Source (Archive)
Many years ago, I had a very dear friend who was one of the senior engineers working on the space suit project for NASA (and its predecessor agency) in the early years of manned space flight. He is long deceased, more the pity. I think anyone who knew him still misses him. His was a wise, insightful, humble, and curious mind that never left a stone unturned when he was looking for an answer to a problem.
One of the many stories he told over beer and chips in the living room involved the difficulty NASA was having designing a space suit for women. The big problem was how to make it possible for a woman to pee in space where there is no gravity to help draw the product away from the producer. In zero gravity and without some kind of suction device, bubbles of urine will go careening off around the space suit or cabin.
For men, a “comdom” type catheter can be attached to a suction device inside the space suit, but for women, any kind of catheter has to be physically invasive, inserted directly into the bladder. That opens a channel for infections, which can quickly become quite serious. According to my friend, NASA did not want to take a chance on an astronaut developing a bladder infection while unable to access medical care from orbit. Understandable, but unfortunate.
Said friend recounted a meeting he attended with the space suit design team and some NASA executives. There were ten or a dozen men around the table, and no women. Not a surprise, and anyone who is miffed is deservedly so. Certainly my friend thought that was not appropriate.
During the discussion, it turned out that none of the men around the table except for him had the least idea of how women void their bladders. My friend had taken some pre-med courses in college before settling on engineering as a career, and turned out to be the only one who had the remotest idea of how the differences between men’s and women’s bodies actually work. He took over the meeting, and gave a long, illustrated lecture about the process they were trying to accommodate. He was given the assignment of designing a “Female Urine Collection Kit” — go ahead and make a face at the acronym — and after about a year of experiments with everything from a urinal with a suction device to a rubber diaper with a tube for a “penis,” and with a lot of help from just about every woman who worked at the space suit company, they came to the conclusion that the only safe way, and most comfortable way, to allow women to pee in a space suit was to use the inserted catheter. (I don’t know whether the space program still does this. I will welcome some word from people in a much better place to know than I am)
But that’s not the point of this little essay. The point is truly that men don’t know a damn thing about how women’s bodies work, or for that matter, how their own bodies work. A related rabbit hole is to look for studies of the differences between men and woman in response to visual erotic stimuli. The general ignorance of the action of pheromones on human response is another one. There was, probably still is, a belief among high school girls that placing vaginal discharges on the pulse points will attract boys. A tidier, and more expensive, version of this is the use of perfume containing civet (an animal erotic scent) to attract men. But in truth there is not a lot of credible research into either of these topics. Neither is magic.
This ignorance is ancient, and has had terrible implications for the women involved. How many “witches” were burnt for “enchanting” men in the Middle Ages? That is really code-speech for the men having an involuntary erection when they saw an attractive woman. The covering of the face and head, particularly the hair, was actually a way to prevent girls from showing an erotic trigger, putting the burden on them to keep the boys from acting out their animal urges. This attitude is of a piece with the constant thrum of girls being punished or sent home from school for wearing “provocative” clothing while the boys who succumb to the “provocations” with bad behavior go scot free. Then there’s the Taliban…
Men in the anti-abortion movement are jus as ignorant as any horny medieval peasant, or any Taliban bigot. The idea that women can choose which sperm cell can meet up with an ova is pure foolishness, and just as baseless as the belief that a glimpse of a woman’s hair is a kind of magical enchantment. For what it’s worth, female ducks can save a selected drake’s sperm for months in their complex vaginas, and can actually prevent the sperm from an unfavored drake from making it to the ova. The last time I looked, though, none of the women I know are ducks. (Ducks have pretty brutal sex life, another interesting rabbit hole.)
Would it help to educate the boys, and for that matter, a lot of the girls — and men and women too — as to what’s going on? Well, yeah, it probably would. But it is very difficult to educate people who already think they know something into realizing that they are wrong. Cognitive dissonance is a watchword today, and I’m kind of afraid that we will have to work around that mental cacophony for a long, long time.
