I’ve only fully watched the series’ from TNG onward, plus the “must see” episodes of TOS. I’m just wondering if in canon he’s actually all that promiscuous.
I’ve only fully watched the series’ from TNG onward, plus the “must see” episodes of TOS. I’m just wondering if in canon he’s actually all that promiscuous.
That depends on the timeline we’re talking about. Kelvin? Yes, mostly. He straightens out once he meets Old Spock and takes command of Enterprise. Mirror? Yes, absolutely - he was a man with nearly limitless power, and he could exercise that power however he damn well pleased. Prime? I don’t think so, no. He’s described as a walking stack of books, a studious and attentive officer, and he’s shown to be that way too. He beat the Kobayashi Maru through trickery and intelligence - he didn’t just sleep with a professor.
Now, I will borrow from the statement of one preacher who wrote in on “Plato’s Stepchildren”. Any red-blooded man who’s holding a woman looking that beautiful, if he doesn’t kiss her it’s almost a sin. I think Kirk is presented as an attractive man who’s in a culture and situation that leads to him encountering a lot of attractive women. We read it as womanizing, because in the real world, it probably would be. Frankly speaking, yes, Kirk is a reflection of Roddenberry’s own ‘free love’ beliefs. Look that up if you want to knock the aura off the Great Bird. But in the fiction, no, Prime Kirk was certainly promiscuous, but not a womanizer, and I feel there’s room to accept the difference. For the majority, the women he manipulated, canonically, he didn’t sleep with, and the women he slept with (or wanted to be with), he didn’t manipulate.