the delphic expanse

Totally hypothetical situation: T'Pol and kalifee

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Re: Totally hypothetical situation: T'Pol and kalifee

Postby Honeybee » Fri Apr 22, 2011 6:44 pm

I mean, if a human would say "I have this biological drive that makes me to have sex - I have to, even when it means taken her by force" so it was beyond my control - we wouldn't accept that. We would arrest him for being a rapist or wanting to neuter him.
And as for the custom that men fight to the death to marry a woman, we all are very glad that not in our culture.


Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, Vulcans probably developed rituals so that that pon farr induced rape was rarity. However, it's still a flaw in their culture that it could exist at all. I've always thought the blackmail that Koss lays on T'Pol in Home skirts very close to rape, if you look at it in the context of what would be expected during pon farr.

But even in Amok Time, Spock says the Vulcans are ashamed of this. That would indicate that they know it's a dark element of their society.

The people who think a pon farr induced rape would be acceptable are out of their minds. I loved Crystalswolf's solution, however, of Vulcan priestesses existing to satisfy pon farr in males who do not have a mate. That makes perfect sense.
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Re: Totally hypothetical situation: T'Pol and kalifee

Postby Aquarius » Sat Apr 23, 2011 3:02 pm

I have to confess that, when I posed the question, rape wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

As T'Pol advised her crew so often, especially during the first season, one must be careful about judging another culture through the lens of one's own. (Hear me out before you start throwing stuff at me.) What's barbaric to us makes perfect sense to another culture. That doesn't make it right, but there *is* an issue of context/frame of reference that's often missing when we do such a thing. I'm envisioning a situation like the white settlers converting the "savage" Native Americans -- the latter of whom often had it more together than The Man who took it upon himself to tell them what to do. Just saying.

As humans, we do not, in fact, have a biological drive that forces us to mate or die. So we have no frame of reference, no room to judge an entire species, if such a species was real. What would be an aberration in our society is THEIR every day life that they have to deal with, once every seven years for everyone.

That said, it's reasonable to assume that the customs and rituals that contemporary Vulcans observe are a direct result of having to cope with this biological drive. Marriages are arranged to ensure the availability of a partner. Telepathic bonds are forged at betrothal in order to guarantee that the partners can find each other when the time comes. Many "enlightened" cultures here frown on arranged marriage as barbaric, but if humans were loose sexual cannons every seven years, we may instead have the world view that this is a very practical thing to do, in order to protect people from the very rape scenarios we find atrocious.

My quibble, and this is part of why I spelled out the alternate "Home" scenario the way I did,is that T'Pol didn't have an out, except to declare a fight to the death between her suitors. Now, again, to our Western, human sensibilities, this is outrageous, and since Vulcans are not real there's no reason for us to believe otherwise. But what if they were real, having to deal with these biological problems and the social issues that come with said biology? Again, it may be considered necessary to maintain measures that make sure most people stick with the mates that are chosen for them, because if you suddenly go lax and let everyone out of their arrangements at the drop of a dime, then you have the same crimes and social issues you would have if you didn't have these customs and rituals in the first place. So even on technologically-advanced, "enlightened" Vulcan, making a challenge to the death the only way out could be viewed as very necessary, a way of telling the parties involved that they better be pretty damn sure about wanting out of the arrangement, and making sure that only a minority of extreme cases create situations that disrupt the delicate balance. Furthermore, the death of the loser quite "logically" solves the problem of oh snap, now what do we do to get them a mate? I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying that in a weird kind of way, it makes sense if you take yourself out of an individualistic, Western human mindset and put yourself into the pluralistic mindset of someone who has to deal with these issues and the consequences of upsetting the balance that's been established for thousands of years. What we consider a flaw in their society, they may consider to be the best anyone can do under the circumstances.

However -- HOWEVER -- I am still a human woman of Western culture...which is why I conceived of T'Pol fighting for her own way out. I can buy bonds and pre-arranged marriages as a means of coping with a very unique problem that my society and I have no frame of reference for. It's the part of me that believes in equality among the sexes that balks at the idea that T'Pol would have to send her suitor in to fight for her in order for her to get out of the arrangement. What if there wasn't another man in the picture and she just didn't want to be married? As Vulcan law currently stands, she isn't allowed to take responsibility for herself or her own situation. Vulcan law forces her to be married to *someone*, hell or high water. But again, am I really qualified to judge this, being a product of an individualistic society vs. a pluralistic one? As the person I am, the idea makes my skin crawl...but what if I had grown up differently, with problems and issues I don't have now? No, I don't idealize Vulcan culture, but I'm not going to fool myself into looking for absolutes in right or wrong here. No solution is necessarily going to be perfect.

I truly believe that prior to her assignment on Enterprise, T'Pol would've gone home and got married. At the end of the day, she is a creature of duty -- hence her marrying Koss at the end of "Home" in order to help her mother.

It's a hard moral issue to tackle, one that doesn't have an easy answer. But the question wasn't really meant to go *that* deep. More like, in an alternate reality, if T'Pol had declared the challenge, what would happen? What would it take to shift T'Pol's dramatic need from helping her mother to being with Trip? How would such a thing affect the characters involved? That kind of thing.
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Re: Totally hypothetical situation: T'Pol and kalifee

Postby panyasan » Sat Apr 23, 2011 3:53 pm

I agree with your position, Aquarius. We are dealing with an alien culture, with people that through their biology and history have taken paths that sounds strange to us, but are from a Vulcan point of view perfectly logical.

