It’s been quite some time since we last checked in with the genteel racist and Holocaust-denier who calls herself The Thinking Housewife. Flipping through her blog archive today, I could not find it in me to click on posts with such unappetising titles as “Usury and Homosexuality” and “Martin Luther King: Commie Fraud.”
But her recent post on lady astronauts got my attention. In it, Laura Wood (her real name, evidently), throws some reactionary shade at NASA for the unforgivable sin of training four women for space work and a possible trip to the Red Planet.
As Wood sees it, Mars does NOT need women, because a trip to yucky Mars pales in comparison to the joys of full-time housewifery.
[T]he things these women could accomplish within the dramatic and exciting Inner Space of their own homes so dwarfs what they could accomplish on Mars (where they won’t be going anyway), that the very suggestion is an outrage.
Wait, I thought Innerspace was the movie in which Dennis Quaid got shrunken down to microscopic size, Fantastic Voyage style, and accidentally injected into Martin Short?
Who would trade insipid, lifeless, finite Mars (Yuck!! Revolting!!) for the chance to create and influence human beings, each one of whom is a fascinating planet, an eternal sphere of consummate adventure, a being that is utterly unique and made in God’s image?
Apparently, God is a tiny bald, incontinent person who can barely walk straight and communicates mainly through shrieks and vomiting, yet is somehow also adorable?
If that isn’t power, what is?
Uh, being president? I mean, having a kid is a momentous thing, for mothers and fathers alike, and fulfilling in many ways that even being president or taking a trip to freakin Mars couldn’t ever be. (Or so I’ve heard.) But it’s not power.
And seriously, if the thing you value most about your children is that they’re small enough to boss around, you’re probably not cut out to be a parent. Go run for president, or something.
God gave men galaxies and distant planets and asteroids to compensate them for the misfortune — and unfairness — of never being able to become mothers.
And God says this where? I’m a dude with no uterus, and I never got my owner’s certificate for everything in the sky.
Outer Space takes their minds off the unfairness of it all, something women have been kind enough to recognize in the past by not denying those who have dreamed of being astronauts since they were little boys of the chance to experience the “vomit comet.”
I’m just going to let J-Law here handle my response:
Dudes, if you’re truly furious that some darn woman has stolen what should rightfully be your spot on the “vomit comet” — the affectionate name for the plane in which astronauts first get used to the joys of zero gravity — you can actually just pay these guys to have the very same experience.
Women don’t want it anyway. If someone came to my door when my children were young, blossoming creatures and said, “Hey, lady, you have just won a trip to Mars!,” I would have told him to get lost. I would do the same now.
Uh, yeah, and so would I. But I’m not all men, and you’re not all women, and neither of us has the right to be making these decisions for other people.
I just hope that Mars turns out to be as cool as the moon.
What’s with this “thinking housewife” name, anyway? Is she implying that other housewives don’t think? That’s… pretty thoughtless, wouldn’t you say?
@Anarchonist:
A magnificent post, to which I shall append only this:
Pluto is icy-cold, smothers the atmosphere out of life near it, can’t escape the orbit of other bodies and is only worthy of comment because it disturbs the rest of us. Laura “The Thinking Housewife” Wood might see it as a fellow spirit.
I would! OK, maybe not now, but 8-year-old ej (who was in Young Astronauts and participated in a few mock space missions) definitely would have. Honestly, I hate the feeling of free fall, so I would probably not do well in zero gravity (since it is essentially just falling). I’ll stay here on Earth in my microbiology lab.
Also, speaking of zero gravity, here is a brief musical interlude:
@EJ (The Other One)
Thanks!
And that’s a good point. I would go deeper into comparing celestial bodies with manospherians and their orbiters (hee hee) if I had the time. In particular, I’d like to discuss which one of the regular misogynists David covers here would identify with a huge, bloated ball of gas in a constant state of aggravation, but what the hell, we all know the answer would be Paul Elam.
