Weekend Post #11: William Shatner’s #1 Fan’s Great Parenting Advice… For Girls

Unlike my brother, who lives upstate, my sister lives in the city just a short subway ride away. I have a lot more experience with parenting girls than boys because I get to see her and her daughter so much more often than my brother and his two boys. Now that she’s finally potty trained, I’m willing to babysit her so that my sister can have a bit of a social life. (Actually, mom says that babysitting my niece is the closest thing I do to paying rent and I should do it because it’s not as if I have anywhere to go on weekends anyway.)

This is the primary lesson that I try to teach my niece and that you should teach your girls. Grow up to be a strong woman like Uhura, Janeway, or Seven of Nine. All of these women are great role models because they are valued by their male peers for their intellectual prowess, yet they don’t feel degraded by wearing tight outfits that show off their smoking hot bodies.

Also, help the young girls in your life understand that Padme Skywalker is not a positive role model because a) she sucks and b) she was killed by a weakling a Sith. Just last weekend I told my niece that if Anakin had tried to strangle a real woman, like Uhura, from across the room, she would have marched right up to him and bitch slapped the little twerp. She probably would have phasered him in the nuts too. Feel free to tell that anecdote to your daughters so that they will understand how important choosing the right exemplar is.

Teaching your girls to emulate the heroines on Star Trek will build their self-esteem and help to develop the gender-equal utopia envisioned by Gene Roddenberry. Not only that, but when they get older they will realize that so-called Star Trek Geeks (I hate that term) are the ideal boys to date. The women of this generation never learned that lesson. By teaching our girls from a young age that they should only date men with encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek, we will ensure that future generations of Star Trek Geeks will never find that the waters at the dating well have run dry.