If Ferengi females aren't allowed to be bought and sold then it isn't slavery, regardless of how poorly offworlders think they are treated.
Spoilers Star Trek: Prodigy 1x07 - "First Con-tact"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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If Ferengi females aren't allowed to be bought and sold then it isn't slavery, regardless of how poorly offworlders think they are treated.
It's not literal slavery but it's a slavery of the spirit.
They're still wrong.
Slavery is slavery. There are absolute standards at work here. Ferengi treat their women like slaves, and everyone knows it; if they disagree, that's their problem.
They probably are.
Is the ability to sell something a prerequisite for ownership?
That's as good a definition as any. Do you think children are slaves to their parents?
No, but I'm not sure what you mean. My question was not intended to be an obnoxious 'why would you blah blah blah' type response. I was thinking about selling and buying, which is very heavily connected to slavery, but I guess I never thought it was a prerequisite, but then I was thinking about ownership in general. Can you own something without having power to exchange it?
Well, at least in some jurisdictions it’s possible to inherit something, usually a house, but be forbidden by the previous owner to sell it.
So working in the house is not working?
My general thought though was more along the lines that if we define slavery as just a lack of freedom, then that means that prisoners are slaves. Ferengi women are certainly trapped within their culture, but as portrayed (mostly in DS9) they didn't appear to have a substantial burden of domestic labor put upon them.
Regardless, checked Memory Alpha, and saw this:
So yeah, okay, that is explicit slavery. Daughters being treated explicitly as property, and rented out? No other way to describe it.
Ferengi patriarchy is more a form of emotional abuse and enslavement than it is actual physical slavery. Like having a beaten-down and subservient servant or butler that isn't actually abused in any physical sense and gets to share the home with their employer but is not allowed to do much outside the home and frequently told they're not worthy of the same legal rights as the employer.
Inequality can also be more insidious in that you're told and it's put on paper that you have the same legal rights but in reality you don't. "Separate but equal" comes to mind.
Pel and Ishka definitely gave off vibes that females were told to their faces they were equal to males but were treated otherwise by the law. "You're an awesome mother and are the reason our children grew up to become such successful businessmen, but you know you can't wear clothing so get it off. Now."
I feel like lumping patriarchal misogyny into slavery demeans both struggles against such.
I think that if you ever try to take Star Trek distances seriously then you have put more effort into it than any of the writers.
It's actually TNG and later writers that ignored TOS/TAS travel times and made up a new system completely inconsistent with what was established before. TAS "Magicks of Megas-Tu" showed the Enterprise NCC-1701 was perfectly capable of reaching the galactic center and Star Trek 5 merely followed up on that. Even casual TOS dialogue like Cheron being in the southern portion of the galaxy in "Let that be your last battlefield", while an obvious nod to American southern racial issues, are actually meaningless if the Federation doesn't have capability to reach all sides of the galaxy (southern part of the galaxy is meaningless if the Federation is only in the southern part).
Thus TNG's travel times and the infamous issue of Voyager being unable to return home when no such issue existed in Star Trek 5 was actually the result of later writers not following what was established in TOS/TAS/TOS movies.
For our Trek RPG, I actually said that subspace rifts and "currents" made travel times and charting dramatically different in a feast of handwavium.
I'm confused. This Ferengi raised Dal (what a bad moogi) for some time in what looks like a reasonably modern (for the time) Ferengi starship, but he's still unfamiliar with the tech on the Protostar? I can accept that she never mentioned the Federation and maybe doesn't have a holodeck/suite aboard, but we know she has transporters...? Also of course we have another member of an alpha quadrant species far away from their home space, so that mystery continues. On the bright side, 8 or so short years after Rom made nagus and there's a clothed Ferengi female quoting rules of acquisition and flying around in her own ship for years...
Well, she still seems to be operating under the impression that they're Starfleet cadets at this point.
Accessory after the fact...
Yeah; Pen Pals and Homeward Picard is terrifying.
How you doin'?
Hodgkin's Law of parallel planetary development?
Well...in the top two...
Yeah: to explain the at least do-able travel time in Megas-Tu and ridiculously short travel time in Final Frontier, I like to think that the great barrier causes occasional temporary wormholes to open to it that can be somewhat predicted.
Well, she still seems to be operating under the impression that they're Starfleet cadets at this point.
Accessory after the fact...
Yeah; Pen Pals and Homeward Picard is terrifying.
How you doin'?
Anyone else notice they used a Mars height map for the orbit shots of the planet? You can clearly see Valles Marineris
Hodgkin's Law of parallel planetary development?
Well...in the top two...
Yeah: to explain the at least do-able travel time in Megas-Tu and ridiculously short travel time in Final Frontier, I like to think that the great barrier causes occasional temporary wormholes to open to it that can be somewhat predicted.
As much as I would love to see that, I don't think a show aimed at pre-teens is going there, at least not in depth. Thank you for mentioning the black mark though - I hadn't thought about what it could mean.
As to the slavery question, there have, sadly, been many times and places in human history where a man could sell their wives and children.
Sisko did not kill Vreenak. Garak did.
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