt has to go to class to learn how to love Kathy without getting injured. Yet throughout the show sexuality is so frequently being used as a lesson that the audience begins to feel they’re in Tolerance College. Ultimately, we’re not watching adults behave, we’re being shown how adults should behave. Now go brush your teeth.

Even such "mature audience" shows as The X-Files lose ground when it comes to sex. Mulder has sex once on the show (excluding, I think, Scully), and the woman turns out to be a vampire. One group of aliens (?) has great sexual mojo, so naturally they use it to sleep with strangers and then kill them so they can change gender. Another predator uses chatrooms and promises of sexual relations as a lure for overweight women so he can get them alone and eat them. Sexuality is only mentioned in Mulder or Scully’s family when questions are raised about adultery. When Cancer Man manipulates Scully, he makes her vulnerable by putting her in a revealing gown that renders her strangely helpless.

Contrasted to all this bad sex is the "true love" between Mulder and Scully which, until those last couple of bizarro seasons, is steadfastly sexless. Of course, when sex is introduced between them, it’s to make a baby.

But for the best example of a show that isn’t afraid of dealing with "issues" unless they’re sexual — at which point the show gains the maturity level of a thirteen-year-old boy — we have Enterprise. To understand just how far Star Trek has fallen, consider the pro-sex sensibilities of Star Trek: The Original Series. While today we tend to comment primarily on Kirk’s rampant libido, a more important part of the show’s sexual message wasn’t that Kirk was randy, but that the women who joined him in his sexuality weren’t to be treated like whores. On the contrary, a woman could want to sleep with him, enjoy sleeping with him, and talk about sleeping with him and still be a fine, upstanding woman. Sure, they tended to die and stuff, but they weren’t vilified. For the 1960s, this was a pretty revolutionary idea.

By contrast, and despite initial signs that sexuality would play a greater role on the show than it did in VOY, DS9, and TNG, Enterprise has given us little but "giggle and jiggle" sex meant to make us smirk at skin and laugh at sex for being so "ooky." Tucker gets pregnant, and the Klingons chortle so hard they almost pee on themselves. Archer and T’Pol get tied up together, and he ends up with her breasts in his face. When poor T’Pol is sexually attracted to a Vulcan male, he mind-rapes her. The only person who’s had sex for sure on the show is Hoshi, who "gets some" on Risa as a joke against the poor men, who don’t. In fact, when Tucker and Reed go to Risa, they end up getting lured into the basement by two beautiful women who turn out to be male alien muggers in disguise.

There are some scattered efforts to do better, but then writers inevitably take refuge behind comfortable and distancing symbols, such as the way vampires kinda represent adolescent fears of sexual power on Buffy, mind-melds sorta stand for gay sex in the recent Enterprise episode "Stigma," and the rape-like phallic penetration of Goa’uld symbiotes on Stargate SG-1 demonstrates...uh, rape-like penetration.

Now, I’m all for symbols. My favorite thing about sci-fi is its allegorical ability to provide social commentary. But a comment is made on its own when serious treatment of sex is only allowed if no one can be 100% certain what’s "really" going on. Sexual symbols can too easily be reduced to nothing but innuendo, and as soon as something is an allegory, the audience can ignore it if they choose.

The obvious argument against treating sex more seriously is that it’s not a suitable subject (for whatever reasons) for TV and film below an R rating. But the problem is that sex is a subject on mass-market sci-fi drama: a subject of derision, a subject of mockery, a subject of villainy. At least if such sci-fi just ignored sex, it would be a case of no harm, no foul. But the message we’re definitely getting is that the future attitude towards sex matches what you find in today’s junior highs. It’s the most telling indicator that the intended audience for mass-market sci-fi is getting younger and younger, and that those outside the target demographic are getting...well...screwed.

So much for the future of sex. As for the future of sci-fi, as studios lust after the money kids will shell out to see movies over and over, and advertisers desire younger affluent male viewers, the next sci-fi hit may well be cast with nothing but men whose response to meeting alien females is finger-pointing and snickers about "those boob thingies."

Enjoy.


2 Forum messages