Paige's Ponderings

I'm going to go through the three main Type 1 romances in chronological order for clarity, because I had a lot to say. (Also unsurprisingly.)

1) Janice Rand

For us (though not him), the first onscreen Kirkmance of early S1 is the Kirk/Janice doomed romance that reaches its tropey height in "Balance of Terror."

They're framed together in the opening scene of Martine's and Tomlinson's wedding. Janice remains at Kirk's side and is clearly having romantic thoughts as he's performing the wedding ceremony, and her position dangles her hand close to Kirk's. But he firmly grips the podium as he speaks, and they don't touch at all, even when rushing off as the red alert sounds.

The closest he gets to the arm grab with her is much later, when Janice nervously sways towards him as they're playing cat-and-mouse with the Romulans (or rather, cat-and-cat). He offers a brief, reassuring wrap of his arm around Janice's shoulder from the side, but no more; she takes the first step and he's responsive, within the constraints of the kind of tactile gestures that are broadly normalized among human crew. Then the ship gets struck, and oh no, Janice and the captain fall in the same direction and have to brace themselves on the same railing, and (*gasp*) their hands touch for real.

Noticeably, it's again not Kirk who seizes the pretext this offers. He's clinging to the rail separately from her, and his hands are below hers. It's Janice who goes from grasping at the rail where she happened to fall because she was standing so close (their hands brushing on accident in the process), to letting herself close her fingers over his knuckles for a moment. It really seems to be only a moment; the quick cuts of that scene make it hard to tell for sure, and by the time we return to the bridge, he's back in his chair and she's gone. But it does appear to me that she allowed herself that brief lingering touch in an emotional moment before backing off, and no more.

It's also Janice who draws near to Kirk and seeks him out in his quarters, after he's retreated to nurse his anxiety alone (shortly before Bones arrives to check up on him). He forces himself to sit up and be supportive instead of resting, but they remain safely on opposite sides of the room.

They also have another little quietly romantic moment towards the end of the episode, when she comes to bring a message from Starfleet as Kirk is leaving the room. The unspoken mutual attraction/infatuation is obvious in the interaction, and he's definitely charmed, but while we don't see his hands in that interaction, the position of their arms and shoulders makes it clear they're both keeping their hands to themselves.

Afterwards, Janice gives Bones and Spock—who are right there and not quite snickering—a pretty deserved dirty look after Kirk disappears into the turbolift.

I think something significant in these scattered moments is that, while Janice takes the initiative in these scenes, it's not framed as inappropriate or crossing a line he would be uncomfortable with (nor vice-versa). This is very limited, very courtly stuff that isn't going anywhere, and she's broadly someone he can trust to stay on the right side of the professional boundary. While they're not safe in a big picture sense in "Balance of Terror," he does feel safe with Janice.

This wasn't always the case, at least as imagined for the early season.

In "The Corbomite Manuever," for instance, there was supposed to be an actual reason for the random scene where Kirk wanders shirtless through the halls from Sickbay to his quarters, despite having a shirt with him. In the cut scene, it's made clear that he was wearing the shirt during the earlier phase of his medical exam, and it's gross now from the exercise and sweat, so he's going straight to his quarters to get a fresh shirt, only to find Janice there. This would have provided the first glimpse at the potential romantic undercurrents of their relationship.

In the cut scene, he's clearly uncomfortable with having to tell Janice to give him his fresh shirt, and at the prospect of getting dressed with a crew woman there, even if "getting dressed" is just putting a shirt on and he's already shirtless (yes, he feels less exposed just not wearing a shirt around a crew woman his own age than with putting one on in front of her). He ends up having to explicitly dismiss her from his quarters before she'll leave and he relaxes enough to get dressed while talking to Spock on his webcam (the conversation with Spock about the crisis as Kirk is putting on his fresh shirt is the part of this that we actually get in the aired episode).

