Every now and then you come across an article online that is so mind-bogglingly silly, it’s practically impossible to tell if it’s satire.
The following thinkpiece published this week by NBC News is that sort of article. The headline reads, “The patriarchal race to colonize Mars is just another example of male entitlement.”
Oh, boy.
“The presumed right to use and abuse something and then walk away to conquer something new is a hallmark of colonialism,” writes author and editorial and communications manager of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University Marcie Bianco.
“The desire to colonize — to have unquestioned, unchallenged and automatic access to something, to any type of body, and to use it at will — is a patriarchal one,” she explains. “Indeed, there is no ethical consideration among these billionaires about whether this should be done; rather, the conversation is when it will be done. Because, in the eyes of these intrepid explorers, this is the only way to save humanity.”
Bianco adds, “It is the same instinctual and cultural force that teaches men that everything — and everyone — in their line of vision is theirs for the taking. You know, just like walking up to a woman and grabbing her by the pussy.”
Ah, there it is. Space exploration is at least as bad as Donald Trump. But at least she didn’t compare the spaceships involved to his phallus.
Oh, hang on … No such luck, I’m afraid:
This means that while men compete with each other over whose rocket is the biggest, fastest, and best, and send playthings off to become flashy space junk, women around the world are fighting to stay alive against violent assaults on their personhood — and their planet.
In an attack directed at billionaire business moguls and space entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Bianco writes, “[T]he impulse to colonize — to colonize lands, to colonize peoples, and, now that we may soon be technologically capable of doing so, colonizing space — has its origins in gendered power structures. Entitlement to power, control, domination, and ownership. The presumed right to use and abuse something and then walk away to conquer and colonize something new.”
She goes on like that for some time, and includes everything from mentions of a lunch she had with Buzz Aldrin, to claims that humanity’s desire to explore space is connected to the “raping and pillaging” of earth.
Today, humanity is experiencing literal miracles of science and bounding toward the great void of space, making previously unimagined leaps and bounds in science and technology. But no, Houston, we have a problem, and it’s the patriarchy.
