Star Trek: 10 Biggest Takeaways From Open A Channel: A Woman's Trek
Here are just some of the crucial reveals from Nana Visitor's exploration of women in Star Trek
Nana Visitor's book Open A Channel: A Woman's Trek explores the journey that women have been on, navigating the final frontier, from its inception to its most recent iterations. It's a deep dive into the experiences of women throughout the franchise's history.
It is both an easy read, flowing quickly through the years, while also offering some stark depictions of what it was like on set. The Original Series was created in the '60s, so one begins with the expectation that times were worse for women then. Some of the stories support this, while still others remind us that issues continued well into the franchise's newer entries.
This article will highlight some of the revelations from Nana's work, though for the full experience, one should pick up a copy for themselves. It is a doorstopper of a book, ideal for coffee tables and dinner discussions. It is a must-read for all Star Trek fans, though also for those who are fascinated by the history of filmmaking in general.
10. The Original Series: The Difference In Securing Work
From Star Trek's earliest days, there has been a dichotomy of what it represents and the world from which it springs. Roddenberry's version of the future pronounced that women would have equal status to men (unless their name was Janice Lester) and would have full agency.
This was not always the case behind the scenes. Grace Lee Whitney spoke in her autobiography The Longest Trek: My Tour Of The Galaxy about the abuse she suffered at the hands of an unnamed executive, but Nana also highlights some of the marketing for Star Trek, in which Lee Whitney features heavily.
One image circulated to media outlets depicted her scantily clad, though clearly not with any Trek-relevant costume. It was simply a case of using her body to push the show, seemingly at odds with Trek's utopian view of the future.
Tanya Lemani George, who appeared in Wolf In The Fold as Kara, spoke about casting in Hollywood at the time. She claimed that sex was an expectation from many of the men she encountered, though there were those others who were 'good actors', in her words, suggesting that, rife though sexual favours may have been in the 60s, not every male agent subscribed to such actions.