Meanwhile, Janice herself had been sexually assaulted by evil!Kirk in "The Enemy Within." While both Janice and re-fused Kirk handled it as well as they could, Janice in particular was incredibly gracious towards normal Kirk about it, and did her best to convey forgiveness and a desire to return to their usual professional dynamic (I have a discussion of that story element here, so I won't get too into it in this already long ramble). Kirk gently complied with pretty evident gratitude, though he didn't make a huge deal out of it that would have only increased her discomfort.

So Kirk and Janice have good reasons to be super jumpy around each other. However, because of who they are as people, the end result by this point in the show looks more like a weird, but genuine, fire-forged trust they can't ever talk about, but do feel.

Janice anxiously going to Kirk's quarters as he's trying to rest between crises and finding him in bed could have been exceptionally fraught, but it isn't, really. It ends up as more of a brief, gentle bonding moment with some skittishness around it from the messy, impossible, mutual UST—but it's a long way from his alarm over her presence in his personal space in some early episodes. Still, they remain professional, and nothing in "Balance of Terror" goes beyond those scenes.

The closest thing to the arm grab in all of "Balance of Terror" is probably when Kirk and Angela Martine exchange a comforting hug after talking about the death of her fiancé, and that's extremely platonic. The closest thing to it as a deliberate romantic overture with Janice is ... probably him starting to longingly reach towards her in "The Naked Time," but sober enough to abort the gesture and pull his hand back—and the mood is quite different.

2) Areel Shaw

Many episodes later, in "Court Martial," Kirk and his ex-girlfriend Areel Shaw have a flirty reunion laced with mutual admiration and chemistry. Again, she's the first to initiate things, and again, there's a heavy emphasis on their :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧ ✿ hands ✿* :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧.

Specifically, Areel arranges the rendezvous in the first place. When Kirk arrives, it's Areel who holds her hands out to him first as they smile warmly at each other. Then Kirk returns the romantic gesture by taking her hands in his and kissing them (rather than her face) before sitting down. There's no hint of an arm grab.

Kirk and Areel are promptly revealed to be two of a kind when it comes to their tastes for sternly ethical, brilliant, charismatic, and attractive people their own age who can challenge them. They also share similar tastes for these kinds of gestures of sweeping high romance.

In fandom/fanon, Areel is often appropriated for some casual fling for Kirk to have, but it's clear in the actual episode that their relationship is much deeper, older, and sturdier than that. While they're smart enough not to try dating again—their attempt at a full romantic relationship failed for a reason—the love and respect and attraction between them all endure in some form into the present. This is placed in sharp contrast to the shitty bro squad of men who graduated in Kirk's year and seem to have been friendlyish acquaintances of his in the past, who promptly turn on him when he's in trouble, very shortly before this. They don't even have the excuse of anything like Areel's difficult, conflicting obligations.

In the scene above, Kirk and Areel separate to sit at her table together. Despite gesturing with their hands as they speak, and resting them on the table at different points, they seem unable to keep from touching each other's hands throughout the conversation. It's mainly through the repeated, spontaneous contact of their hands that the episode reveals how much the chemistry between them remains strong and deeply affectionate.

Areel is established throughout her early scenes with McCoy and then Kirk himself as Kirk's long-time friend, not just his ex-girlfriend. She's an intelligent, iron-willed woman who has known him well for ages and never been fooled by his personas or his persuasive eloquence—something he jokes about, but respects her all the more for ("I never could talk you into anything").

And I feel that's actually pretty effectively illustrated by the final scene of the episode, after all the plot has happened and been resolved. Areel asks Kirk if he's okay with a goodbye kiss, given that they're on the bridge of the Enterprise in front of the turbolift, and his crew is right there.

So it's another scene where we see her taking the initiative, but specifically doing so in a way that allows for a range of courteous responses from him. She's teasing, but she's also aware of the possibility of crossing a line in what's essentially his workplace. So her approach lets him either accept or reject the offer gracefully before the kiss happens. She simultaneously takes the lead (as is very obviously her own preference as well as his), and respects his autonomy and boundaries in how she does it.

