I will admit that I don’t like the idea of traveling to space. I’m not against space travel, I’m against space travel for myself. I’m perfectly happy viewing the images from the Mars Rover, and I love images coming in from other parts of space, I’m just not excited about going into space myself.
I was a weird kid. I never went through the phases that a lot of kids went through. Dinosaurs didn’t interest me, I never liked horses, and I didn’t want to go into space. It’s not that I didn’t have intellectual interests, they just didn’t match up to other kids. I was too busy writing adventure stories and studying volcanoes, sometimes combining the two.
Every once in a while, my sibling would encourage me to play space games with them when I was little. I remember one night we spent pretending that our bedroom was a spacecraft and we were traveling to different parts of the solar system. We put on our rain boots, got into our bed tents, and pretended they were sleeping pods.
Other times we pretended we were on Star Trek. I always wanted to be Captain Kirk, but my sibling wanted to be Savok from the movies. We always pretended that we were fighting intruders on the ship or that we were caught in some sort of space field. Anything for a Star Trek adventure.
Star Wars was a game to play outside. I was always Luke Skywalker and ripped up everything I could find with my “light saber” in the park. My friends always wanted to be Ewoks for some reason, and my sibling liked to play the Rancor.
It should’ve been obvious at that age that I was agender, because I was always playing boy characters. The girls never interested me, at least until Star Trek, the Next Generation came out and I was introduced to Tasha Yarr. I even got my hair cut like Denise Crosby when I went to the salon after seeing the show. But, for the most part, girl roles were of no interest to me.
In Star Trek, I was always Captain Kirk. In Star Wars, I was always either Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, depending on my mood that day. When we played Dune, I always wanted to be Paul. When we played different movies, I was frequently the dashing male lead. I’m sure there’s some psychological analysis that can be done about my character choices, but I don’t know what it is.
When I got older, I started realizing that one of the reasons I always chose the male characters was that there were not good female characters. Those “strong” female characters that did appear with misused or ignored by their authors. This is partially what happened to Tasha Yarr. Between being pushed into the background by the writers to immature male viewers immediately hating her, she was doomed.
Female characters were usually the designated babysitters, being stuck protecting or taking care of any child characters in the show or movie. If they weren’t, they became rape victims or otherwise were beat up by the bad guy and had to be rescued, and when it happened, they usually uttered the most annoying line in movie history: “You’re hurting me!” Well, no shit! They’re bad guys!
Then there was the opposite problem, which sprang up in the 1990s and trickled into the 2000s. Everyone wanted to emulate Sarah Connor or Ellen Ripley, but they missed the point of those characters by a mile. The writers just made these muscle-bound, emotionless machines with no realistic qualities and nothing human about them.
No one was creating a strong female character that I wanted to see, so I decided to write my own. This is the major reason why all of my fiction stories feature a female main character. My mother once said she liked my stories, but she wished I would write about men more often. I bluntly told her that this was never going to happen, and if she didn’t want female characters, she could just read something else.
My family was not very friendly to the female persuasion. This was partially because of my father, who was not only a malignant narcissist, but a misogynist to the extreme. Whenever he went on one of his complaint rants, it was always about a woman. He called every strong woman he saw a “bitch” or made fun of her, and when he encountered those rare strong female characters on movies or TV shows, he always hated them and went overboard with his hatred. Worse, he would constantly try to force me into a female role, making assumptions about me based on his twisted ideals. Women were supposed to smile all the time and be weak and gentle.
But he wasn’t the only one who was a problem. As her question about my stories demonstrates, Mom wasn’t a big fan of women, either. I always noticed that when a negative incident involving more than one person occurred, it was always the woman or girl that she attacked first, and did so rather viciously. She had these views before she married him, but Dad only encouraged her hatred of women and girls whenever he was around.
Mom was a very mutable person. She always went with what was going on with the most influential person in the room, and, unfortunately, it was usually Dad. She always claimed that no one could push her to do bad things, but I know from experience that this was a lie. If that were true, she wouldn’t have stood by while Dad did such awful things to his kids.
