Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [23]
The same guide also includes a lesson on “Masculine and Feminine Psychology” with a table of “characteristics.”Males are more realistic, females more idealistic. Men are more emotionally stable, women are more emotionally liable. Man loves his work, woman loves her man. And, my favorite,Men are more likely to be right, women more likely to be wrong.
I accepted these twisted sexist messages of Catholicism so completely that in my senior year of high school I wrote a term paper on why women should not be allowed to attend college. After all, I eloquently reasoned, they never did anything with an education. They only attended college to find a husband. They were needlessly filling classes and taking seats from males who would require the education to get jobs…real jobs. I received an A on the paper. I had learned my lesson well.
The Hollywood movies of my childhood did nothing to dispel what I was learning in school. The men were always depicted as theaction gender, be they cowboys in action against the Indians, a soldier in action against the Japanese, or an astronaut saving humanity. The women were always the passive gender, waiting at home, cooking, and caring for the children. They were only active when the letters and telegrams came that their heroic men had taken an arrow, bullet, or meteor. Then they cried. After all, they were moreemotionally liable.
To further guarantee my ignorance of females, I had lived and worked in environments awash in testosterone my entire life. I was raised in a family of one girl, five boys. My sister was nine years younger than me. This was no Brady Bunch house filled with teen girls to give me a clue about how to act and what to say around females. I recall one of my wildlife-enthusiast brothers had a basketball on which he had written,I hate girls. Bighorn sheep, I like. That about summarized the Mullane boys’ attitude toward females. We were more comfortable around four-legged animals than a human carrying an X chromosome.
I didn’t go to either my junior or senior prom. At the few dances I did attend I stood against the gym wall with the other nerds, dweebs, and losers attempting to fight off impure thoughts. When there would be a girl-ask-boy dance, I would be left against that wall. The girls at St. Pius X High School weren’t stupid. In my entire four years of high school I doubt I accumulated more than a couple hours talking to girls. My senior yearbook doesn’t have a single entry from a girl. In fact, it bears only one dedication. It’s from a fellow dweeb that reads,You missed Korea, but here’s hoping you make Vietnam . It probably comes as no surprise that when I graduated I was as virginal as Mary the Mother of God.
The West Point of my era was another all-male bastion. Cadets joked that the mortar in the granite walls was actually semen. My Company K-1 marching song included the lyrics “We make the cum fly.” West Pointers of my era looked at women with the same leering eye as a convicted felon doing thirty to life. Flirtation Walk, so romantically depicted in the movies, was littered with more used rubber than a Firestone test track. My West Point experience reinforced what Catholicism had taught me—women were nothing more than sex objects.
The USAF officer corps that I entered in 1967 was also a male organization. I never encountered a female flyer. Strippers entertained us at the O’club on Wednesday and Friday nights. Military flyers saw women only as receptacles. If anyone from my era says otherwise, they must be running for Congress. Women may be from Venus and normal men may be from Mars, but military flyers are from the planetARRESTED DEVELOPMENT (AD).
When I walked into the astronaut office on day one, I didn’t have the slightest sense of how to incorporate the six TFNG females into my work life. My behavior and vocabulary around them was exactly as it was around men. I recall an early incident of telling a joke