I was actually reminded of how, in Kirk's other kinds of romances, he frequently tries to soften the blow of his rejection/the revelation of his real agenda by wrapping it in something complimentary (even if a blatant lie) that gives the other person a chance to gracefully retreat and save face. He does this no matter how wonderful or awful that person may be (even if they've committed horrific crimes).

Often, these people don't accept his gentler, more flattering nos for an answer, and he's forced into a harsher, more antagonistic position. It's clear that he strongly resents being cornered that way; he'll turn coldly angry, or stop pretending he wasn't already. We see this in "Dagger of the Mind," for instance, with the revelation that he rebuffed Helen Noel at the Christmas party in the first place. His behavior is not post-one-night-stand awkwardness (Helen herself claims he monologued about space instead of having sex with her), but active hostility driven by her ongoing disregard for the boundaries he keeps trying to assert, something which forces him into a much more directly adversarial position than he'd prefer.

We also see the attempt at softening the blow -> suddenly revealed anger in "The Conscience of the King," when he goes from offering a tactfully flattering (if duplicitous) let-down to Lenore Karidian to turning cold with righteous fury when she refuses the olive branch and tries to claim some moral high ground. We also see a slightly different variant with his former prison guard Shahna in "The Gamesters of Triskelion"; she does accept the softened rejection, and they end up on okay terms (though mostly because she's too vacuously adoring to do otherwise). We even see a particularly ironic iteration with Deela in "Wink of an Eye," right as he strands her and her people to die without the antidote he already has on the Enterprise.

So, Areel lightly setting out a gracious way he can refuse the kiss without repercussions or unpleasantness, as well as a way he can accept in a limited context without him leading her on or being pressured to kickstart their old relationship, very much tracks with the episode's presentation of her as a stalwart, thoughtful friend in addition to an ex-lover, a woman who has a sharp understanding of him as well as of law. Their kiss can be a flirty and fun goodbye between friends who have a lot of chemistry without being a pushy preamble to a renewed dating relationship or ill-considered one-night stand. The boundaries of everything that goes on between them are clearly defined, and Areel as well as Kirk broadcasts them in a way that respects the preferences and autonomy of both herself and him.

Kirk actually is comfortable with the kiss (and I think is pretty clearly touched and affectionate about the manner in which it's offered). But even when the camera zooms out enough that we can see them holding each other, it's just a normal, light, romantic embrace.

Noticeably, Kirk's hands are relaxed and splayed open against her waist and back/shoulder, rather than gripping her arms to hold her in place and maintain some sense of control. He doesn't seize her, or really try to manage her part of the kiss at all. She has plenty of freedom of movement and could easily alter her position or the general tenor of the embrace if she wanted. She doesn't, however; she just holds him in much the same way, leaning into the kiss with her arms around his waist/back, but not getting super close.

For a sense of what Kirk and Areel are not doing, compare their attracted but distinctly decorous kiss in sight of his crew with the Korby/Chapel kiss in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" (happening right in front of Kirk and his salad):

So. Back to "Court Martial": after Kirk and Areel part, Areel remains the more (romantically) assertive and controlled of the two, but not pushy. She smiles and blows a confident, satisfied good-bye kiss from the turbolift, while Kirk is all but swept off his feet and obviously nowhere near enough to grab any part of her, nor inclined to do so.

Again, all of this occurs in a context that (in-story) they carefully construct to feel safe as well as exciting for them both. Areel lightly takes the initiative at pretty much every turn, but isn't overbearing, and it's plain that she would be responsive to any concerns or objections with their flirtation. If either of them were uncomfortable, everything would screech to a halt, but the two of them go to pains to make sure that doesn't happen here. Kirk in particular gives no indication of feeling any need to re-capture some appearance of authority in front of his crew, or his own sense of autonomy and control in his dynamic with Areel—the prosecutor in the case that could have ended his career.

3) Edith Keeler

Kirk/Edith is, of course, the superstar of the Type 1 Kirk romances, and the most iconic as the doomed love story from "The City on the Edge of Forever." While there is a background crisis he's concerned about in the episode, Kirk's romantic feelings for Edith—as with Areel—only make his situation more difficult to navigate, not easier. This isn't tactical.