Ugh, worry about yourself, Thinking Housewife. What I or any other woman does with her life doesn’t affect your life in the least.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mercury-13-Thirteen-Flight/dp/0375758933
My boyfriend loves this book (The Mercury Thirteen: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight), my birthday present to him a few years ago.
The Mercury Thirteen trained as astronauts in the early 1960s, but because they were women never got to go into space. My boyfriend wanted to be an astronaut once upon a time, but at least in those days NASA didn’t take people with less than perfect eyesight. So he could relate to their sadness.
The Thinking Housewife strikes me as an Ann Coulter wannabe. She’s just as nasty and smarmy. Does she mean one word of her rant? Whether or not she believes in the truth of her own thoughts, TTH is doing some stinkin’ thinkin’ (as they say in AA)!
TTH appears to have based her thoughts on those of Karen Horney, an early to mid-twentieth-century psychoanalyst who broke with Freud. (Actually, anyone who had ideas of their own about psychoanalysis had to break with Freud because the Great Man did not tolerate dissent.) But TTH takes Horney’s ideas and twists them into an exhortation to women to keep the patriarchy humming along.
http://www.feministvoices.com/karen-horney/
If someone had shown up at my door when my children were quite young and told me “You’ve just won a trip to Mars!” my response would have been OH YES PLEASE CAN I LEAVE RIGHT NOW RIGHT THIS INSTANT.
If they had shown up during younger son’s colic period, there would not even have been words.
Don’t want to go to Mars, but one of my deep heartfelt life goals is to see as much of this beautiful Earth as possible before I die. If someone knocked on my door and offered me the chance to travel the world vs. staying at home with kids, there is NO question which one I’d pick.
8 year old me wouldn’t have wanted to go into space. That’s because 8 year old me wanted to be an astronomer. For some reason I was very adamant on that, I think I saw being an astronomer as looking at amazing things and discovering exciting far-off stars and galaxies, and being an astronaut as just some sort of fancy flight attendant. But 8 year olds’ ideas of things are often weird.
Anyway, I honestly find her post just sad. I’m a geographer by training, and one of the reasons I’ve loved geography and wanted it as a career since I first learnt of the subject is that it’s about discovering the world and how everything interacts. It’s the amazingness of the constant “out theres” that I love. While I know there are many people very happy to just have their own little corner and recognise that’s just as valid as my learn-about-all-the-places-and-all-the-processes, I can’t comprehend how someone can have such a viscerally negative reaction to the concept of exploration and discovery.
@EJ(The Other One)
I’d like to point out that Mrs. Tereshkova wasn’t just the first woman in space, she was also a member of the highest echelon of the Soviet government, having been a member of the Politburo from the 1960s all the way to 1989. She’s also still considered a major general of the Russian Air Force, although she was retired from both the air force and cosmonaut corps by presidential fiat in 1997. And just as an aside, she was awarded the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union and not one but two Orders of Lenin.
Yes, Valentina Tereshkova is one of my absolute idols. ^_^
As someone who thinks “speciesism” is a real thing I feel compelled to point out that poor old Laika was a lady dog 🙁
(There’s also a, probably untrue, rumour that there was a female cosmonaut before Tereshkova but she died in space)
@Kat
I didn’t know about Karen Horney! That’s really interesting. I vaguely recalled I had heard of a reverse-Freud before our TTH here, but now I have a name. Thanks!
@Anarchonist
You’re welcome! I find all those early psychoanalysts fascinating, except Freud ’cause he had such a bad attitude. Talk about trying to put women in a box!
@Alan Robertshaw
I was so sad when I found out about Laika. Yes, speciesism is really real!
Why go to Mars when you have HomeGoods? Why explore space when you can decorate? Why learn to read when you can learn to bake? Now, that’s some solid logic right here.