Personally, I believe that most Vulcan have a strong moral code and that they struggle in daily live to deal with the problems their biology gives them at the best way possible. This is one of the reason I love Vulcans and T''Pol so much. The choices aren't easy made and my remark was that in my opinion your outline reflected that sentiment. You had thought about the implications and impact of kalifee for both Trip and T'Pol.
I only wanted to say that works better for me then accepting everything Vulcan as "normal" for lack of better words (my English is failing here). I was thinking of a discussion I have read in which some one indicated that T'Pol should have married Koss "because it was the Vulcan way." I am sorry if I wasn't clear before and hope I make sense.
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Re: Totally hypothetical situation: T'Pol and kalifee

Postby Honeybee » Sat Apr 23, 2011 4:06 pm

I agree with everything you say, Aquarius, it is an alien culture and it should be viewed as such. And I wasn't really responded to your outline as much as panyasan's comment.

Yet, I've still always seen it as a rather odious aspect of Vulcan culture that women are basically given three ugly choices: submit, risk the life of a champion or risk their own life (which if we take the Voyager episode as a guide, is rare). T'Pol in Home has, although, unbeknown to her, bonded with another and it just strikes me as morally indefensible to put her in a position to choose submission or violence, and I think the Vulcans know this - Spock alludes to it in Amok Time. They don't advertise this element of their society because they are ashamed. I think that the logical elements of Vulcan society have dealt with this contradiction through social pressure. You simply married who you were supposed to and avoided this. People in T'Pol's (and T'Pring's) situation must have been very rare. So rare, that Koss and T'Les have no comprehension of what she is going through - until later.

I also maintain that had anyone known a bond existed between TnT, that that could very well have given her a legal out. Her mother, as a Syrannite, certainly would have respected the bond.

But see, I like this imperfection in Vulcan society from a dramatic point of view. It indicates just how much they needed Surak, and just how dangerous they could be without logic.
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Re: Totally hypothetical situation: T'Pol and kalifee

Postby Aquarius » Sat Apr 23, 2011 7:08 pm

It's all good, Honeybee and panyasan. I just wanted to make sure my question wasn't causing a flashback to that particularly nasty forum grenade. ;)
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Re: Totally hypothetical situation: T'Pol and kalifee

Postby THE Rigil Kent » Fri May 20, 2011 11:54 am

Really, really late to this game, but I figured I'd chime in.
Aquarius wrote:So, I'm wondering, what if, in a parallel universe somewhere, T'Pol turns left instead of right and declares the kalifee?

Truthfully, the only way I can see this happening is if T'Les realizes the enormity of her error - perhaps after the scene where she talks to Trip and admires him in her dead husband's clothes - and then promptly makes a beeline to T'Pol with the "you can't do this. You don't want to do this. I was wrong. Oh, and I'm also a Syrannite." Thus, T'Pol has an out.
Does Trip fight?

I'm of two minds: as someone who doesn't like Gary Stu Vulcans and as someone who saw Katra!Archer knocking Vulcan commandos around with ease in the later Kir'Shara arc, I actually think that Trip could beat Koss. Sure, Trip would appear to be the underdog here, but in Trek (and most fiction) the underdog is invariably the winner, plus he's had to fight for his life a lot more recently than Koss. For that matter, I could actually see Koss backing down the instant he realizes that yes, Trip is ready to do this and fight to the death for T'Pol. The big question is how does Trip react to this - as a human, I'd think that he'd see this entire thing as sheer barbarism and would be aghast at the notion that this is to the death. It really boils down to (IMO) how he perceives this - does he see the component of rape in these marriages that Honeybee referenced (and I kind of agree with)? If so, I suspect he's gonna unload of Koss without hesitation or compunction.
Does T'Pol, in a stroke of Girl Power badassery, battle Koss herself?

This could also be really cool, although we've unfortunately only seen her actually fight in the substandard "Marauders" where she tossed Klingons around. In this case, I think I'd go so far as to have her set the actual precedent that Torres uses in VOY - make it so that Vulcan law doesn't forbid the female from fighting her own battle ... its just that no one has ever done it before! And then, since Koss is a slightly out of shape architect, she whips his ass so thoroughly and completely that he's humiliated.
And what would the consequences be?

Here's where it gets ugly, though. With Koss kicked to the curb, he's not there in the later Vulcan arc to provide assistance, which means the Vulcan civil war is far more likely to turn into an actual war rather than the bloodless coup it was. T'Pol is also considered even more of a persona non grata on Vulcan, whether she had her human lover kick Koss' ass or did it herself. Starfleet would also have to be informed of this, especially if Trip fought Koss since, by Vulcan law, Tucker & T'Pol are now married, so that would likely lead to Trip's reassignment even sooner than canon (and would actually work better, IMO, because it is Outside Forces keeping them apart for a change rather than them acting like teenagers.)

And in the unlikely event that Trip fights Koss and is killed (unlikely because Trinneer is a main character whose name is in the opening credits, and the guy who played Koss is a guest star at best), T'Pol is gone from Starfleet and tensions between Earth and Vulcan deteriorate - Archer's dwindling Vulcan bigotry flares back up, likely brighter than before, and he's less likely to care about the Vulcan civil war.

Just my thoughts...
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