So, hey, Phoenix Mars Lander, anyone? Awesome, right? It landed on Mars! Well, I think it’s awesome.
For those of you who don’t spend your typical Saturday night watching NASA TV, the lander is on one of Mars’ polar regions, looking for ice. And by gum, it found some, my friends:
This picture is too big to embed!
Scientists know the white stuff is ice and not minerals because it sublimated upon contact with the atmosphere. WICKED COOL. Right now, the lander is taking soil samples to analyze under its microscope. I’m infatuated with the process: after the lander takes a sample, it shakes it into its ovens, cooks it up, and then uses it to make science. TOTALLY ACES.
But, okay, it’s not like there are women in the soil samples – unless we’re talking about microscopic proto-women, which I can assure you we are not – so why am I posting this on a feminist website?
The breaking news from Mars reminds me of something I read on the Astro-Dyke months ago, filed under “to blog,” and then never got a chance to write about. Last February, the women on the tactical operations staff for the two Mars rovers decided to switch their shifts around so that, for one day, Spirit and Opportunity would be run by an all-woman team. The full article is on the Planetary Society website:
One, two, or a handful of women around could be explained away by the chauvinistic as token participants, the product of affirmative action. But the entire tactical team, from top to bottom — there’s no way to dismiss that; these women all have the skills to do the work, work they do every day, keeping Spirit and Opportunity alive and active a hundred million kilometers away. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory sure has changed a lot from the days when women were only in secretarial positions, and competed in an annual beauty pageant called “Miss Guided Missile” (see M. G. Lord’s Astroturf for more on that story). My only experience with JPL has been since 2003, and it’s certainly now a diverse workforce by any dimension. Still, I was surprised that the rovers’ tactical operations team could be mustered with only women. It turns out it wasn’t at all hard to do, and has almost been done by accident several times in the past.
Very cool. This situation – and the accompanying buzz – should prove that there’s no difference between men’s and women’s abilities in the hard sciences. Unfortunately, the author decided to take the article in an, ahem, interesting direction:
There have always been plenty of women around on the Mars Exploration Rover mission. But there are lots more than there used to be, in part because the Mars Exploration Rovers have lasted so danged long. In the beginning of the mission, the rovers were being driven by the people who originally designed and developed the hardware and software. The kinds of people who excel at designing and building space-traveling robots under huge time and budget pressures find the regular schedule of everyday operations on Mars to be, well, less thrilling than designing and building the next Mars mission. So they have moved on.
So, since the end of the primary mission, the engineering side of the rover staff has almost entirely turned over to new personnel. The new people get a kick out of driving a rover on Mars while also being sure that, on most days, they can clock in at eight and out at five. On the science side of things, after the long-awaited landings, the thrill of exploring Meridiani and Gusev quickly gave way to fatigue and a nagging worry that all this time spent operating the rovers is time taken away from research. Even in the earliest weeks of the mission, young Ph.D.’s and even graduate students were being thrust into the tactical science positions so that their more senior advisors could spend a little less of their time worrying about day-to-day operations and a little more time analyzing the data being returned to Earth. The four years of operations to date have seen many of these students grow up, win their degrees, find permanent positions, and get replaced by fresh faces.
Oh… I see. Women aren’t running the Mars rovers because they’re highly educated and extensively trained – they’re running them because the men who invented the things got bored. It’s just grunt work, really. Doesn’t take that much skill.
I know I’m in a precarious position here, since a) I don’t have insider knowledge of planetary science careers, and b) the article itself was written by a woman. I’m sure the situation she’s describing is true… but is it true as she’s describing it? Would we have gotten the same emphasis on “less thrilling” work and “fatigue” and grad students being “thrust into” the role if the majority of the tactical operations team were male? Would those grad students be described as bright, ambitious young stars? Would the operations team be portrayed as tough, quick-thinking, and unfazed by the stress of operating an expensive and temperamental vehicle on another planet?
My point is, even though I’m sure it wasn’t the author’s intention, our bias against women – whether it’s outright misogyny or internalized sexism – paints any activity done by women as easier than any activity done by men. And it’s so disappointing to see amazing work like this explained away as menial labor.
