By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
When Giovanni da Verrazzano returned from his famous
16th-century voyage exploring North America, the king of France rebuked him for
lack of gender inclusivity aboard La Dauphine.
When William Clark and Meriwether Lewis made it to the
Pacific Ocean and back, President Thomas Jefferson quizzed them about any
microaggressions they might have committed against their Indian interpreter
Sacagawea during the arduous trip.
When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and said his
memorable line about “one small step for a man,” President Richard Nixon called
to register his regret that Armstrong had strongly implied that only men could
walk on the moon.
None of this actually happened, of course, but only
because all of these epic human achievements occurred before the advent of
Twitter and the modern feminist perpetual-outrage machine. Otherwise,
Verrazzano would have been browbeaten and forced into ritual apologies long
before any of the natives got a chance to eat him.
Matt Taylor lives in a different time. He is the British
project scientist for the Rosetta mission, which succeeded last week in landing
a module on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, some 300 million miles from Earth.
The mission included a journey of 4 billion miles and is a feat that has been
compared to landing a fly on a speeding bullet. It is, in short, a thrilling
triumph for human ingenuity.
But let’s not get carried away and lose sight of
trivialities.
In discussing the mission on camera after the landing,
Taylor wore a Hawaiian-style shirt depicting cartoonish, scantily clad, buxom
women brandishing firearms. And just like that, Taylor stood for the
subjugation of women and their exclusion from the world of science. Taylor was
mercilessly condemned on Twitter and the Internet until the next day he
apologized in tears for having committed the sartorial equivalent of a
thoughtcrime.
Let’s stipulate that Taylor’s shirt — custom-made for him
by a female friend who was delighted he wore it — was tasteless. It was more
appropriate for a stroll on the Atlantic City boardwalk or for a day at Comic
Con than for any professional setting, let alone for highly public interviews
about an event generating interest around the world. Taylor could have done
worse than make a trip to Brooks Brothers prior to his star turn.
Although he is not exactly the buttoned-up type. Involved
in authoring 70 scientific papers — focusing, in the words of the NASA website,
“on energetic particle dynamics in near-Earth space and in the interaction of
the Sun’s solar wind with the Earth’s magnetic field” — the bearded Taylor has
enough tattoos to compete with the average rock star. He added one on his leg
earlier this year depicting Rosetta’s module reaching the comet as a sign of
his confidence in success. This is not your father’s Mission Control.
It’s one thing to say that Taylor would have been better
served wearing a tie, even a clip-on, on his big day; it’s another to accuse
him of a dastardly betrayal of women in science. Any young woman interested in
science who will be deterred from pursuing her dream because of one garish
shirt worn by one scientist who was practically unknown the day before
yesterday needs bucking up. Thank heavens Marie Curie wasn’t so delicate, or
she never would have won one Nobel Prize, let alone two.
The overreaction to Taylor’s shirt doesn’t just
implicitly send the message that women are helplessly vulnerable to the
smallest of unintended slights; it makes feminists look witlessly censorious
and absurdly humorless, not that they ever seem to care. The atrocity of Taylor’s
shirt will be forgotten soon enough, and it will be on to the next thing. In
the past few days, we have learned that mankind can chase down a comet speeding
through space at 34,000 mph, but resisting the outrage machine, kicked into
high gear over a trifle, is completely beyond its powers.
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