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?
**
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?
Great post about how women’s work is devalued even in the hard sciences. As an aside, my mother in law was actually one of the programmers on the original Mars Rovers, so I guess there were a few women working on it when it was still “interesting”.
About Wall-E, I had a similar disagreement with my husband on the way out. My point, though, was that it didn’t make sense for the computers running the ship to give people more calories than they strictly needed to survive. Wouldn’t they be interested in conserving resources instead? Also, it wasn’t much of a consumerist society at that point. People were all wearing the exact same outfit and seemed to have no relationship with their bodies at all. I would have found it more believable and consistent with the overall picture if they also didn’t care about food. For that reason, I found the fat thing to be gratuitous. I think the filmmakers thought fat==lazy and so they made these people fat even though it wasn’t a necessary part of the story at all.
Also, did anyone else notice that almost everyone was white? What was up with that?
>>How can we privilege Pixar’s need to make their movie a certain way over actual people’s wellbeing?<<
We can’t. Pixar can because they don’t give a shit about fat people.
Yours is the first comment I’ve seen that mentions this and I’m glad you did. I thought I wanted to see the movie and now I’m not sure; if I do go, I appreciate the warning. The last movie I saw in a theater was “Borat” (not my idea) and there was a trailer for that execrable Eddie Murphy film where he plays his own ridiculous, obese wife. I wanted to crawl under my seat.
My daughter is already getting comments from her friends about my weight. I don’t need to take her to see another movie that will appear to justify that point of view.
I dunno, I think the point is that all of the people on the ship are put in a place of such privilege and boredom (they clearly don’t have to work), that there isn’t much to do BUT eat and talk. And the robots are programmed to be obedient, not to say “sorry pal, you’ve had enough”.
I didn’t see it as problematic in the way I initially worried about after considering that it takes place in an isolated-for-700-years, labor-less society, not… like… real life where class actually exists.
(sigh) OK, GD, I’m going to fucking vent. The goddamned fucking Viking Lander touched down on Mars when I was a Wee fucking Lad. Thirty something years later, we’re supposed to be excited about a robot-armed lander finding water? Excuse me while I yawn. It’s THIRTY YEARS LATER. We’re supposed to have a fucking COLONY on Mars by now, to say nothing of the Moon. Oh, and meanwhile, the goddamned Shuttle is being retired, we’ve got no space plane to replace it, and the newest launch platform that NASA has come up with is yet another big fucking stick with a payload on the top.
Yeah, No, Sorry. NOT fucking happy with the goddamned progress of our friggin’ Space Program. Thank you very much.
Not to be bitter or angry or all that……
*cheers toast*
exACTly
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.
There’s another interpretation that a lot of people seem to be overlooking because we’ve been so inured to the “fat=lazy” trope in our popular culture: they’ve been infantilized by the robots. They spend their days being carted around in carriages, drinking out of bottles, wearing onesies, and babbling to themselves. They’re gigantic babies who have to learn to do things for themselves and make the robots work for them instead of letting the robots do everything.
They’re giant infants who literally have to learn how to take their first steps.
I’m split on the space thing, because like Toast, I’m impatient and want more space progress and yet… Faced with how much the government spends on space research and how little it spends on, like, it’s citizens… sometimes I wonder if a funds allocation adjustment might need to take place?
Or maybe we should just stop being at war so that space and people can both get good funding. Harumph.
I find the focus on fat people in the commentary about the movie profoundly wierd. I think that it fits within the narrative of the movie’s portrayal of the society.
Maybe I’ve read too much advant garde sci-fi or something, but I find that people who wanted to complain about fat people are actually more nervous about seeing a society in which fat people are the *norm* and shuddering about *that* rather than any deep concern for fat people.
I mean, this is sci-fi, and from the sound of it (I have not seen it), an unapologetic sci-fi movie, and it sounds like it follows the sensibilities of Octavia Butler just as much as Kubrick, and she was a big one for “body-sense” discomfort. I’d have to see it to be sure, but I’ll just wait for the video. $10 for a movie is just too much.
Science inevitably funds itself in the long term. Microcomputers with silicon transistors were developed so that it would be possible to fit a computer on the Apollo capsule. You never know when one discovery in one niche is going to affect other discoveries elsewhere.
I hate to harsh on the idea of an all woman team, but it’s actually well documented that clusters of women form and dissipate regularly in science. I heard this from Millie Dresselhaus herself (look up her work yourself, what, I have to do everything for you?) while bragging about some of the all woman lab groups in my graduate alma mater. While cool, this particular team does not represent some pinnacle of diversity at JPL. When all-woman teams cease to be remarkable, that’s when we’ll have reached a pinnacle of diversity.
I agree with Frumious on this one. The all women team is a little depressing in that, well, it is news. I can certainly see the tone of the article here grating on people, but it seems to me the exciting thing might just be in the last block:
“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.”
