It was an
exciting week in space exploration. Early on Thursday 13th November 2014,
Australian time, the European Space Agency’s Philae lander touched down on the
surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a ten year chase.
There were
several unexpected problems with the ultimately successful mission, including the
failure of the stabilisation thruster and the harpoons, and the lack of
sunlight to power the batteries in the final landing position. Perhaps the
least expected problem, however, was the encounter between a space scientist,
his lurid shirt and a global audience.
Rosetta
mission scientist Dr Matt Taylor turned up to do a live-streamed interview wearing
a Hawai'ian-style shirt featuring drawings of half-naked blonde women posed
raunchily in corsets and leather/latex costumes, some of them delivering
'come hither' looks. It appeared to be a
sort of Goth-BDSM-Hawai'an fusion aesthetic.
To say it
hit the wrong note is an understatement.
Many people were
appalled that after so much effort has been put into getting more women into
STEM fields, this sent the message that we're not really part of the
gang. There was a social media storm of the usual responses, including threats
of violence against women who were critical, cries of 'It's just a
shirt!', and gnashing of teeth over the lengths to which stupid evil
feminists will go to make a mountain out of a molehill.
Dr Taylor
apologised. That's all good.
But even
after so much has been written about it, I think there is a little more to say
about the cultural meanings of the shirt and the performance of wearing the
shirt in that particular context.
Subjects and objects
I'll start
with an anecdote from long before internet times. Many years ago, perhaps in
the 1980s, an Australian bank purchased a work of art for the foyer of its
Sydney headquarters, in the way that wealthy institutions do. It was a large
painting of a naked woman's legs spread apart, so that the viewer looked
straight between them. Many people found this problematic. The bank's reaction
was to label them prudes who supported censorship and denied the power and
beauty of the female body. But they did eventually take the painting down.
So what was wrong
with this 'picture'?
For women,
it was a stark reminder that you could be chopped up and reduced to a single
characteristic. That you cannot control who looks at your body. That any man you
met in the bank may not be talking to you as a person, but imagining you naked
like the woman on the wall. That in the end, you're nothing more than a cunt interchangeable
with any other. It was about remembering your place, and staying in it.
Here's something else to think about. Magazine covers generally feature a person, often a celebrity. But who are these people? Do you see men on the covers of women's magazines, and women on the covers of men's magazines? Or women on the covers of women's magazines, and men on the covers of men's magazines? Overwhelmingly, it is women who are featured on BOTH. It's so normalised that few people I've ever mentioned this to have noticed before.
This is the
phenomenon of the male gaze, frequently invoked and even more frequently misunderstood. You don't see the person looking
- the person behind the camera - you see what it is they look at and the
cultural perspective that informs what they focus on. They themselves become
invisible and unexamined, while the women are offered up as commodities to be
viewed and consumed. The idea is that the gaze reproduces power relationships.
It is so pervasive in the contemporary world that even women are accustomed to adopting this perspective, looking at ourselves from behind the lens. We see it in film and television, on billboards and magazine covers, in literature, in bank foyers, and on shirts. Leading characters in films and books tend to be male (plenty of statistics about this if you're interested), and female consumers must perform an act of mental acrobatics to 'read' themselves into these characters and their perspectives - which we mostly do without even thinking about it, because there's a paucity of choice in this regard. (But imagine if you didn't have to do it). Men are much more rarely in the position where they have to think themselves into a female perspective.
This leads
us into subjectivity and objectivity. The male gaze hides the male as the
subject structuring the encounter and focuses attention on to the female body
as object. This is the same thing that Jackson Katz talks about so cogently in
his brilliant TEDx talk on how
men get written out as actors in Violence Against Women, Domestic Violence,
Intimate Partner Violence. See what I mean, even as I write those terms?
What this
means is that men are whole subjects with a single position, while women are
forced into becoming split subjects. They see themselves as objects through the
male gaze and have to assert themselves as autonomous subjects against this.
Their subjectivity is divided, and has to be negotiated on a personal
and individual basis. This takes effort, and of course many go with the path of
least resistance.
So let's get
back to that shirt.
Messages about masculinity in science
The shirt is
an illustration meant to be interpreted. It's one choice from a huge range of
things that were NOT chosen. It's a cultural choice and a personal choice.
We have the
male subject offering to the gaze of the audience an array of sexualised women,
who look out from the shirt to meet the eyes of the observer. The women are
offered as a way for other men to assess the wearer’s masculinity.
There's a
bunch of messages that we could read from this.
- I'm not a nerdy scientist. I'm a cool one with tattoos and an edgy shirt.
- I'm not a basement-dwelling space dweeb, I'm a red-blooded male who likes women too, just like you!
- Space science is sexy and attracts the chicks! (who are not space scientists themselves, unless corsets are standard lab wear).
- I'm heterosexual.
- I can totally score and indeed deserve a "10" woman - see them on my shirt.
- We have mastered the comet just like we have mastered the women who pose for us (here on my shirt).