And I think it's worth mentioning that the idea that Kirk's use of flirtation/romance as a tactic is a borderline self-indulgent, high-risk/high-reward approach that makes difficult situations worse as often as easier is 100% fanon, not how this occurs in the show at all (the closest scenario to that is probably "By Any Other Name," in which it's still entirely effective). Risk is not the issue. When he's using seductive flirtation as a weapon in his femme fatale toolbox, it's not some risky tactic that's as liable to get him into trouble as out of it. It's his most reliable trump card and almost invariably works. The times he's uneasy and has to be pressured into using it aren't because of doubt as to success, but because he very strongly doesn't want to for a reason particular to the case (e.g. Miri) or to his unsettled emotional state about something more broadly (every time in S3).

And that's true here, too. His use of sex appeal as a tool just like his wily intelligence or quasi-Shakespearean monologues on tap is as conspicuously absent from his behavior (and motives) with Edith as the arm grab. The flirtation-as-transactional-tactic and the arm grab are much more connected behaviors than anything going on here.

As with the previous two romances of this kind, Kirk is flirty and admiring towards Edith (and sometimes puts on theatrically girlish pseudo-naivete), but he doesn't go for the overpoweringly seductive sex appeal. IMO he doesn't want to win people over that way when there's no desperate agenda a romance serves. When the relationship and feelings are real and important in their own right, not a means to an end, his entire emotional state and thinking and approach are different.

His seductions (whether involving literal sex or, most often, not) are fundamentally a power move, an increasingly (and then, in S3, decreasingly) habitual attempt to regain some kind of control over what's happening when power has been stripped from him. It does almost invariably succeed; that's not the issue. The issue is that he doesn't want to play that kind of trump card when the context is an actual relationship with serious admiration and attraction involved, not a utilitarian maneuver so people don't get killed.

While Kirk does lack most of his usual power in "The City on the Edge of Forever," it's not Edith's doing in any way that she could justifiably be held accountable for, nor is he being personally targeted by the situation. As a result, he feels no need to assert autonomy and control in his relationship with her.

Their dependence on her charity doesn't bother him as long as he has something useful to do (in the following episode, we'll also see him handle his devastation over his brother's terrible death by finding things to do). In fact, it's Edith who provides the means by which he can be useful to Spock. And despite the lies and secrecy demanded by the plot, he has such a high opinion of her character and priorities that he can't help feeling safe. It essentially allows him to fall head over heels for her without complication.

So no, he doesn't want to bowl her over with his narrative version of Orion sex pheromones. He wants her to like him because she understands him, not because she's been tricked or overwhelmed into it. He wants her to like him enough to fall in love with him for real, for her to turn the commanding intensity they share with regards to aspirations and causes onto him as a person, for no other reason than that she wants to.

The reality is that Kirk and Edith might as well have been grown in a lab for each other. In this particular situation, her power over him isn't an obstacle or threat to be overcome, it's part of the attraction she holds for him, much like Areel's steely assertiveness. It's all over the scene where Edith catches them trying to steal tools. While Kirk tries to talk her down, his manner is intense and earnest rather than sultry:

EDITH: I'm sorry, I can't— KIRK: If Mr. Spock says that he needs the tools and that they'll be returned tomorrow morning, you can bet your reputation on that, Miss Keeler. EDITH [looking him up and down, clearly interested on multiple levels]: On one condition. Walk me home? I still have a few questions I'd like to ask about you two. Oh, and don't give me that questions about little old us? look.

So at this point, he's not romancing Edith for any practical goal, nor does he want to. Rather, a) Edith is romancing him, just the way he likes it, and b) his feelings for her have nothing to do with the crisis and their interactions are completely genuine. And there's no physical contact in this scene, either.

In the romantic walk that follows, complete with "Goodnight, sweetheart" in the background, they do end up touching, but it's nothing like the arm grab+kiss of the femme fatale Kirkmances. Rather, Kirk and Edith initially hold themselves further apart, then walk more closely together as they're talking/having their thrilled meeting of minds.

