Why Loving the Alien Doesn't Quite Do It For Captain James T. Kirk

Kirk points out to Shahna where his one true love lies ...

It's often said that many perverts are fans of Star Trek and, having just watched several episodes from the original series, I can well imagine that to be the case. For one thing, female crew members aboard the Enterprise dress in a provocative manner designed to excite fetishists and inspire thoughts of lust in space.

And, for another, in the figure of Captain James T. Kirk as played by William Shatner, perverts surely recognise one of their own; a polyamorous exophile who behaves like an intergalactic sex fiend, cruising from planet to planet and playing with the affections of an assortment of nubile lovelies, before beaming up and flying off at warp speed, permanent smirk on face. 

Kirk's inability or refusal to form meaningful, long-term relationships with women is seen by some as a sure sign of misogyny, or, indeed, psychopathology. But it could just be that his heart lies elsewhere; not with Mr. Spock - as fantasised in often explicit homoerotic fan fiction - but to his beloved starship.

It's the Enterprise that is the real object of his desire and his single great obsession, providing what Ellen Ladowsky laughably describes as "a non-human, inanimate detour for evading anxieties belonging to genuine intimacy".

Nothing and no one can come between Jim and NCC-1701: Deela, Queen of the Scalosians, Marta, the green-skinned Orion seductress, and Shahna, the Triskelion slave girl with her big hair and silver bondage outfit, each provide a very pleasant distraction.

But loving the alien just doesn't quite do it for Kirk; a man who needs to feel the throb of powerful engines and experience the thrill of firing photon torpedoes; whose greatest joy lies in commanding a spacecraft and exploring strange new worlds of desire, seeking out new and unusual ways of loving, and boldly going where no man has gone before ...

See: Ellen Ladowsky, 'Pedophilia and Star Trek', HuffPost, (Aug 18, 2005 - updated May 25, 2011).

Note: Deela, played by Kathie Browne, appears in season 3, episode 11, entitled 'Wink of an Eye'; Marta, played by Yvonne Craig (better known as Batgirl), appears in season 3, episode 14, entitled 'Whom Gods Destroy'; and Shahna, played by Angelique Pettyjohn, appears in season 2, episode 16, entitled 'The Gamesters of Triskelion'.

Added punk bonus: Spizzenergi - Where's Captain Kirk?

Rough Trade, (1979)

 

Loving the Alien (Notes on Exophilia)

Dream-sketch by Zena
(untitled, undated)

As Roland Barthes once pointed out, the art of love has no history. And so there's no progress in pleasures - nothing but mutations and perverse deviations. So it can't be said that exophilia is simply an unearthly development of xenophilia; loving the alien is not merely a substitute for loving foreigners.

Rather, it's a unique form of desire that deserves to be considered in its own right, even if its devotees share traits with other paraphiles who have a penchant for inhuman and non-human lovers and long for a sexual experience that is truly out of this world (what the journalist Annalee Newitz charmingly describes as an alien fuckfest).   

What, then, is exophilia, in essence, if you will ...?

Obviously, such a question is difficult - perhaps impossible - to answer; who can truly say what love is (particularly forms of love that are by their very nature queer and which often involve extreme as well as abnormal activities)? 

However, for those who imagine the phenomenon of alien abduction to involve human test subjects being taken secretly and against their will by extraterrestrial biological entities in order to be experimented upon in ways that include a non-consensual sexual component, I suppose exophilia might be said to be primarily a sci-fi rape fantasy or close encounter of the kinky kind. 

Procedures such as vaginal and anal probing, the collection of semen and harvesting of ova, etc. all speak of medical fetish transplanted out of the lab or hospital and projected into the still more sterile and even more hi-tech environment of a spacecraft. It's intergalactic masochism in which submission is made to an alien overlord rather than a woman in furs.            

Of course, not all exophiles are so passive in their pleasures; some dream of violently penetrating alien bodies and inflicting a maximum amount of pain and suffering upon creatures from outer-space ...

Supervert, for example, is the author of a philosophically-informed, pornographic work entitled Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, in which the protagonist, Mercury de Sade, is a serial-killer looking to make contact with EBEs - not to befriend them, learn from them, or submit to them; but so that he might rape, torture and murder them. 

It's a deeply unpleasant read. But it's also a necessary counternarrative to the moral idealism of Star Trek in which humans and non-humans all rub along together in a kind of rainbow alliance; or, again to paraphrase Annalee Newitz, the playful cosmic permissiveness of Barbarella in which everyone fucks, but no one is ever fucked-up or fucked-over.                    


Notes

Those interested in knowing more about Supervert's Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish (2001) can click here. Or, to read a sample chapter, here. 

Those interested in reading Annalee Newitz's review of the above as it appears on AlterNet (18 Aug 2002), can click here. 

This post was inspired by (and is dedicated to) Zena, who provided the lovely illustration above.