I'm sure you
can think of other statements that the shirt translates into. These are just
the ones that occur to me. Taylor’s intentions, insofar as he might be able to articulate
them, are irrelevant here. It’s a production of cultural meanings which
requires both the conscious act of wearing the shirt, and an audience to participate
in reading the message.
But let's not quibble about this - the shirt was primarily meant to appeal to other men. The depictions of women were an exchange between the scientist and the assumed male audience, a confirmation and a performance of masculinity.
Dr Taylor's
other faux pas was the statement that the Rosetta mission was 'the sexiest
mission there’s ever been. She’s sexy, but I never said she was easy.'
The
scientist is male, and the spacecraft (like ships, continents, Mother Nature,
and the sea) is female. Rosetta is sexy but 'she's' still a 'good girl', not a
slutty spacecraft who puts her data out for anyone. Of course she responds to
appropriate commands such as Dr Taylor provides — the theme of mastery again.
For women in science, these are all 'othering' devices that reposition us from the whole subject that we know ourselves to be, to the split subject, the object under scrutiny. We're a marked category. We're exchanged between male gazes, but we can't be active participants in the exchange. We pose prettily and passively on the shirt and sadly, in the minds of some, we're supposed to do that in the lab and in the field too.
The deep past of women and science
There's
another important factor to add into the mix here. Science, especially 'hard'
science, and even more especially mathematics and physics, is meant to be more
difficult than the 'soft' humanities. We've seen a spate of opinions in recent
times from people (who should know better), who argue that the low numbers of
women in STEM fields reflects our natural capabilities. We're supposed to be
more comfortable with soft and fuzzy things which involve people and animals,
and it's genetic and evolutionary. (Don’t
get me started on that one – as an archaeologist I have strong opinions on how
the evidence is used, but that’s for another post).
Ladies,
we're just not brainy enough and there's nothing we can do about it.
The view
that women aren’t naturally capable of logical or rational thought is far older
than Aristotle, but it's worth revisiting the Aristotelian worldview because it
basically dominated science, philosophy, theology and politics in Europe from
the 4th century BCE to the Medieval period and far beyond. And I'm pretty sure
than most of those who complain that women are not seen as inferior today and
are just making it up, because feminists are whiny, haven't ever bothered to do
any historical research.
Here's a few things Aristotle actually said about women, and he wasn't alone in holding these opinions. His works, however, were used as evidence to confirm this view by later thinkers.
Woman may be said to be an inferior man (Poetics).
The female is, as it were, a mutilated male (Generation of Animals).
Females are weaker and colder in nature, and we must look upon the female character as being a sort of natural deficiency (Generation of Animals).
The female is softer in disposition than the male, is more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, and more attentive to the nurture of the young; the male, on the other hand, is more spirited than the female, more savage, more simple and less cunning. The traces of these differentiated characteristics are more or less visible everywhere, but they are especially visible where character is the more developed, and most of all in man (History of Animals).
Woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike. She is, furthermore, more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of more retentive memory. She is also more wakeful, more shrinking, more difficult to rouse to action, and requires a smaller quantity of nutriment (History of Animals).
I could find
countless other examples of this sort of thing dating from the time of the
earliest writing (see Gerda Lerner's work for an analysis), but
Aristotle will do as a representative. This has been the prevailing view of
women for the last few thousand years. It hasn't vanished since women got the
vote, or since the 1960s when equality started to be legislated for in many
nations. We know that both men and women still tend to construct women as
inferior - this has been demonstrated by blind tests such as this one over and over. Put a
woman's name on something and it will be judged as lesser than the identical
thing with a man's name on it.
The corollary
is that when women do things that are held to be the traditional territory of
men, like the hard sciences, they compromise their femininity by becoming more
masculine. (The reverse is also true). So let’s wear shirts which show the
ladies where true femininity lies!
This is what
we're up against in science. This is why we really don't need a stupid shirt to
remind us that perceptions can affect our ability to act as
thinking subjects in the world.
From little things, big things grow
To finish, I
feel it's important to point out something that often seems to be missing in
these debates: the link between the small things and the big things. Opponents
of feminism often make statements like, for example, why are you worrying about
a shirt when the real problem is why women don't stay in STEM? (The kind of
contrast that Richard Dawkins is fond of making and indeed has already made in
relation to the shirt). It makes me want to scream and tear my hair out. Can't
they see that the two are connected, that the minor instance is an expression
of the same ideology that leads to the big problem? The kinds of analogies that
make this easy to understand tend to be unpopular, but it doesn't take much
imagination to draw them, so I will leave that up to you.
The
underlying view of the world doesn't change until individual people start to
act based on a different view. The aggregation of a thousand personal everyday
choices, like what shirt you wear on the television, add up to either support
or subvert the status quo.
Make no
mistake: for women to be treated as equals in STEM, the status quo needs to be
subverted.
(Sleep well,
little Philae)
Many thanks to @lynleywallis and @deborahbrian for their helpful comments.
Updated 19/11/2014 to correct minor formatting and style issues.
Updated 19/11/2014 to correct minor formatting and style issues.