I remember the day I realized that I couldn’t rely on her anymore. Dad called me into the living room and forced me to stand at attention for over two hours while he yelled at me and insulted me. He called me a manipulator and accused me of taking advantage of Mom, claiming that I was “treated like a queen” and was ungrateful. The house was infested with fleas, and they would jump on my legs and bite me. Whenever I went to scratch at them, he would hit me. Mom just sat there and watched, agreeing with everything that Dad said.
I remember that I felt bewildered by the accusations, because these were descriptions of Dad’s behavior, not mine. His accusations became more and more bizarre, and every time, Mom nodded her head and agreed with him. I went to bed that night feeling very alone and wondering what had happened to her. Why was she backing up this man who was constantly shouting at her and insulting her?
He had a lot of explosions, and his eruptions would last for hours. There was one time, at the beginning of his return to the family, that he went on a rant into the late hours of the evening because we supposedly left him “all the ugly pieces” of taffy in a bowl, after he told us we could have as much as we wanted. I should’ve known it was a trap.
By the time I was fifteen, I was totally disgusted with him. I sat in health class for that awful heteronormative marriage and family unit that I hated so much. In one lecture, the teacher told us that women always marry someone like their fathers. I felt physically ill. It was a Clockwork Orange level illness. I almost threw up. It was then and there that I decided that I would never be in a romantic relationship, and I have kept that vow for the last thirty years.
I had a strong aversion to men by this point. I didn’t want them near me, I didn’t want to work with them, and I didn’t want them touching me. Even today, the thought of becoming romantically involved with someone, either male or female, makes me feel sick inside. The only thing concerning romance that I had to go on was my childhood experience with Dad and the way he treated Mom.
Then, of course, there was Grandma’s advice on relationships. She spoke as if marriage were a requirement and something that everyone does. Her advice was even worse. You are supposed to go along with whatever your husband wanted because it made him feel masculine. Nothing else mattered, not how you wanted to live or the autonomy of your own body.
I won’t even go into Mom and Dad’s advice on marriage and relationships. It was just horrible, to say the least. Dad was always telling me the ways I wouldn’t piss off my partner and how to be the perfect submissive spouse. Mom’s advice was so bad that I can’t even describe it in intelligent words.
Mom was really weird when it came to sex, too. I remember her advice about masturbation: “It’s okay, as long as you don’t do it every day.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was a daily activity for most teenagers, and they were perfectly fine. Whenever I brought up the topic of sex, Mom would get restless and say weird things, or she’d laugh and call me “silly.” So I didn’t mention sex to her.
I certainly as hell wasn’t going to talk about it with Dad. He never molested me, but he did make me feel uncomfortable, and he made some things less enjoyable. I still don’t like to be hugged or kissed because he would force them on me, to the point of physically hurting me if I refused. He often demanded a hug after an abuse session, when he’d spent hours psychologically assaulting me, as if somehow this made his explosion all better.
I made the mistake of taking a road trip with him when I was a teenager. He kept stroking my hand while I sat in the passenger’s seat. I finally asked him to stop, telling him that it made me feel uncomfortable. Of course he got bitter about it and a fight resulted, but at least he stopped. I don’t think he understood why it made me feel bad, nor did he ever know I was three seconds away from clocking him the last time that he did it.
He would make inappropriate jokes about me, too. I remember how gross I felt when he joked about how “amusing” I would be in transition labor. He’d bring up this gross thing I did as a baby and would make inappropriate jokes about it, and Mom would join in because she was too inept to realize exactly what was going on.
And then there was the comment he made to my sibling. They said that I would probably be a good actor. Dad’s response was that I was a good actor, but I was no “sex pot.” It was just as gross as everything else. So, yeah, no sex advice from Dad. I didn’t feel comfortable even saying the word in his presence.
But we were talking about space travel, weren’t we? I may not be into space travel myself, but that does not mean that I don’t support space exploration. The great thing about space is that there don’t seem to be any limits to the amazing things you can find out there. There are planets made of ice and even one made of diamond.
Who knows what sorts of life are out there? It’s possible there are aliens out there that are so unlike life on Earth that we have no idea how to even look for them. Honestly, I think there is life on Earth that is so different from scientists’ definition of life that they overlook the life forms in question. This is one major reason why I advocate a respect of this planet. You never know, we could be living on a gigantic lifeform.
Think about stars, for example. They eat, they are born, they die, they reproduce, and some even mate. Planets are the same way. How is this not life? As I said, you never know.
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