oh, those dirty mind-melders.
I watched an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise last night called "Stigma", which, posits, in a rather grand feat of ret-conning, that during the time Enterprise takes place, there was a big stigma against a small subset of Vulcans who are mind-melders.
Apparently, not only are mind-melders a small subset of Vulcan society, they're unsavory characters! Mind-melding is likened to something perverse, that only sordid types engage in mind-melding activities. The connotation is totally sexual. Those that mind meld are sexual deviants. Not only that, but possibly, if you mind-meld you will contract a fatal disease - a disease that because those that contract it are marginalized so severely, there is no effort to develop a treatment or cure.
Okay, so, a not so subtle attempt at paralleling HIV/AIDS and homosexuality (or any marginalized group of individuals), and I realized when I read up on the episode that that was exactly the purpose of the episode -- that TPTB were asked to do an episode bringing awareness to HIV/AIDS.
At first I was somewhat annoyed, struggling to, yet again, deal with Enterprise's depiction of Vulcans as total boobs. I mean, wha? HOW? Even accepting that in this time period Vulcans were more conservative then in the later centuries, I still could not quite wrap my head around this. Mind-melds happen as a matter of course in the later series! Hardly a Vulcan goes by without them mind-melding with you.
But then I realized that this basically means that Spock is, canonically, GAY (and, er, every other Vulcan, too), and then the whole concept started working for me. :D
I mean, it's a lot to swallow, having to rethink Vulcans, but I'm beginning to warm up to this. Vulcans, in the time of Surak, were perhaps more wild and untamed but didn't have the social restraints of "present-day" Vulcans (which we can say is like our own history in say Greece or Rome) and mind-melded without problems and with a "cure" for this mental disease, but as centuries went by mind-melding, an intimate act where perhaps emotion was shared, was frowned upon and then eventually considered very wrong and deviant.
Then, with the awareness that mixing with Humans, who are untamed and emotional and yet more, er, flexible then Vulcans, the Vulcans learn to look to their past to correct the prejudices they've develops in the present.
It seems this fatal disease that Vulcan's contract when mind-melding is a result of untrained minds attempting to mind-meld, and can be cured by a trained Vulcan telepath (or Mind-melder), and becomes obsolete in the future where no own would attempt to mind-meld without being trained to do so, the equivalent of mental safe sex. Bwahhawha. Brain condom. HEEEE.
So, I'm beginning to dig the Enterprise Vulcans, even if they're still big dodo heads. My biggest problem though is that when attempting to depict a Vulcan, it's like, instead of showing us a race of people who are cool-headed and logical, we get a race of people who are just stubborn and unbending where logic is really just an excuse to frown disapprovingly at people. I've seen it occasionally in the later series, too, but not nearly as much as on Enterprise. Generally, this is why I don't so much like Vulcans as a race, but rather love individual Vulcans like Spock and T'Pol (and Tuvok to an extent), mostly because the actors (and writers, too, I suppose) found a why of showing this interesting opposite to Humans without it resorting to Vulcans=wrong/Humans=right.
Also, GIP! I love this icon.
ETA: OMG, I open iTunes and Closer is the first song that plays. How appropriate!