“How does it feel,” asks Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, while arguing that the first human on Mars should be a woman, “to watch a person of your gender set foot on a faraway celestial body for the first time? Could you write to me, men, and let me know?”
I was only a child on the one and only occasion that a man has set foot on another celestial body for the first time, but I can answer her question. It felt amazing. Though I didn’t watch the moon landing live (my parents were not the sort to let their young children stay up until three in the morning even to watch history being made), along with much of humanity I watched the footage avidly the next day. I looked up at the moon and thought, there are people there. It sparked a lifelong interest in space. For years I had a perfectly serious ambition to be an astronaut. Who knows, in this era of renewed progress in spaceflight technology, maybe I’ll live long enough to do it simply by buying a ticket. And if I do, it will be the fulfilment of a dream that started with that one small step for a man.
At this point the alert reader might object that as I am female and Neil Armstrong was male I have never watched a person of my gender setting foot on a celestial body for the first time. But that does not stop me answering the question. You see, the splendour of that moment had nothing whatsoever to do with Armstrong being male and everything to do with him being human.
Being a kid in NZ I was able to watch the first moonwalk in an enchanted classroom. Armstrong’s sex never entered our minds (surprisingly, as we were otherwise obsessed with it)! I guess you need a particular perspective to make it an issue (and preclude one from enjoying the achievement). Sad.
The Frankfurt School of Marxism left really are obsessed with this race-gender-and-sexual-orientation stuff.
It makes no difference if the first person to land on Mars is a man or a woman.
Natalie – did you mean to write “… the one and only occasion that a man has first set foot on another celestial body…”?
I once met a man who had walked on the moon. It was David Scott and the occasion was a party at a Hungarian embassy. I’m a very gregarious chap and can chat with anybody but, when we were introduced and I shook his hand, I found that I was inexplicably tongue tied.
I mean, what do you say, to a man who has walked on the moon, that he hasn’t heard a million times before?
[Rob, oops, as you spotted I left out the words “for the first time”. I’ve now inserted them. Thanks for the correction – NS]
There is one very good reason for the dearth of female astronauts – plumbing and how to dispose of the waste. There are medical complications concerned with permanently installed catheters.
It would if it were Hillary.
How long before we hear from NASA that Neil Armstrong had scheduled his sexual reassignment surgery before his untimely death, and that when he landed on the moon he was actually a woman stuck in the wrong body, and thus the first man on the moon was a woman?
I’d be perfectly happy to have Hillary as the first person on Mars. Provided it was guaranteed that the bitch couldn’t come back.
Come on Elon, you’ve done rocketry, tunnelling and electric cars (kinda), time to make our wishes come true and kick Hillary’s whiney ass to Mars.
From the point of view of logistics, an all female Martian crew could make sense provided you picked the smallest possible candidates.
Save a lot of volume and weight on food and life support then.
“Come on Elon, you’ve done rocketry, tunnelling and electric cars (kinda), time to make our wishes come true and kick Hillary’s whiney ass to Mars.”
Yeah. Why didn’t he put Hillary inside the space suit in the Tesla that they blasted into space??
Everyone knows that women are from Venus.
Ms Cosslett could do worse than read Mary Roach’s excellent book ‘Packing for Mars’, which describes in probably-excessive detail just what physical privations and mental torments the first explorers to travel to Mars will have to endure in order to make the journey there and back. If performed upon (let us say) prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, they would rightly be condemned the world around as unconscionable tortures.
History has shown us that such things are much-more-likely to be tolerated, and even welcomed, by men than by women.
llater,
llamas
Actually history has taught us that civilisation is more comfortable inflicting that stuff on men. A handful of individuals willing to undergo that stuff from either gender are firmly at the margin, not demonstrative of half the population.
Put in context of suicide rates and work place deaths and you can show a wider trend though.
I am unsure whether any left-hander has set foot on the Moon. Should I feel excluded, oppressed and marginalized?
Surellin – of course you should! Victimization is a growth industry; not only should you declare your victimhood, you should invent completely new and original ways in which you are victimized. Share your pain with the world!
