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UK Female Sci-Fi Viewers Now Outnumber Males
mosel-saar-ruwer writes "The UK Telegraph is reporting that, due to the popularity of Buffy, Lara Croft, and Xena, female sci-fi viewers now outnumber males, at 51%-49%. From the article: 'People have an impression of sci-fi fans being small men who sit in the dark watching Star Trek but it's not like that now ... There has been an increase in positive female role models, whereas in Star Trek, all the women were either aliens or wore short skirts.'"
Thought so, thanks to their recent bout of slashvertising.
Joss (IIRC, maybe it was Tim) said that one of the main reasons that Fox axed Firefly was that (and I paraphrase here) the women were "too strong" and the men were "too weak".
Just a cool little factoid for y'all. I'd bet that Firefly did at at least a little bit to help bring in female viewers (the women I've showed it to think that most of the men are pretty good looking). Haven't watched much Sci-fi apart from that and BSG, but I can safely say that my sister watches BSG solely because she likes Lee Adama.
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I recently started uni and from what I have seen here, girls are far more into sci-fi and fantasy than boys. I've even got two girls who regularly come to watch SG1 with me and another who is lending me her Firefly boxset in exchange for my BSG.
Good ol' blighty.
Mod me down now and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
There actually is a shot somewhere early in the series with a man wearing one of those skirts.
You can see it here.
Yeah, I think I'm glad they dumped those. What's too bad is they never refer to them later in the series. Why not take a jab at themselves for a laugh? For example when Riker makes a comment to Picard about how he hates the dress uniform, Picard could reply that, "at least he didn't have to wear those awful skirts."
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Technically, Star Trek was fantasy. This is because the plot line contains multiple elements of plot-critical fantasy, on purpose — viewers spent years pointing out that the Enterprise would not "whoosh" as it went by a viewpoint in space, that there is no science behind warp drive, that there are no nerve pathways in the neck that would allow Spock to drop humans (not to mention aliens) right and left, and so on.
Frankly, I can think of very few honest SF efforts on either video or film. It seems that as soon as Hollywood gets involved, the whole concept of SF flies right out the window. On fairy wings, no less.
It's that whole science thing. Of course, this is a nation that apparently wants to put "Intelligent Design" into our schools and is led by an extremely superstitious man, so the surprise level is pretty low here. As a nation, we're not very aware of what science is, much less being able to discern what extrapolation from current science might be reasonably considered legitimate.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
...that anyone hasn't mentioned http://www.sg1archive.com/bios/at.shtmlUSAF Lt. Col. Samantha Carter, Ph. D.