Of course, there is another possibility: that the author’s description of the attitude surrounding tactical operations is completely accurate, and that women just make up the majority of lower-level roles (which, cynically, would explain why the team has almost been all-women several times already). We know women are routinely excluded from higher-level jobs anyway. But why rush to explain that the work the tactical operations team is doing is less exciting than other jobs? Is it any less vital to the mission? Isn’t it possible that team members enjoy it?
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In other space news, I saw WALL-E the other day. Readers, it has happened: Pixar has achieved Optimum Cute. All other Cute will now be judged against WALL-E.
So yeah, overall I loved it. The one thing I found really frustrating, though, was the movie’s portrayal of human beings. The premise is that humans have abandoned Earth after rendering it inhabitable, and are now living on a giant pleasure-ship roaming the universe. 700 years of microgravity have caused significant bone loss, and as a result, people are too weak to walk. Early in the movie, one man falls off his floating chair and flails helplessly until WALL-E hoists him back on. Even though microgravity is presented as the cause of the weakness, the message behind it isn’t hard to miss: the inhabitants of the ship spend all their time sucking food out of cups, obeying advertisements (“Try Blue – it’s the new Red!”), and talking to each other on screens in front of their faces instead of turning their heads. The sum total of human culture is created and owned by a mega-corporation called Buy N’ Large, and people are so absorbed in the mindless comfort of consumer culture that they’ve forgotten how to take control of their own lives.
Oh, and they’re all obese.
My husband and I argued about this on the way home from the theater. My position was that the dystopian future would have been every bit as disturbing if the people had been smaller sizes; the parched Earth, all-encompassing consumerism, and lack of agency should be enough to get the point across.
My husband, however, argued that the weight was essential to the satire in the film – that an overweight body triggers an immediate recognition of pathology in us, and that if that recognition were absent, the film’s potency would be sapped. (To be clear – he acknowledged that he was coming from a place of privilege, and we ended the argument when he asked for more time to think about what I’d said. Also, I’m blogging about our conversation with his blessing.)
Here’s the first problem with that interpretation. When one talks about the message directed at “us,” who exactly is us? Is it the skinny people in the audience? The mid-weight people? The fat people? Are the people whose bodies are being used as satire actually the ones who need or deserve to be satirized? When a skinny person leaving the theater looks at a fat person and thinks, “He’s part of the problem! I hope he learned a lesson!” is she focusing on a valid target – or a scapegoat?
Because, as most people reading this blog already know, weight has a thousand times more to do with class than with laziness and consumption. Obesity rates are higher among the poor and working class, who can’t afford fresh, healthy food. Depending on where and how many hours you work, you may not have much choice about what you eat; furthermore, people living in motels and hotels are usually completely reliant on whatever restaurants happen to be in the area. Also, because of access to time, gym memberships, and personal trainers, people who consume the most resources (food, energy, land, or otherwise) often have the thinnest bodies. And it has to be said that metabolism varies widely from person to person. I can down cheeseburgers for a week straight without exercising and still look thin, escaping the scorn and unsolicited advice that my friends with slower metabolisms (and often better habits) receive. The “ideal” body weight, as we commonly understand it, is largely a myth; people are naturally a range of sizes.
So to make the implicit claim that laziness equals fat only pins the blame on the wrong people. Also, I don’t think that portraying our fictional descendants as overweight inspires the precise fear that the filmmakers intended. I really don’t think thin people are seeing this movie and thinking, “Yikes, I don’t want to live in space and depend on robots!” They’re thinking, “Yikes, I don’t want to be fat!”
Finally, even assuming that the film’s message would have been diminished if the people had been “normal” weights – why is a movie more important than real people’s lives? We all remember the proposed ban, in Mississippi, on fat people in restaurants; it came as no surprise to learn that weight plays a role in women’s job prospects. People I love are called “fat bitch” as they walk down the street. Yes, prejudice affects people. And the more we associate fat with laziness and largess, the less we do to combat the real causes of unhealthy eating habits. How can we privilege Pixar’s need to make their movie a certain way over actual people’s wellbeing?