On Washington Post’s “A Woman on the Moon” Article

The Washington Post recently published an article by their gender columnist, Monica Hesse, A woman on the moon: How has one small step taken so long?

I respectfully ask that you, the reader, take the time to read this admittedly long critique of Hesse’s article, and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.

To begin, please note that I’m a proud lifelong reader of the Post, who nevertheless has long noticed the paper’s gender bias, most notably its imbalanced coverage of domestic violence.

But my pride in the Post turned to quiet outrage after the paper published two undeniably gender-biased articles in 2018: Why can’t we hate men? and Amber Heard’s infamous op-ed that ultimately embarrassed the Post¹, cost Heard millions, and proved beyond doubt that men can be victims of violent women.

Hesse’s article is another example of the Post’s gender bias. In her enthusiasm to hail a first woman on the moon, she conveniently ignored or misrepresented many important parts of the story.

Please don’t misunderstand. As a lifelong supporter of expanding opportunities for women, I was inspired by Sally Ride’s historic space flight and look forward to having a woman and an astronaut of color walk on the moon.

But with that said, here’s why I say that Hesse’s article provided an unbalanced perspective:

First, the article opened with a misandrist anecdote that mocked NASA’s male engineers in charge of equipment who were helpfully trying to determine how many tampons they should provide in case Sally Ride had her period while in space.

Note that these men were engineers, not doctors. They were also men. Is it reasonable to expect “half the population” (to borrow a phrase Hesse uses in her article) who, never having had a period themselves, to know everything about the monthly menstrual cycle? Does Hesse know everything about being a man?

One may say that it’s merely a humorous story and that I should “lighten up”. But what if I started an article about the Titanic sinking with the following riddle:

“What’s the definition of a feminist?”

Answer: “She’s the one in the lifeboat complaining that she can’t hear the band playing.”

I believe that Hesse’s opening anecdote is meant to mock men and masculinity. That it took the first fifth of the article (yes, I calculated it) that otherwise celebrates putting a woman on the moon seems to confirm its real purpose.

Next, Hesse wrote that it was reasonable that the first astronauts “… should be drawn from a pool of military test pilots …”, but because women couldn’t be test pilots, she said that this requirement “… eliminated half the population”. (As one commenter wrote, the requirement “…eliminated approximately 99.9999999% of the population” … why focus only on women?)

But what her article conveniently overlooked is the underlying reason why this female half of the population wasn’t considered: for all of human history women have been protected from many of the burdens and extreme dangers placed only on men.

In particular, women have long been safe from hazardous military service that ultimately produced NASA’s male‑only military test pilots.

Women, with very few exceptions, have also been completely exempt from military conscription, whereas men for all of history have been conscripted, often unwillingly and even under the threat of death, to risk their lives in war. (The conscription of Russian men to fight in Ukraine provides a ghastly current example.²)

Finally, women have never been expected to work in dangerous coal mines or in most of the “death professions”, where men are many times more likely than women to be killed.

I imagine that this massively unequal sharing of life’s risks between the genders is what John Glenn was alluding to in his statement that Hesse quoted: “The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order”.

In both war and work, women have always been the protected sex.

I believe that Supreme Court justice and three times-wounded Civil War veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes best summarized this inequality between the sexes in a single sentence:

“All societies rest on the death of men”.

If one really thinks about it, he was right, don’t you think?

Why can’t Hesse and other feminists see the enormous hypocrisy when women, who have never been expected to share the same burdens as men, then self-righteously claim, almost as a birthright, to be included in the glory of space exploration?

Or the hypocrisy of being accepted to the nation’s military academies without the same draft cards required of the other “half of the population”?

Or the hypocrisy to be the recipients of a feminist-driven “preferential equality” in the nation’s colleges and universities via a twisted Title IX, where male students’ civil rights are being annulled in campus kangaroo courts in the name of “equal educational opportunity”?

Or the hypocrisy not to insist on having equal numbers of both men and women working in coal mines?

Why haven’t feminists demanded a “Title IX for Coal Mines” or an affirmative action program for equality in the death professions, where the male-to-female occupational death gap is 13 to 1?

The answer is “feminist hypocrisy”.

Hesse was so focused on the unfairness that women weren’t eligible to become astronauts, she and other self-righteous women, both then and now, have blinded themselves to an obvious fact:

The early space program was no place for novices or women without test flight experience.

