After asking the same question about Sulu and having it go horribly awry, the StarTrek.com Facebook page decided to pull it again with Yar.
And it wasn’t quite as shocking, but it was hugely depressing. The vast majority of commenters described her as “dead”, followed by references to her having sex with Data in “The Naked Now”, and “butch” or other more offensive references to her character being a lesbian.
Examples after the jump (Trigger Warning for sexist comments and rape jokes):
These are all from the top 200 comments as of 7:45 p.m. Pacific on August 21.
Once in a while, among all this, you’d get references to the rape-gangs on Yar’s homeworld. And what did shock me was no one called them out, and a few people even hit “like”.
One fan summed it up well in her response (I don’t know you Amy, but thanks!):
The likes her post got show there is a decent number of fans on the page who are disturbed by stuff like this. But unfortunately a bunch of the comments she got in response were fans being defensive against what they saw as political correctness run amok…
Yeah, calling someone irritating is totally the same as calling them “droidfucker” or “space dyke” or joking about them being raped.
Or because straw feminists:
There was also the kind of mansplaining that actually kind of proved the author’s original point:
Thanks to cafekreludor for letting me continue using her “Shit Trekkies Say on Facebook” title! I’m going to keep documenting examples like this to keep raising awareness of the toxic sexism (and racism and homophobia) that still exists in some of our fan spaces, until we can figure out a way to mobilize a critical mass of that Facebook page’s 3.3 million fans to push for positive change.
