If the Bible Has Taught Us Nothing Else – And It Hasn't – It's That Girls Should Stick to Girls' Sports

...the Mercury 13, the highly accomplished female pilots who tried unsuccessfully to be accepted into NASA's astronaut corps in the early days of the space program.

I was a space buff as a teenager, and I didn't hear of these women until about 5 minutes ago. And yet

...while the nation followed the exploits of John Glenn, Alan Shepard and other Project Mercury astronauts, they secretly passed the same grueling medical tests.

Cobb passed all three phases of the tests. She maneuvered tilt tables and underwent physical endurance exercises; operated space capsule controls while pitching, rolling and yawing inside a gyroscope; floated for hours in an isolation tank without sound, light or human contact; and completed psychiatric exams.

Keeping pace

The others passed two phases of tests before President Johnson shut down the experiment, concluding that there was no need for women in space. Though barred from being military jet test pilots, many women racked up more flight hours than the male astronauts, and several outperformed the men on endurance tests.

Did you catch the penultimate sentence?:

...President Johnson shut down the experiment, concluding that there was no need for women in space. [emphasis added]

Would someone please explain to me what the need was for men in space? The only "need" with respect to astronaut requirements was that they be Americans: we hadda beat them red pinko commie Russians. I can't think of anything ever done in space for which the physical differences between men and women mean jack shit.

This reminds me of the Women's Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs [no, "Airforce" there is not a typo]. They flew transport and training missions in North America during World War 2, freeing up men for combat flying. Despite military oversight they remained civilians with no military status, they had to meet the same flight standards as military pilots, they towed targets for AA training with greater diligence than military pilots, and each woman was trained to fly a wider variety of aircraft than military pilots. And some in the military gave them incredible (in the true sense of the word) grief, refusing to perform repairs on their aircraft, and even putting sugar into the fuel tanks (resulting in at least one WASP's death).

While writing this, I've been trying to think what makes men such dickheads. On average men are larger and stronger than women, and if you believe bad science, they're also smarter. So if men are just all-around better than women, how is it that they are threatened by women? Frankly, I no longer think it's to do with the psychology of gender relations. I think it's a power trip. The ones in power are in power through historical accident, not law of nature; but they like to think they have some natural right to be there, so any contradictory evidence has to be suppressed: and the best way to suppress evidence is to avoid its collection in the first place. Call it "gender psychology" if you will, but it obtains for race, too. The power-trip element is the more generalized, and therefore the more fundamental.



I left it out of the quotations above because I wanted to focus on my argument, but the fact that the Mercury 13 were news to me makes this important, too. These were the Mercury 13:

• Geraldyn "Jerri" Sloan Truhill
  
• Myrtle Cagle
  
• Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb
  
• Jan Dietrich
  
• Marion Dietrich
  
• Mary Wallace "Wally" Funk
  
• Jane Briggs Hart
  
• Jean Hixson
  
• Gene Nora Jessen
  
• Irene Leverton
  
• Sarah Ratley
  
• Bernice "B" Steadman
  
• Rhea Allison Woltman