Attacked by WASPs
| Posted by Chill on 08 Mar 2010 at 04:48 pm |
Female WWII pilots get their due, after their achievements were ignored for years.
Nine months before the war ended, the WASP program was disbanded. The female fliers were told to come home at their own expense and not to talk about their achievements.
Couldn’t embarrass the poor men, now could we?
Even though the last Terminator movie was pretty bad (god, I miss the TV series), what I always have liked about the Terminator movies and series is that when a woman does something, there’s never any question about it — like, “Oh, you’re a woman, you couldn’t possibly do that.”
When the female A-10 pilot pulls off her helmet after ejecting, no big deal is made out of it that she’s not — gasp! — a man, and no one in the movie ever questions her competence, abilities or decisions (just as in the rest of the Terminator movies and series), not even jokingly or in an implied manner, based on her coincidental gender.
I know the real world isn’t like that, but I don’t always want to see the real world. Else, why would I watch sf anyway?
Incidentally, we’ve come a long way. One of the Thunderbird’s (the Air Force’s elite demonstration team) pilots is a woman, Maj. Nicole Malachowski. Cool.
I had a relative tell me that Danica Patrick had an unfair advantage in NASCAR because she weighed less. Yes, a redneck high-school graduate explaining to me how something that weighs less can go faster. “And the upper-body strength advantage that her male opponents have, fighting against the steering wheel in a 130 degree car, over the course of three hours, does that count for anything?” and they were totally speechless. “Upper body strength doesn’t matter in racing”, I was finally told.
They hadn’t even considered the possibility that guys would have an advantage. Because white guys are the standard. Everything else is abnormal, and suspect.
“If weight really mattered all that much, all the drivers would be the same size as jockeys.” I thought to say, several hours too late.
They probably aren’t aware that NASCAR cars don’t have power steering and, of course, have racing wheels — which are more precise but also much harder to wrestle with than any car they’ve ever driven.
Not that more knowledge would’ve mattered much, I suspect.