Many years ago, I had a very dear friend who was one of the senior engineers working on the space suit project for NASA (and its predecessor agency) in the early years of manned space flight. He is long deceased, more the pity. I think anyone who knew him still misses him. His was a wise, insightful, humble, and curious mind that never left a stone unturned when he was looking for an answer to a problem.
One of the many stories he told over beer and chips in the living room involved the difficulty NASA was having designing a space suit for women. The big problem was how to make it possible for a woman to pee in space where there is no gravity to help draw the product away from the producer. In zero gravity and without some kind of suction device, bubbles of urine will go careening off around the space suit or cabin.
For men, a “comdom” type catheter can be attached to a suction device inside the space suit, but for women, any kind of catheter has to be physically invasive, inserted directly into the bladder. That opens a channel for infections, which can quickly become quite serious. According to my friend, NASA did not want to take a chance on an astronaut developing a bladder infection while unable to access medical care from orbit. Understandable, but unfortunate.
Said friend recounted a meeting he attended with the space suit design team and some NASA executives. There were ten or a dozen men around the table, and no women. Not a surprise, and anyone who is miffed is deservedly so. Certainly my friend thought that was not appropriate.
During the discussion, it turned out that none of the men around the table except for him had the least idea of how women void their bladders. My friend had taken some pre-med courses in college before settling on engineering as a career, and turned out to be the only one who had the remotest idea of how the differences between men’s and women’s bodies actually work. He took over the meeting, and gave a long, illustrated lecture about the process they were trying to accommodate. He was given the assignment of designing a “Female Urine Collection Kit” — go ahead and make a face at the acronym — and after about a year of experiments with everything from a urinal with a suction device to a rubber diaper with a tube for a “penis,” and with a lot of help from just about every woman who worked at the space suit company, they came to the conclusion that the only safe way, and most comfortable way, to allow women to pee in a space suit was to use the inserted catheter. (I don’t know whether the space program still does this. I will welcome some word from people in a much better place to know than I am)
But that’s not the point of this little essay. The point is truly that men don’t know a damn thing about how women’s bodies work, or for that matter, how their own bodies work. A related rabbit hole is to look for studies of the differences between men and woman in response to visual erotic stimuli. The general ignorance of the action of pheromones on human response is another one. There was, probably still is, a belief among high school girls that placing vaginal discharges on the pulse points will attract boys. A tidier, and more expensive, version of this is the use of perfume containing civet (an animal erotic scent) to attract men. But in truth there is not a lot of credible research into either of these topics. Neither is magic.
This ignorance is ancient, and has had terrible implications for the women involved. How many “witches” were burnt for “enchanting” men in the Middle Ages? That is really code-speech for the men having an involuntary erection when they saw an attractive woman. The covering of the face and head, particularly the hair, was actually a way to prevent girls from showing an erotic trigger, putting the burden on them to keep the boys from acting out their animal urges. This attitude is of a piece with the constant thrum of girls being punished or sent home from school for wearing “provocative” clothing while the boys who succumb to the “provocations” with bad behavior go scot free. Then there’s the Taliban…
Men in the anti-abortion movement are jus as ignorant as any horny medieval peasant, or any Taliban bigot. The idea that women can choose which sperm cell can meet up with an ova is pure foolishness, and just as baseless as the belief that a glimpse of a woman’s hair is a kind of magical enchantment. For what it’s worth, female ducks can save a selected drake’s sperm for months in their complex vaginas, and can actually prevent the sperm from an unfavored drake from making it to the ova. The last time I looked, though, none of the women I know are ducks. (Ducks have pretty brutal sex life, another interesting rabbit hole.)
Would it help to educate the boys, and for that matter, a lot of the girls — and men and women too — as to what’s going on? Well, yeah, it probably would. But it is very difficult to educate people who already think they know something into realizing that they are wrong. Cognitive dissonance is a watchword today, and I’m kind of afraid that we will have to work around that mental cacophony for a long, long time.
