Seth MacFarlane, Get Off My Ship.

"The Oscars is basically the Kobayashi Maru test."

Yesterday afternoon, Seth MacFarlane spat this sentence into the Twittersphere, and the irony almost murdered me.

MacFarlane's Oscar performance Sunday night has sent ripples of conflict throughout the Internet. Feminist bloggers were sent into paroxysms of rage at his song about the breasts of actresses that have been exposed on screen, his comment sexualizing Quvenzhane Wallis, and other general moments of misogyny, and other people told said feminists to "take a joke" and to let it go because MacFarlane's style of humor is to be crude and offensive.


I fell firmly into the first camp, but I didn't say anything until now, because I found that other bloggers were handling the situation just fine, and signal boosting their work on my fandom blog seemed appropriate enough.

Then I heard about this tweet, and I'm sorry, but what?

MacFarlane's trying to cast himself as an underdog, a good guy up against impossible odds, a regular Captain Kirk.

I call bullshit.

The point of the Kobayashi Maru as a narrative device in Star Trek is that it can be beaten. But it requires self-sacrifice, compassion, and a sense of heroic duty to the larger whole. Spock's referencing the test when he dies makes this almost explicit. The test isn't a romantic notion of being the victim of unfair circumstance -- it's a story of overcoming through cleverness or through sacrifice.

There is no sacrifice in making "humor" at the expense of those already oppressed. There is no cleverness in the perpetuation and acceptance of the social norms that allow for that oppression to exist uncountered.

Beyond that, it's offensive to the idea of Roddenberry's heavily romanticized concept of the future to cast misogyny as the brave little Starfleet cadet up against the Big Bad Kobayashi Maru test. Roddenberry, while the depiction of his future needed work ("Mudd's Women" and "The Turnabout Intruder" in particular being problematic in regards to women), wanted a post-racism, post-sexism, post-classism future, and MacFarlane aping the language and devices of Roddenberry's ideal to cast himself and his sexism as the heroic underdog is fucking gross as hell.

That's all I really have to say on the matter. If I say much more, it'll just devolve into nerd-rage and expletives even more, and I've made my salient points.

-- Shannen