Guest posting by Miren Gutierrez, IPS editor-in-chief

So 1960s...Star Trek masters and commanders are all men.

The other day I saw Star Trek. What an uncreative film. Listen, women: in the year 2387, men will still wear the pants and command the ship, while leggy women are busy being ornamental in mini skirts.

I don’t expect films to campaign for human rights, especially films of this nature. Space odysseys just have to be entertaining, surprising, ingenious. But Star Trek was just unimaginative, reproducing the social prejudices of the sixties, when the TV series on which this film is based started. As if nothing had changed…

Now that I think of it, that part was indeed surprising.  Some things have changed since the sixties but we are reaching a plateau of stagnation where films like this do not arise any objections or comments.

Where Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi can treat his fellow female citizens as if they were just meat, no brains, and cause no outrage. Where the woman South Africa President Jacob Zuma allegedly raped was put on trial by the media, her sexual history exposed.

Where we don’t expect improvements, like Elisa Muñoz, coordinator of the Global Report on Women in the News Media due in 2010, told me recently in an interview: “I believe that we will find more women in the journalism profession around the world. However, we will likely continue to find that women are underrepresented at higher levels of management.”

Where there is an eternal, unfathomable economic and political gap of inequality between men and women.

Maybe I should not get all worked up by a film. You tell me.