More specifically, in the earlier moments of their happy Walk o' Romance, Edith is clasping her hands together (much as Kirk often holds or touches his own hands in moments of emotional intensity). Kirk's remain at his side, probably the single greatest indicator that he really is feeling relaxed and cheerful.

It's Edith who first touches him, laying her hand against his body. It's not pushy or crass, but she's a woman who knows what she wants. He could not be more obviously receptive and charmed by this:

She's still a cautiously respectable single woman in 1930; she turns the touch into a more sweeping gesture, and goes back to clasping her hands together. But when she gets concerned about his backstory and asks if she can help, she can't keep herself from reaching her hand out again. The angle and their winter coats make it hard to see where her hand goes at first, but it seems like she brushed his arm and then returned her hand to his side, against his coat.

It is only then that we see him touch her, carefully placing his hand at her back. She promptly places her hand at his back in response, and they settle into those positions as they continue, their bodies drifting close together but no more. From that point, the positions of their arms and hands remain at each other's backs through their several layers of winter clothes, and don't budge; they're flirting, but not rushing things even when they're gazing at each other.

It's pretty obviously not because of doubts around reciprocation or whatnot, it's because they enjoy the slow burn. They don't rush because they don't want to. They like the gradual sweeping romance of it all and they want to get it right.

There's a jump, and in their next scene together, they're once again combining flirtation and talking about social issues. We find them returning home to the boarding house where they live, with Kirk struggling to keep his face straight as they talk about space travel.

It seems like he might want to reach for her hand as he escorts her up the stairs, but he doesn't. She trails her hand over a knob at the end of the banister, but he waits for her to move on before following the same path as her fingers with his own, closing his hand on the banister. Their hands don't even touch; this is high-tier yearning.

Again, they draw close together and gesture animatedly as the scene progresses:

EDITH: I think that one day they'll take all the money they spend now on war and death— KIRK: And make them spend it on life? EDITH: Yes. You see the same things that I do. We speak the same language. KIRK [entranced]: The very same.

But contrary to the idea of the arm-grab kiss as a key to when Kirk's feelings/attraction are most clearly genuine, it remains completely absent from this scene, as with the previous one. He's all the more careful to keep his hands away from her as the mood builds. Her gestures when she speaks nearly lead to her touching him, but Kirk keeps his hand on the banister and the other firmly at his side.

As they continue to their rooms, still talking seriously, he keeps one hand slightly curled and held back, the other still at his side and also closed.

Even in the close-up right before they lean into a kiss, we can still see that he closes his hand the rest of the way and keeps it held away from her. His other arm doesn't seem to have moved, and its hand presumably remains at his side.

In the Kirk/Edith scene after that, a little time has passed and they're very evidently "together," though it's not entirely clear what that means in 1930 terms. The scene is placed between two others that occur between Edith and McCoy that day, likely no further apart than a few hours of each other. In the McCoy scenes, she refers to Kirk as both "a friend" and "my young man," and mentions that Kirk is taking her out to see a Clark Gable movie later (as the bisexually supportive good boyfriend he is at this point, apparently).

Between the two confused!Bones scenes, Edith goes up a staircase just as Kirk is leaving the room he shares with Spock. Kirk calls out to her while she's on the top of the staircase, starting to go up the stairs. They exchange a playful joke about him pursuing her—she pretends to be a shocked damsel and he laughs about having ulterior motives, but being himself, immediately double-checks: "Does that please you?"

Edith, very into it and very assured, starts to say, "I hope that means—" as Spock also exits his and Kirk's room. Edith missteps and trips badly on the stairs with a scream, and Kirk launches himself forwards to catch her. This moment is literally the first time in "The City on the Edge of Forever" that we ever see him seize her:

While romantic in its way, it's an instinctive reaction prompted by anxiety about her falling, rather than a conscious romantic gesture. And that anxiety, while prompted by this specific incident, also has the obvious context of Kirk's previous scene—the one in which Spock famously concluded, "Edith Keeler must die."