Two near-disasters in space that were averted only by Neil Armstrong’s many years of test flight experience clearly show why:

As described in How Landing the First Man on the Moon Cost Dozens of Lives, Armstrong’s first trip to space nearly ended catastrophically:

“Armstrong himself encountered near-disaster during his first space mission, Gemini 8. After a critical onboard failure, Armstrong and pilot David Scott began spinning out of control in space. After struggling to resist blacking out, Armstrong eventually regained control and landed safely.”

This YouTube video vividly shows just how Armstrong’s skills avoided disaster.

What if it had been two women without test pilot experience flying in Gemini 8?

We would have had two dead women floating in orbit around the earth.

How many people are aware of the harrowing first landing on the moon as Armstrong manually took over the controls of the lunar module Eagle as he struggled with multiple simultaneous problems that occurred during the final descent to the moon’s surface?

This scary landing is vividly described in a space.com article, Apollo 11’s Scariest Moments: Perils of the 1st Manned Moon Landing. A small excerpt conveys only a portion of the sheer terror of the landing – and the cool-headed flying skills of Neil Armstrong:

“‘Give us a reading on that program alarm,’ Armstrong said. He sounded tense, but no more so than during the simulations. It was hard to grasp that a life-or-death struggle was playing out 240,000 miles (386,000 kilometers) from Earth, in a small, fragile machine descending rapidly to the moon. Communications were spotty; the computer was threatening to quit, and Gene Kranz, the flight director for this first lunar landing, felt Mission Control slip a bit further behind the power curve.”

What if it had been two women without test pilot experience landing on the moon?

We would have had the corpses of two women still sitting on the moon some fifty years later.

Finally, her article describes NASA physician William Lovelace’s own independent, privately-funded program where he gave 13 selected women the same physical and psychological tests administered to the male Mercury astronauts; how none were admitted into NASA’s official program; and how the Russians were first to put a woman into space.

Unfortunately, Hesse’s account leaves out some really interesting details.

First, the Russians put the first woman in space only because they became aware of Dr. Lovelace’s renegade program.

This is described in an Atlantic magazine article, The Soviet Space Program Was Not Woke:

“The effort to bring women into the Soviet astronaut corps began when Nikolai Kamanin, the head of cosmonaut training, heard [about Dr. Lovelace’s wayward program].

“We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American,” Kamanin wrote in his journal. “This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women.” A search began shortly thereafter, and the first female astronaut candidates reported for training in 1962.

“Kamanin couldn’t have said it any more plainly. The impetus was nationalistic—any [gender] egalitarian impulse was in service of that primary motivation. Soviet women would fly to space for one of the same reasons that the rockets carrying them did: to beat their Cold War enemy.”

So, despite Hesse’s insinuation otherwise, the Russian’s weren’t “blazing trails for gender equality” any more than the Americans were.

Second, she omitted the real motivation for Dr. Lovelace’s wayward program – it wasn’t for gender equality!

The real reason is described in another Atlantic article, Why Women Weren’t Allowed to Be Astronauts

“[Dr.] Lovelace may sound progressive for his time, but his reasoning for including women wasn’t. Lovelace imagined a future full of space stations circling Earth, carrying people busy at work. ‘He was thinking that if you’re going to have dozens of people on space stations, then you’re going to need secretaries, you’re going to need telephone operators, you’re going to need lab assistants—and that means you need women,’ … ‘So he’s thinking about the women for very much traditional, pink-collared, gendered jobs.’”

So, despite her insinuation, Dr. Lovelace wasn’t “blazing trails for gender equality” any more than John Glenn was.

Third, Hesse wrote that Valentina Tereshkova, the Soviet’s first woman in space “… hadn’t been a test pilot either”, which strongly suggested that the “test pilot” requirement of the U.S. program was too restrictive against women.

However, this implication ignores a crucial difference between the Soviet and U.S. space programs. As described on this NASA website page,

“Although piloting was not a requirement for the female candidates (the Vostok spaceship was more or less automated), parachuting was, especially because after reentry Vostok cosmonauts ejected from the capsule and parachuted to the ground separately.”

So, Tereshkova not having test pilot experience was irrelevant. She was chosen because of her skydiving experience.

I know that Hesse’s position as a “gender columnist” at The Washington Post really means a “female perspective gender columnist”, but she seems to forget that there are two sexes. In the interest of true – and fair – gender equality, we can only pray that she considers and starts writing about the other “half of the population” and the burdens and extreme dangers placed only on men?

You know…the ones that feminists don’t want to acknowledge.

Notes: