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Re: TOS S1: Space Seed

@ Trish,

I can see that feminist critique, but even by the 1950's America had entered an age of become self-aware of it's own inherited tendencies, and was able to poke fun at them while recognizing that things were changing whether people liked it or not. I know that feminism still had some ways to go in the 60's, but you can take a show like The Honeymooners from the 50's as a good example of the realization that many men still wanted to act out the "I'm king of the castle" role while knowing on another level that the wife in the family was in fact not subservient to him. "Right in the kisser" and "You're going to the moon" were both jokes on the faux-nostalgia of when the husband was utterly dominant in every way. By the early 70's you have All in the Family continuing the portrayal of the dominant domestic man as being a spent force, utterly defeated by the new age of both female and youth empowerment. The man in this case who still acts like a savage ends up looking more like a fool than like a threat.

Now this is TV, and surely in real domestic life things were often still an unfortunate throwback to earlier times. But insofar as the public-facing social causes are often portrayed through popular media, I don't think by 1966 there was still a public perception that was accepted that the typical man-woman relationship is that the man is utterly dominant and the woman is his footstool. Sure, there were cultural tropes of playing at the man being dominant, but that's different from being actually dominant. To this day there are quasi-theatrical playings out of the man being the king of the house, but it's just playacting, not an actual adversarial situation (not most of the time, anyhow).

So I guess I disagree that people would have seen the Khan/McGivers relationship as essentially similar to typical American relationships of the mid-60's. I think the Khan image (the mighty conqueror) was a significant throwback even at that time, completely inverting the emerging mentality of the progressive movements in the 60's. Sure, you could no doubt find regressive communities and relationships out there (especially in rural areas, which are typically decades behind metropolitan cities), but I think the idea of a woman idealizing a dictator would have been nearly as alien to a 1966 American woman as it is to people today.

I know you were citing a possible objection, rather perhaps than making one yourself, but personally I don't see it. The thrall of serving a great man like a Julius Caesar seems to me to me a cultural divide of centuries, not decades.