annashay 
By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
Star Trek has always had a specific audience, and it has never had much appeal outside that group. Now it’s a group the franchise seems to hate, and it’s doing everything it can to drive them away.
To understand this problem, first, you have to understand the demographics of Star Trek viewers. Trekkies are and always have been men. Women are not usually interested in science fiction, but that’s doubly true of Star Trek in particular.
I hear you, random guy who once knew some lady who watched every Voyager episode. I see you on Instagram, attractive girl cosplaying in Starfleet miniskirts. Unfortunately, you very cool Trek-girls are the exception, not the rule.
A solid five to ten percent of Star Trek’s audience is female. That’s great, but 5% is not enough to fuel an entire franchise.
If you think I’m underestimating the number of Trek’s female viewers, scroll through the comments on any Star Trek-related content anywhere on the internet. Then count the number of female commenters. You’ll see a lot of guys named Steve, but you won’t see many Jennifers.
That Star Trek’s fandom is primarily male is obvious and undeniable. Anyone who disputes the idea that the vast majority of Trek’s audience is made up of nerdy dudes is probably selling something and should not be trusted.
What Star Trek’s Male Fans Care About
Star Trek needs men. It does not exist without men. Therefore, it’s important to ask what men care about.
To find out, we have only to act like Mr. Spock and look at the numbers. The following chart illustrates the political views of men compared to women in four different countries, over time.
The chart demonstrates a vast and growing split between men’s and women’s political leanings. Men are now, on average, very conservative and growing more conservative rapidly.
You might be thinking it’s only older men voting Republican, but you’d be wrong. If you’ve seen photos of Democrats at the recent No Kings protest, for instance, you probably noticed that the vast majority of the men in attendance were over the age of 60.
Younger men are as likely or more likely to have voted for Donald Trump in the last election as older men. According to Pew Research, most men of all ages and most demographic groups voted Republican in the recent 2024 political contest.
Polls done by organizations like Gallup on the more specific views of American men reaffirm this. 80% of all men oppose trans women participating in girls’ sports. 80% of all men also oppose limits on gun ownership. 60% of men polled by Gallup don’t think climate change is a big problem. 70% want stricter border control, and most even support mass deportations.
How Star Trek Has Responded To The Growing Conservatism Of Trekkies
Pick any major political or cultural issue, and you’ll usually find polling that shows the vast majority of men hold the same positions as America’s Republican president.
Meanwhile, Star Trek is doing this…
Polling in 2023, shortly before the above Star Trek: Discovery episode aired, indicated that at the time, 64% of men believed there were only two genders.
Isn’t Star Trek Supposed To Be Counter-Culture?
In the past, Star Trek often explored ideas outside mainstream thought. For instance, the first officer on Deep Space Nine is a former terrorist, in a time when America was hyper-sensitive to terrorist violence. That worked for the show because even though Kira’s past might have seemed edgy and unacceptable to older male audience members, it appealed to younger ones willing to consider the consequences of living a life of violence.
Kira’s past as a terrorist was never glorified or endorsed, only explored. It allowed Trekkies with more flexible minds to consider the world from a point of view they’d never seen before. That made it relevant in the current time but also timeless since there’s nothing about Kira’s past that’s specific to the real world in which her character was written.
That’s not what Star Trek is doing now. Pronoun culture is not counter-culture, and it’s definitely not timeless. It’s of the moment and the prevailing message in most mainstream entertainment. If you’re being pressured to add pronouns to your LinkedIn profile, that’s as mainstream as it gets.
Adding a non-binary teen to Star Trek: Discovery and lecturing the audience on gender pronouns probably appealed to a couple of aging hippy Boomers on their way out to a No Kings protest, but it caused most men to switch off.
The mistake people make when talking about this subject is in assuming Star Trek started out with a progressive bent, just because it considered liberal views. That’s wrong. Star Trek was above liberalism, conservatism, and all types of isms. That was the point of the series, and that’s why it has had such enduring and broad appeal.
Early Trek would never have lowered itself to subscribing to any sort of limiting set of modern ideologies. Instead, the show’s beating heart was its willingness to explore ideas outside the mainstream, whatever they might be, and then let its audience decide for itself if those were ideas worth having.
Star Trek would not still be relevant had it been a progressive television show or a counter-culture beacon, because what’s mainstream and what isn’t, and what’s progressive and what isn’t, has always been a moving target. In the 1960s, an interracial kiss was outside the mainstream. Now that it’s so mainstream, it’s no longer interesting.
If Star Trek had made an episode where it lectured the audience on the importance of interracial mating, it would now be cringey and irrelevant. Trek was much too smart for that. Or it used to be.
Modern Star Trek Picks A Side, And It’s The Same Side Your Grandma Is On
Now, Star Trek seems to think that espousing the views shared by the late-night talk shows watched by your grandma is edgy rock and roll. Where Trek once examined complex ideas outside the mainstream, it now demands its audience adhere to ideas from the mainstream. Ideas that its core audience, men, hates.
They’ve accelerated that male audience alienation strategy with the upcoming series Starfleet Academy, a spinoff of Discovery. Star Trek’s new series has commercials featuring Klingons wearing skirts, lectures about climate change, and plenty of the current-year political jargon your average Karen soaks up from CNN.
Fan Replacement Theory In Action
Most other modern, male-audience franchises have the same problem, and they’ve all tried to solve it not by making stories that reflect the values of modern men, but rather by trying to replace their male viewers with female ones who will think the right thoughts.
It doesn’t work. It never has, not even once. The best example of this is Star Wars, which has been obsessively focused on attracting female viewers for years now.
Despite centering everything they do on female characters played by actresses with approved political views, as well as creating plots around lesbian witches and murdering all their legacy characters, it’s still mostly only men who care about Star Wars. All they’ve accomplished is shrinking the number of men willing to watch.
If you doubt that, use the social media comments test I just gave you to see who’s talking about Star Wars. You won’t find many women geeking out about Rotta the Hutt, though if you are, you’re cool, and I want to be your best friend.
Star Trek Is Stuck With Men
Star Wars has proven you can’t convince women who share your politics to take over the viewing spots once held by men. That means Star Trek is stuck with males as its only significant demographic at the same time it’s doing everything it can to make men hate it.
There’s a logical way out of this self-created mess, but Trek doesn’t seem inclined to take it. That logical path doesn’t mean turning Star Trek into a conservative-coded utopia, or pandering to male viewers by having Captain Pike suddenly turn Christian, as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recently did. It means getting back to basics and avoiding modern sensibilities in favor of exploring the core basics of the human spirit and creating a world based on the can-do attitude of gutsy exploration. It means rejecting modern “isms,” entirely.
Unless Star Trek makes this change, and soon, it and everything like it will be dead. In the impending future without Star Trek and other Hollywood science fiction, we’ll be stuck watching nothing but terrible Jesus-first sci-fi movies like the recently released end-of-the-world disaster Homestead, produced by Angel Films. As someone raised on real Star Trek and trained to be leery of joining groups, whether they’re progressive, conservative, atheist, or religious, that’s not an entertainment world I want to live in.