I was in primary school in 1969 and our teacher made us do a long project on the moon landing.
By the time it happened I was bored by it and I can’t remember the actual event.
The fact that Neil Armstrong was the same sex as me was of no interest.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, get back in line – you know as well as I do that anti-islamophobes, anti-racists, anti-transphobes and etc., all take precedence over mere feminists. How dare you steal the victimhood of more intersecting people!
I too was not allowed to stay up late enough to see the 1969 landing but I recall the Apollo 8 astronauts broadcasting the bible to me from their lunar orbit, circa Christmas 1968, while looking pretty white, being married with children, and in other ways unintersecting much more than mere femaleness. She ought to realise that the first person on Mars has vastly more important boxes to tick (for starters, their gender clearly has to be trans).
I think she needs to check her privilege. (I assume she knows what that phrase means. I was never sure whether it meant “check it’s still working OK” or “check it into left luggage – for later re-collection,” or what.)
At this point the alert reader might object that as I am female and Neil Armstrong was male I have never watched a person of my gender setting foot on a celestial body for the first time. But that does not stop me answering the question. You see, the splendour of that moment had nothing whatsoever to do with Armstrong being male and everything to do with him being human.
” the splendour of that moment had nothing whatsoever to do with Armstrong being male”
No – it had everything to do with the fact that he was a naval aviator and a test pilot.
I detest lying hypocrites. Feminists are not merely mistaken, they’re hypocrites, generally speaking of course.
They’re hypocrites because they say that they are for equality and that things like race, gender, sex don’t matter…and then they proceed as if it’s the most important thing in the world that the “first” of this or that be someone “of color” who is, obviously, female.
“We’re for equality” they beam. No, sorry, they’re for gyno-mastery of the human race. Even the “woo-woo” characters think that since we’re entering the “Age of Aquarius”, then the mastery by men will be pulled back and the mastery by women will take place, balancing the debt. Well, again, no, sorry.
That’s the socio-spiritual equivalent of the gambler’s fallacy. You don’t flip more Tails on a coin to “make up” for a running deficit just because your coin and the flips are fair and the overall average will be approx 50%. What will happen is that the Heads flips and the Tail flips will “rise together”, and each, divided by the whole (number of flips) will tend to approach 50%.
Feminists don’t know the difference between masculinity and “toxic masculinity”. They don’t know the difference in male leadership and male rulership, between male co-existence and male dominance. And they sure as hell don’t know the difference between toxic masculinity and the divine masculine.
If there is a divine masculine and divine feminine, and if there is to be an “awakening” and balance, then both will rise together, not one dominating the other.
Modern feminists are obviously shooting for female domination. The truly sad thing is that they are not merely at war against masculinity, they’re at war against femininity as well. They can’t help but see men as “toxic” and women as victims.
Want to be a stay-at-home mother, nurture your children, whom you adore? Then you are “setting back the movement 50yrs”. Because apparently feminists are at war with the family.
Not at war with the family you say? Oh, just masculinity, femininity, motherhood, fatherhood and child birth…that’s all. LOL.
Modern Feminist: “It’s wrong for someone to be in a position just because they’re male; let’s put someone in that position just because they’re female!”
Modern Feminist, continues: “Why doesn’t anyone take me seriously??” “Take me seriously or I’ll make it a crime not to!!”
Modern Feminist, with green skin and a pointy hat: “…and your little dog too!!”
(Cue frightened pug).
What you’ll NEVER hear from the Left:
“Lets send someone to mars based solely and purly on their merits and abilities, turning a complete blind eye to their race, sex, gender and anything else inconsequential.”
Sorry, I don’t understand your words. Aren’t there 47 genders? What does “woman” mean? What does “feminist” mean? Isn’t gender a social construct and purely subjective and arbitrary?
Now Thai, the little dog was a Cairn terrier, not a pug.
Accuracy is important.
.
And, wrt your comment immedjitly above, surely you’re not intending to bring toxicmalepatriarchical logic into it. Are you. 😈
Julie, if it looks like a pug, walks like a pug, then that’s just a dirty rotten shame. LOL
😆 yerself! (Except, I likes pugs! 😈 )