Angels? None.

"Want me to save the world
I'm just a little girl"

Marilyn Manson - Get Your Gunn

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Star Trek: The Next Generation
Seriesdate: 1.14
Angel One

By my understanding widely viewed as one of the worst TNG episodes and I really have to agree, despite its much higher production values (more extras, lavish sets and costumes, abundant props, etc.) than other first / second season fare. For one thing it's plagued by a bland, scatterbrained B-plot about a shipboard sniffles epidemic involving Wesley taking skiing lessons, Geordi taking control of the bridge, Picard pouting and some oft-mentioned, never seen Romulan threat lurking somewhere behind the scenery.

For the other thing, its A-plot made even less sense. The Enterprise visits a matriarchal planet. This inexplicably causes Troi and Yar to mentally regress to giggling schoolgirls at the sight / thought of Riker in a frilly V-neck shirt seducing the planet's leader... on which account he flips a 180 after five minutes of PG13-rated smooching to declare he's not that kind of boy. Then they go ahead anyway. Then they argue about it some more.
Huh?

Well, anyway, back to that confused mess in a minute. Let's talk about El Goonish Shive, a webcomic about high school students with magical powers fighting supernatural threats. Because that's never been done before. The dialogue in EGS frequently tangles in an unending mess of snowflake posturing about homosexuality and gender roles, which combined with teenage relationship drama should make it utterly unreadable if not for its creator's comedic flair. Prepare for idealized angelic females, villainous males (unless they're endorsed by women) and all the usual spiel.

Like most webcomics, EGS is burdened by a constantly ballooning cast of redundant characters, one of whom, Tom, was introduced for the express function of trying to seduce the group's resident ice queen, Susan. This act is so vile in the eyes of her friends as to warrant an "I might have to hurt this guy." Why, you ask? As described here, because he was cozying up to her and trying to get her to ask him out as though it were her idea and not his. We're of course already perfectly comfortable condemning any male who fails to throw himself at women's feet. Tom's villainy goes a step further by trying "to make her take the initiative" -*le gasp!*
Bbuuuurnn hiiiiimmm!

I addressed this when discussing pickup artists. What is Tom doing that billions of women have not done since the dawn of time? Hovering around a man, gaining his trust, worming under his skin, teasing and taunting, soft non-committal words, casual non-committal intrusions into personal space, never saying anything outright but baiting him into taking all the risk of action while personally maintaining deniability. The hallmarks of feminine behavior, from lipstick to "on your knees!" marriage proposals. Tom is being condemned for trying to take advantage of women in the same way that women have always taken advantage of men, for infringing on women's copyright on entrapment. Only men can get condemned for feminine crimes.

The women of Angel One are certainly not manipulative. "Here, the female is the hunter, the soldier, larger and stronger than the male." They're imperious, lectured in the big moralistic speech at the end for standing in the way of social progress by not letting their adorably shrimpy male counterparts vote. The episode gets panned as sexist, presumably on the basic universal assumption that women are wonderful and should never be portrayed as in the wrong, but note how they're in the wrong. By adopting masculine demeanor. Not a word is said about what the men of Angel One are actually doing all that time. If this truly is a gender-flipped society, then we should reasonably expect males to adopt feminine tools of sexual, emotional and social manipulation, with cute, sexy, pouting little Lord Macbeths guilting and shaming their Ladies into risk to further their own ambitions. Would it be wrong for men to do so?

Angel One teaches us that women can only sin by adopting a traditional overt, declarative masculine mindset. EGS teaches us that covert feminine manipulation is only wrong when adopted by men. Neither is saying anything we haven't otherwise had megaphoned into our brains from the cradle onwards. Men are evil, but the only thing worse than masculinity is a man who refuses to play his masculine role when women demand it. Femininity itself can suffer no criticism.

To what end?
For that, flip to another old comic strip, 9 Chickweed Lane to learn: "Give her the upper hand and she'll always hold it out to you." Awww, how sweet. A willful ignorance of female self-interest. An expectation of self-denigrating male servility. A lifetime of throwing oneself on the barricades to ensure that women always have the upper hand.
Human instinct. How... sweet.

"Selective judgments, good guy badges don't mean a fuck to me"