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.
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.