TIL that Svetlana Savitskaya, the second woman in space, arrived at Mir (modular space station) in 1982, where she was greeted with an apron as a welcome present, and jokingly told to get to work in the kitchen by her fellow cosmonauts.
TIL that Svetlana Savitskaya, the second woman in space, arrived at Mir (modular space station) in 1982, where she was greeted with an apron as a welcome present, and jokingly told to get to work in the kitchen by her fellow cosmonauts.
With a modern mindset of expectations in the workplace and the level of work and talent required for anyone to become a cosmonaut then this would be an instant dismissal for those involved, it simply would not happen today as expectations of professionalism are made crystal clear.
Outside of simple wordplay (dad jokes) humour and inside jokes in the workplace are now almost completely inappropriate.
If I had gone to a space station with an all female crew and they handed me a full trash bag, and a toolbox and told me to get to work I’d find it hilarious. I guess you have to know your audience when it comes to jokes, and the threat of it becoming an ‘HR issue’ means workplaces have less fun and laughter than they used to.
Maybe I’m just an out of touch millennial.
You’re out of touch but it has nothing to do with the year you were born.
Could you let me know what the problem is with my take?
Not trying to troll, the downvotes for my post and upvotes for yours tell me I’ve got the bad take here, just genuinely trying to see how specifically I’ve got it wrong.
Historical baggage. Women have been “othered” in male dominated spaces for a very longtime and their accomplishments systemically diminished.
This woman trained very hard to get to be a cosmonaut, only to get there and be greeted with sexism. It’s very problematic and not a joke. She should’ve been greeted with enthusiasm and excitement for her and everyone elses accomplishment of being in space. Instead she got an apron.
A good rule to follow for jokes in the workplace is its only funny if everyone’s laughing. Otherwise it’s just adult bullying.
If the target of the joke isn’t laughing, but everyone else is…the joke teller just bullied someone.
She was laughing, avoiding to herself
Your empathy for women is impaired by a false assumption. You imagine that you can simply put yourself in the same position with the appropriate change in roles and understand how a woman should feel in that situation. But you’re wrong. You’re ignoring how a lifetime of oppression creates a context that changes a person’s interpretation of a situation. You can’t just imagine the situation being reversed, you have to imagine an entire life being reversed.
Yes. Not just “imagine you were given a tool box.” Imagine you’ve been told your entire life that all you’re good for is being a basic handyman and you work incredibly hard against people biased into believing that about you to become an astronaut. You finally make it to space. You’ve done it. You’ve proven you’re good for more than handiwork.
And you get onto the space station and your peers spend their time joking that you actually ought to be the station’s handyman instead.
Because it is a shit take. Thank you, good night.
It’s not “just an innocent joke”. It’s demeaning and ruining her greatest achievement in life by being shit colleauges. It immediately sets the relation between her and other astronauts and basically tells her that her only worth is cooking. If you don’t see anything wrong with that, or you want to go “is just a joke why u serioooous loool we jokiiiing” then I can’t help you.
Funny, she didn’t see anything wrong with it either
I’m assuming they had all worked together for some years previously, did it really ruin this achievement? Did it ruin their working relationship? Or are you projecting how you would feel, or how you think she should feel?
She was the first person to weld in space, I think as far as breaking stereotypes go, you can’t really top that.
I suppose I see this as a joke about stereotypes to the one person in the world (or off the world) that it applies to least, rather than sexism.
I read that she replied “I assumed you would be doing the cooking”, and they joked back “don’t worry, we’ll make you something”, to me it just seems like colleagues joking around that we are all reading too much into 40 years later.
There is a lot more to humor than just dad jokes and sexist jokes. I’m sure some workplaces are devoid of humor, but there is a lot of space to have good appropriate humor at the workplace. I’m sure this varies from workplace to workplace.
This is true, I remember one colleague who loved his car more than anything, had it as his desktop background, and went to car shows at weekends.
On his birthday during lunch we filled it with happy birthday balloons, floor to ceiling and watched out the window as he tried to work out what to do with them, how to get in and get home. I think that was the last time I truly laughed at work.
He came in to get some scissors to burst the balloons and called us bastards, but he was laughing just as much as we were.
I’m thinking like… It’s just a humor joke thing. From the reading it seems like it was banter and the quick joke was acknowledged and everyone moved on. I think that people get overly sensitive with some things.
It’s great to have an open mindset to learn but that can go both ways.
Yes indeed, you had me in the first half. I remember men being at the whim of women since… forever. I remember the decades of fighting it took for men to get the right to vote. I remember that 81% of all men will experience sexual harassment in their lifetime. Oh wait, that’s all women!
The problem is you have no perspective, no idea what it’s like to be a woman. As another dude neither do I, but I have empathy, I listen to them, and I believe them when they tell me their experiences and struggles.
You may be a millennial, but you’re definitely out-of-touch.