On the other hand, Judgybitch tells us that home decor is misandry. Also misandry: colors, candles, pillows and hard chairs. What is a thinking housewife to do? Perhaps the unifying theory here is that women have the power to make their home really nice, which freaks men out, becauss a nuce home is misandry, and then men run away to space because they like everything cold, lifeless and insipid.
Got it.
@Monzach:
Thanks for that! I didn’t actually know, but now I do. She was a total badass.
@Amused
Schrödinger’s Misandry: Every object, action, thought and thing is simultaneously misandry and not misandry until such time as an MRA is asked for their opinion. The waveform resets after ten seconds and can freely change when next asked.
@Kat
Wow! Karen Horney! A blast from my past. She featured in my Ph.D. dissertation! I used her theories to study French novels!
Re: (un)thinking housewife: can we get all these various groups of reactionaries some lessons in reality? Lately in examining these beliefs, I have come to the conclusion that their (ahem) thoughts are not grounded in lived reality.
In this case, as people have pointed out: poor women have always had to work and have not had the luxury of staying at home; there are people who do not fit the gender binary; there are women who have been able to do incredible things *and* somehow have children; there are people who can’t have children.
But really, the complaint of reactionaries is always “Why aren’t people more like MEEEEEE!!??!” Because the fact that people are different from them, make different life choices, come to different conclusions is threatening.
@SFHC
That is perfect! I think we have a new law!
Someone is trying way too hard to sell her own life choices. Who is she trying to convince, us or herself?
I am a SAHM. I’m not knocking it, it just isn’t all she is pretending it is. It sure ain’t walking on Mars.
I just want to respond to the assertion that women who do not carry their children are automatically fathers.
I adopted three of my kids. I’m not a father. So why would trans women be fathers?
@ScarlettAthena
Wow! You know a lot more about Horney than I do. I admire her willingness to go against Freud and stick up for women!
This is actually the dumbest bit of her post:
Any decent parent would say the same, man or woman. “Oh, a trip to Mars? You mean I leave my kids behind on Earth and never see them again ever? Sure, sign me up.”
Karl Marx was wrong. Religion isn’t the opiate of the masses, it’s the acid trip of the masses.
“Whoa! This diaper, like, leaves trails when I wave it around in the air!”
“Have you ever, like, really looked at a pacifier? I mean REALLY LOOKED. All of eternity is in that little plastic ring, man…”
Hold it right there, madam. Planets are majestic and stately. Planets do not eat breakfast with underpants on their head and bicker over who took all the red Legos and squirt toothpaste all over the bathroom. Let’s not sentimentalize children. They are cute and amazing, yes, but they aren’t undiscovered blank continents just waiting to be colonized by your parental footprints. They’re people in their own right. And so are you. It’s supremely unhealthy to style yourself as god and master creator of someone else’s cosmos. Curate your own universe, and let your kids curate theirs.
Awesome. I’m sure that was exactly God’s thought process. “Whoops! Forgot to get a little Earthwarming gift for the guys. Nine months of throwing up and labor is already taken…hm…I know! How about an asteroid?”
So, the entire space program is driven by womb envy? Who knew?
Anyone who feels deprived because they never experienced the “vomit comet” should just visit Thinking Housewife’s blog. Same feelings of nausea and disorientation, for free!
@guy
I’m sorry, Matt Damon is no longer allowed to be an astronaut. We’ve already spent trillions of taxpayer dollars rescuing him from space strandings.
Are the only choices going to Mars or having a baby? Is there no third option that involves dinosaurs?
What is so very revolting and yucky about Mars? The pictures we have show a rocky, desert-like place. I understand that the desert isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but does TTH get queasy flying over/driving through the Mojave? Does she feel the same way about say, Saturn? What about the Moon?? So many questions!
Also, that way of expressing yourself (“revolting!! yucky!!”) probably doesn’t work on anyone who isn’t a toddler* so maybe she does need to get out more!
I don’t want to go to space OR have kids, wonder how she’d parse that?
*probably doesn’t work on all toddlers, either!