The implication seems to be that there are simply MORE women in the new crop of post-docs. Getting experience on a high profile operations team is the track to bigger and better things.
“Also, did anyone else notice that almost everyone was white? What was up with that?”
Well aside from living entirely indoors and adapting to how much UV light the inside of the ship receives, 700 years worth of humans living in an enclosed space would probably melt them all into one race of medium-everything.
Skin might gradually lighten over many generations living indoors, but as to ethnicity, you got me.
Here’s my take on the race issue – at the beginning of the movie, it shows everyone taking off in gigantic cruise ships. Who can afford cruise ships? Those with the most resources. (How I’d love to believe that that was intentional social commentary on Pixar’s part.)
On NASA – Actually, NASA’s annual funding is only .58% of the national budget. I think we could *easily* fund both social programs and space exploration. Also, I’m aware of Viking, thanks. But I will continue to be astonished and delighted by every new thing humanity sends out there until I myself don a pressure suit and see it with my own eyes.
I’m with Mnemosyne on this one. Yeah, there are problems with the “fat=lazy” premise. But what I saw in Wall*E was that the humans had been infantalized: they’d stopped living adult lives. They were completely helpless; even proportioned more like infants than adult humans. That was what I found horrifying (as I think they intended): adult humans completely incapable of taking care of themselves because they had never been allowed to physically mature past infancy. The implication, with the shots of babies in a nursery, is that this is how all humans live all the time in the film — they’re not given a chance to walk or move, and they’ve never taken those first steps.
So, why don’t you find out? Why don’t you talk to the author and perhaps some of the women who work on the project? Why don’t you do a little research on the career path in the sciences to see whether such grunt work is typical regardless of gender? Ironic, given that this post is from someone who writes under the pseudonym “The Girl Detective”. Being a blogger is not a license to be ignorant.
“even proportioned more like infants than adult humans. ”
Because obese people? Aren’t proportioned like adults.
Also, if we’re to accept that the movie is using visual iconography to make its message – which seems likely – then if it intended to show “infantalized” and instead triggered cultural associations about “fat=lazy,” then that’s completley their failure. Like the people who made the monkey-obama t-shirt and claim not to have understood its racist implications, Pixar here does not escape through ignorance or good intention the guilt of mobilizing a fatphobic trope.
This reminds me of one of the pioneering female astronomers, Annie Jump Cannon, who got her start as a computer at the turn of the twentieth century. Doing the many, many computations that are all automated now had to be done by hand at that time, and as it was considered menial work, women were allowed to do it. It gave Cannon a keen understanding of stellar data, which was the underpinning of her work in stellar taxonomy. If the work these women are doing today is undervalued by their colleagues, then it’s they who’ll be the fools for it.
It also reminds me of an idea I had the other day — women are the most efficient means of human colonization of other planets. If an appropriate habitat could be constructed, Mars could be colonized by a single woman. Given the appropriate level of technology and training, a single woman with a number of frozen sperm vials could start her very own human family.
Looks like someone doesn’t understand the difference between “career journalist” and “blogger with two jobs.” How ignorant, hrmm, yes.
No, seriously, great rhetorical flourish at the end there. Have you tried submitting to the New Yorker?
Colony on Mars = bad idea.
Colony on Moon = bad idea.
Water on Mars = very cool.
Water in Mercury’s exosphere (just discovered) = freaking amazing.
It turns out not everything proposed in science fiction is a good idea. I know, weird.
(A few reasons why we shouldn’t/can’t live on Mars: no oxygen, very little water, no soil (with organic matter), extreme temperatures, weaker sunlight, no atmosphere to protect from cosmic rays and solar wind, etc. Plus, why? Seriously. Ask yourself why there should be people living on Mars. We’d pay billions of dollars per person so they could… be bored? We could send many advanced robot probes to every planet and moon in our solar system for the cost of one person on Mars. And, well, pretty much fund all other astronomy research too.)
I say this as an astronomer who’s struggling to get data from the Hubble telescope, which broke 4 years ago and still hasn’t been fixed, and was supposed to be decommissioned years before that but still doesn’t have a replacement. Hubble has lead to major advances in every field of astronomy, and we could put up a hundred new ones with the price of one Mars expedition. Let alone a freaking colony.
As someone who works in the aerospace industry and close to similar projects as the Rover or the (really really old!) Hubble, let me tell you that aerospace, as one of the most conservative industries “out there” is currently facing serious personnel issues–not only because it’s a largely male-dominated field, but also because, due to government funding cutbacks, senior (male) employees have been retained throughout the years while more junior (often female) employees were let go. This still puts most of the management functions, including hiring and task assigning etc. firmly in the hands of conservative men with a “linientreuer” military background, while a few women are mixed in as talking heads for PR purposes. So, your observation that, as soon as projects have passed acceptance and go into maintenance mode, they are shipped off to the “lesser workers” is right on the mark.
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