This has been around the blogosphere a couple of times, but I finally took a look, and it’s as good as promised.

Dirk Benedict, the man who played the (male) Starbuck in the original Battlestar Galactica, has written rant against the sissified, womanly reimagined Battlestar Galactica. The rant itself contains gems like this:

“If Dirk doesn’t quit playing every scene with a girl like he wants to get her in bed, he’s fired.” This was, well, it was blatant heterosexuality, treating women like “sex objects.” I thought it was flirting. Never mind, they wouldn’t have it. I wouldn’t have it any other way, or rather Starbuck wouldn’t. So we persevered, Starbuck and I. The show, as the saying goes, went on and the rest is history for, lo and behold, women from all over the world sent me boxes of cigars, phone numbers, dinner requests, and marriage proposals.

As a lifelong heterosexual and advocate of heterosexual rights, let me say that I am deeply offended by the conflation of heterosexuality and womanizing.

Wait, it gets better:

I’m not sure if a cigar in the mouth of Stardoe resonates in the same way it did in the mouth of Starbuck. Perhaps. Perhaps it “resonates” more. Perhaps that’s the point. I’m not sure. What I am sure of is this…

Women are from Venus. Men are from Mars. Hamlet does not scan as Hamletta. Nor does Hans Solo as Hans Sally. Faceman is not the same as Facewoman. Nor does a Stardoe a Starbuck make. Men hand out cigars. Women “hand out” babies. And thus the world for thousands of years has gone’ round.

Wow. I mean, wow. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. And I’m even sympathetic to the point he might be trying to make, which is that men and women have significant differences and you can’t just swap one for the other. But of course, the new BSG doesn’t do that: the neo-Starbuck’s femininity is important to her character, what with her having been sent to a pregnancy farm and thinking she was a mother for a while, among other things. Benedict is right that a female Starbuck could never have been what the old Starbuck was, but he acts like that’s a bad thing.

Anyway, the real gem is the comments, in which many of his commenters point out that he’s a whining ninny upset that he didn’t get a role in the new BSG. My favorite is this one:

Dude, Katee Sackhoff’s Starbuck has a much bigger pair than your femme, hairbrushing, mirror-loving pipsqueek ever did.

FTW!