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Kara Thrace: Thirst among equals.

Sci-fi stuff is fucking knocking it out of the shop when it comes to telling me I can achieve what I want in life.

I always switch on the TV to prime time and see a majority of dramas where the main character is a heroic-type guy, or go to see a film where the main character is some badass dude. I watched Luther and The Hour, two of the newest BBC dramas – and I was so bored with the ladies. I fucking love testosteroney dramas, you know, where the main character is renegade, uncompromising, a maverick. But jeez, as a lady who isn’t totally passive, I really want to be the hero someday. There’s just something in me that wants a screen heroine that isn’t totally rubbish (Halle Berry’s Catwoman this means you), and yeah, there are one or two brilliant exceptions to the bad heroine rule (Sharon Stone’s The Quick and the Dead is one of my favourite films). But ladies assume the main role so little, and when they do, the writers (or perhaps we are talking studio execs here) often make them commit hari kari by just neglecting to write them engagingly. I think it’s pretty much everyone’s fault for not expecting more from what we consume.

You know who is expecting more?  The sci fi genre. I’m not a huge sci-fi nerd but hell, sci fi just seems like it assumes that in the future, ladies have being doing badass shit for years. When you’re watching Alien, and Ripley is the only person on the ship that is a capable leader, she just naturally assumes control of the whole thing. It doesn’t seem odd. It doesn’t seem weird. The Alien movies were box office smashes. There is zero resistance to a lady being in charge on screen. When Ripley picks up a flamethrower, it makes perfect sense. Why haven’t we made other movie franchises like this? Why is Ridley Scott one of the only directors who picks up female-led scripts that don’t totally and utterly suck?

In the new Battlestar Galactica, you’ve got a wealth of ladies who are exactly the equal of their male counterparts. Starbuck and Apollo are sparring partners, dogfighting partners, often besting each other alternately; Admiral Adama and the President have constant power struggles that seem evenly balanced; Admiral Cain is as much a mind-fucker as Admiral Adama is. On the ship, women are evenly represented in the officers’ mess, in CIC, and in the engineering bay, and are just as respected. The sexual relationship between Boomer and Chief Tyrol is particularly interesting as their relationship is often predicated by her outranking him: Apollo and Starbuck often also find themselves alternating roles in the power stakes. The only damned thing that seems to separate men from women on Galactica is that ladies happen to be able to gestate a foetus (that can sometimes be half toaster). That’s the way it fucking should be. …I mean, the equality, not the robot baby.

Star Trek: Voyager even put in a little work with Captain Janeway – she’s kind of cool because she’s not your usual young ‘un: usually you get these Seven Of Nine bints in sci-fi who are all tits and no wrinkles, and as soon as you’re past 35 you gone sista.  That’s kind of unfair considering most male actors get to be as grey as Richard Gere and still get to have their wang handled by someone young enough to be their daughter. When I’m an old granny of 60 I wish to be still having the sexy time with men at least half my age. Janeway is totally this beacon of hope. Though by the time she’s 60 she’ll have a voice so croaky she’ll probably sound more like Patrick Moore: I hope to see her hosting a new season of Gamesmaster when this happens.

In his own little way, even Joss Whedon attempted a sci-fi world in which ladies weren’t just an afterthought, though, again, the main character’s very decidedly a dude in Firefly. (A guy who’s so awesome you’d probably get down on all fours and let him rest his boots on you, though.) I guess this is because Whedon got tired of Buffy a bit (so did I – she was a little self-righteous in the end) as Whedon’s some sort of self-professed feminist. My particular favourite moment is Kaylee’s origin story: immediately post-orgasm in the engine room of Serenity with some hunky douchebag, she manages to secure a job as the engineer on the ship. Usually women on screen are punished for their sexual assertiveness. In Firefly, Kaylee dusts herself down and starts getting the Firefly-class ship ready for the Kessel Run. Like it actually matters what her skills are! Meritocracy forever!

A nod of the head should be given to Starship Troopers, a movie I loved so much when I was a kid I snuck in underage to see it twice.  In Starship Troopers, there’s that notorious scene in which everyone in the mess is in the mixed-sex showers. Aside from the questionable things that must have gone down in the shower room late at night, it seemed like it made perfect sense in the context: in my eleven-year-old brain there was something that said to me, “Hey, why don’t we do that? Why are men and women so weird about each other’s bodies? In the future, I bet we won’t give a crap about gender because we’ll just be people.” Curiously naïve, but I was eleven and idealistic (I thought that I was going to marry Dean Cain) so you can excuse my adolescent fantasies. Frankly, I’ve since showered in a mixed-sex shower situation and it’s quite dull: people aren’t as hot as you thought they’d be naked, and there’s a lot less larking around and ‘shower japes’ than there were in Starship Troopers. Mainly I just worried about whether I lathered up shampoo in the correct way. In any case, let’s just ignore the fact that badass Dizzy in Starship Troopers died a love-sick puppy and Denise Richards’ character was a useless screaming damsel: and let’s imagine that Dizzy shot up the alien and married Dougie Houser. I declare it a win for ladies across the globe.

There is something sci-fi’s doing right – more often than other genres – that I kind of wish were coming true sooner. It’s as if we’re slowly willing it to be true. We’re slowly wanting society to get there, we’re exploring the possibilities. I find it exciting and awesome to see this kind of equal opportunity politic go down on screen, even if you disagree that it’s realistic. But when sci-fi writers explain their worlds this way, it kind of highlights a contrast with the way we conduct our world just now. If the examples I’ve given above seem far away from what is happening now, I feel kind of sad about that. Sci fi is set in the future, and so it seems less mental of someone to say, hey, maybe when we’re all equal it’ll be like this eh? But what’s so dangerous about making more modern day dramas where a lady is the main focus?  After all, in all of my everyday dramas, I’m the hero of the story. And it seems realistic to me. Only yesterday, I killed four dinosaurs in Tomb Raider, and then later rescued a timid-looking girl from a sleazy chat-up line in a bar. I should get my own series.