Dr Space Junk 20 Years of Blogging Feminist as Fuck Edition

This blog is 20 years old! My first post was in July 2004, when blogging was relatively new. In those pre-microblogging days (that’s what Twitter was, for those not around at the time), blogs were where all the action was. We had blog carnivals, blog rolls, web rings, bloggers fighting with each other, and all kinds of shenanigans. 

Twenty years later I have written over 400 posts, and as time has gone on, they’ve become longer and longer, and more researched. This wasn’t a conscious decision, more a reflection of how the blog’s role in my writing/research life has changed. 

To celebrate this anniversary, I made a list of the top ten most-read posts. Then I realised that the top ten posts weren’t necessarily my favourite posts, so I decided to make a list of them, which turned out to be far more than ten. So I decided to break it into smaller sections, and here we are. These are my most feminist posts, and if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen! (No stay in it because I want you to read them).

Please enjoy my Feminist as Fuck edition!

1. The spacecraft, the shirt, and the scandal (November 16, 2014)

Back in 2014, a spacecraft called Rosetta was woken from hibernation, and as the world waited with bated breath, the Philae lander was dropped onto a comet’s surface. It was an extraordinary mission, one of my favourites. But an ill-chosen shirt worn by one of the mission scientists temporarily eclipsed the achievement. Why? I gave my take in this post.

In 1930, there was tremendous excitement across the world because a new planet had been found. It was named Pluto at the suggestion of 11-year-old Venetia Burney. Of course it’s not a planet any more, but the point of this post was to look at Venetia Burney’s life in an era where women were not permitted to get university degrees. Sometimes I wonder if men realise just how far women have to be dehumanised to allow them to remain the dominant gender. And I guess this is why I write these posts, as drips that might eventually wear away the edifice of the patriarchy.

Because I was tired of men:

1. Denying that street (or workplace, or domestic) harassment occurred – you can’t believe what a woman says about her own experience, right? See post above.

2. Minimising its impact – you didn’t get raped, or physically hurt, right? And it will be couched in such passive language so the harasser doesn’t appear.

3. Telling you how to deal with it – just say no, right?

4. And failing to recognise how constant this is, and how much time and energy you have to expend just to stay safe – nothing happened, right? So why are you angry?

I thought I would explain how it works, using a recent example. Sad to say, I sent the post to a male friend to get some feedback and his response was to tell me what I’d done wrong.

Listen up, men, quit your bitching, and change your behaviour.

In case you weren’t aware that the first woman in space was being disparaged and belittled over 60 years after her spaceflight, let me disabuse you. Every year around the anniversary of her flight, you will find women celebrating her achievement on social media and men trying to tear her down. One of those men issued a challenge to me, and while I would normally react by saying ‘do your own research, buttercup’, this time I thought I would take him down. 

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So there you have my favourite posts where I have tackled women’s rights or applied feminist methods to interrogate space history and public perceptions. If this is an area which interests you, I can recommend these older publications:

Penley, Constance 1997  NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America. London: Verso

Lykke, N. and M. Bryld  2000 Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred. London: Bloomsbury Academic