But also, it's a couple of seconds later that we can see where his hands ended up as he grabbed her to stop her fall: he caught her by the waist, not the shoulders or arms, while Edith grabbed his shoulders.

It's only once she's safe that his hand goes to her arms in the anxiety/relief of the moment, taking the "standard" Kirk position in a blink-and-you-miss-it grasp of her arm:

This happens, by the way, 44 minutes and 7 seconds into the episode. By 44:09, he's pulled his hand back, and immediately afterwards, she's easily able to lift that arm to fix her hair. They exchange a lingering stare, and Edith is the one to lean in to kiss him, and the one to touch him with her hand as well, wrapping her fingers around the back of his neck:

From what we see of the rest of the kiss, his arms seem to remain at his side; he's not holding or touching her at all beyond reacting to Edith's kiss. Her hand trails from his neck to his shoulder to his chest, and he's enjoying it, but this is like the pillow princess version of kissing. He's just standing there responding.

Spock, btw, is not only completely stoic and unmoving as Edith falls, he watches this entire kiss. Then, looking absolutely miserable, he retreats back into their room. It's only once he's alone that Kirk shows the real heaviness he feels at this point, and Spock immediately pops back out of their room to chide him. Fear and anxiety are major factors in how Kirk relates to Edith in this scene and afterwards, though he tries to conceal it from everyone but Spock.

So, the next time we see Kirk and Edith together is shortly after her last interaction with McCoy. Once again they're with Spock, who discreetly leaves so Kirk and Edith can go have their Clark Gable appreciation date (but not far, presumably so he can glower from a distance in a totally normal, platonic way). It's a little hard to see how Kirk and Edith are physically interacting as the scene opens, because it's brief and deliberately shot from a distance that makes them look small and vulnerable and sweet (this is not a criticism!). But from what I can see, this is the sequence:

All three leave the mission together. Kirk closes the door behind Edith. As Spock waves goodbye, Kirk and Edith are not touching. Once Spock turns away, Edith and Kirk move closer together and Kirk puts his arm around her shoulder to cross the street together (this is the most "forward" tactile behavior towards Edith we've seen from him thus far). The gesture is both affectionate and anxious; when a car rushes ahead, Kirk immediately reacts to pull her back, and the driver screeches to a halt to let them pass. Kirk waves his thanks at the driver with his arm still around Edith, hurrying them both past, almost running. Once they're beyond the cars, however, he releases her arm and pulls away to just hold her hand.

He's visibly stressed through all this, but relaxes at this point, and they stride across the street in their normal way, reciprocally swinging their joined hands as they walk and chatter. Edith even clasps their hands with her other hand at one point. It's very mutual and very happy.

And then Edith casually mentions McCoy's arrival. The feeling is that Edith remarking on some random detail about her day is normal for them; this is only unusual because McCoy's arrival means that either a) Edith's death or b) the Nazi hellscape future is imminent, and also they have no idea how functional McCoy himself is going to be at the moment. Edith is smiling, thinking nothing of it, but it's a moment of mixed urgency, relief, and overwhelming horror for Kirk.

This is the moment when we get the classic Kirk arm grab: not a kiss, not a flirtation, not a blink-and-you-miss-it touch of her arm, but underscoring his panicked interrogation about where she's seen McCoy, with the context of everything his arrival means for all four of them.

The timestamp of the shift from romantic/relaxed/happy/holding hands to anxious/frantic/scrabbling for information/grabbing her arm: 47:11 out of 49:19.

Even when he rushes back across the street to find McCoy, he gestures for Edith to stay safely where she is. It's in this moment of fear that we see the Kirk we're familiar with from more typical plot lines: commanding, tense, focused on extracting information, suddenly projecting both force and urgency. And all this is caught up in that anxiety around safety, that consciousness of threat to himself and/or others (a lot of others in this case), and the loss of a sense of real agency over what's happening around him.

