Saturday, November 15, 2014

cathedral castration: shirt ain't stop nobody from loving and doing science



theverge |  No one knows why Taylor chose to wear that shirt on television during a massive scientific mission. From what we can tell, a woman who goes by the name of Elly Prizeman on Twitter made the shirt for him, and is just as bewildered as he must be that anyone might be upset about her creation. Taylor apologized on Friday during a live ESA broadcast for wearing the shirt, stating that "the shirt I wore this week... I made a big mistake and I offended many people, and I'm very sorry about this." Still, Taylor's personal apology doesn't make up for the fact that no one at ESA saw fit to stop him from representing the Space community with clothing that demeans 50 percent of the world's population. No one asked him to take it off, because presumably they didn't think about it. It wasn't worth worrying about.

This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields. They see a guy like that on TV and they don't feel welcome. They see a poster of greased up women in a colleague's office and they know they aren't respected. They hear comments about "bitches" while out at a bar with fellow science students, and they decide to change majors. And those are the women who actually make it that far. Those are the few who persevered even when they were discouraged from pursuing degrees in physics, chemistry, and math throughout high school. These are the women who forged on despite the fact that they were told by elementary school classmates and the media at large that girls who like science are nerdy and unattractive. This is the climate women who dream of working at NASA or the ESA come up against, every single day. This shirt is representative of all of that, and the ESA has yet to issue a statement or apologize for that.


5 comments:

Ed Dunn said...

I'm waiting for Hollaback to create the video showing a comet going 10 billion light years through space being harassed by spacecrafts built by sexist male earthlings and male alien species...


"damn comet!"


"shine, comet...shine!"

CNu said...

lol, why can't something wonderful like this happen in Kansas City? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2834172/She-freezing-Model-parades-New-York-NAKED-painted-jeans-social-experiment-notices.html

Vic78 said...

Somebody recently broke out of the crazy house.
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/

CNu said...

She does an adequate job of picking apart the flaws she knows, too bad her understanding doesn't even begin to encompass the political-economic necessity for technical and martial competence...,

CNu said...

The above critique of the ultimate impotence and futility of the cathedral, because the cathedral lacks the capacity for technical and violent exploits, applies in spades to the multi-level system of lawyers in political control of the "rule of law" in the U.S. At the end of the day, there is never an exception to the fact that the world is ruled by the men who make, control, and use guns and advanced technology capabilities.

A WHOLE lot of effort goes into the smoke and mirrors (or make-up and skirts) used to cosmetically mask this fact of life, but it remains an incontrovertible fact of life whose unspeakable ugliness occasionally gets fully unmasked for one and all to truly see. We're in the middle of precisely one such moment, right now, and lots of folks are struggling to process and reconcile the facts of life. The world as it is vs the world as they would like it to be. everything else is merely conversation....,

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