“I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing.”
14th November 2014
No one knows why Taylor chose to wear that shirt on television during a massive scientific mission. From what we can tell, a woman who goes by the name of Elly Prizeman on Twitter made the shirt for him, and is just as bewildered as he must be that anyone might be upset about her creation. But none of that actually matters. What matters is the fact that no one at ESA saw fit to stop him from representing the Space community with clothing that demeans 50 percent of the world’s population. No one asked him to take it off, because presumably they didn’t think about it. It wasn’t worth worrying about.
Of course, if he’d been black, nobody would have dared open his (or, more accurately, her) mouth about it.
Of course, if he’d been black, he wouldn’t be involved in landing a spacecraft on a comet.
But this merely illustrates that for some people (even in the supposedly ‘technical’ press) their political agenda intrudes on every aspect of their lives — they still haven’t gotten over the fact that the only people who have been to the moon were white and male.
UPDATE: John C. Wright addes the choicest comment: ‘If I wrote this in a parody SFF story, no editor would buy it. It is too far beyond belief.’