Ellison was, frankly, wrong in condemning the revision to his original script in which Kirk tries to save Edith and it's Spock who holds him back; TOS Kirk was never going to trade the lives of a universe for one person because he fell in love. He doesn't have it in him: not for Spock, not for Edith, not for anyone. He'll try and buy time, dig up more information, find an alternative, but if all that fails ... then it's "Return to Tomorrow" or "The Immunity Syndrome" or "Where No Man Has Gone Before." Or "The City on the Edge of Forever."

So, (/deep breath) considering the Part 1 of this as well, I ended up feeling like it's actually pretty clear that the arm grab maneuvers aren't all that tightly linked to spontaneous romance or attraction. They're tied most of all to crisis situations and fear/relief from fear: whether the specific emotional context is urgency, relief, offering reassurance, projecting authority/threat, getting someone to lower their defenses, they all follow from the experience of some potentially catastrophic crisis that has stripped Kirk of his usual access to power and a very considerable degree of autonomy.

Kirk holding someone in place this way seems pretty clearly an expression of his drive to grasp at some sense of autonomy/defense of himself and others from threats in these situations. And when it happens in a specifically sexual context, even if he's the one to make it so, I don't think what's being signposted is uncomplicated attraction being his true motive because he's such a whore or whatever. I think that, consciously or subconsciously, what's really being signposted is anxiety.

This reaction shows up when something is wrong. Maybe the "wrongness" is not with the person in question—it can derive from the situation or some vague alarm going off in his head rather than from an individual, like when he seizes Spock this way after Nomad fries his brain, or Rayna and Odona in S3. But I think it's still an indication that something isn't right, and that at some level, he's uneasy about some aspect of this.

And sometimes it is very much something wrong with the other person. I've seen Kirk grasping Deela this way used as jokey "proof" that attraction must "also" drive the same maneuver with Spock, and I find it as repellent as the "lol what a slut he's down for anything" crowd characterizing Kirk's interactions with her in those terms (and, ultimately, these are pretty much the same thing). I think he grabs Sylvia that way in "Catspaw," too, and we're explicitly told he feels no actual attraction to her and is wholly lying, and he pretty much invariably does it in most of the dubcon femme fatale scenarios (and certainly the coerced noncon ones), just not these wholly romantic ones.

So this is basically a very long way of agreeing strongly with you, @carlandrea! I think the evidence strongly suggests that, particularly in a sexual context, the supposed "standard" Kirk kissing position is nothing of the kind. It's the standard Kirk anxiety position, compensating for a sense of reduced agency by attempting to direct as well as act in these moments. He does it in nonsexual, non-romantic circumstances as well, in exactly the same way, but perhaps more importantly, in his most clearly unforced, spontaneous, heartfelt romantic scenes when he's at full liberty, and all that is laced with uncomplicated attraction and liking, the maneuver is nowhere to be seen except in connection to fear.

And that entire compensatory reaction that we see around the "standard kissing position," where he's using seductive flirtation but also preoccupied with maintaining control over himself, her, and the scene—that very conspicuously vanishes in these truer romances, as well. Pretty much every indication in these pure romance moments is that he doesn't want to have to manage all that, make all the decisions, defend all the boundaries (something he basically says multiple times onscreen anyway, but still, it permeates these Type 1 romances, too). If anything, it seems to me like he wants to manage as little as the other person is comfortable with—and he's drawn to the kinds of people who are prone to taking the initiative while respecting both of them.

And last of all, on a K/S note: I think it's honestly pretty clear that Kirk is most allured by Spock in contexts where Spock is conspicuously powerful or authoritative: watching him control people with his mental powers, kick ass in a fight, righteously condemn an ethical failure without being intimidated by threats, or just be invincibly bossy or bitchy. When Kirk teases Spock about showing emotion, he's not prodding him to be less Vulcan; the vast majority of the time, it's a near-ritualistic invitation for Spock to assert his ironclad Vulcan fortitude, a point Kirk can then admiringly concede, while Spock gets to feel smug and affirmed.