A rocket ship lands on a distant alien planet. For convenience
sake, let’s say it’s a fifties-style rocket – kind of
a Buck Rogers rocket with racing stripes and fins. The
rocket lands and the captain sends out a landing party.
Among the members of the party are a father – a middle
aged rocket engineer named Frank—and Frank’s strapping
twenty-year-old son, Bob.
The landing party is not far from the ship when they
are attacked by an alien monster that looks suspiciously
like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Frank is killed. In fact, everyone
in the landing party is killed except for Frank’s son,
Bob, who hides in a convenient cave. The monster then
turns on the ship, ready to attack.
For the sake of the rest of the crew, the captain must
order the ship to take off, abandoning Bob. The bridge
crew looks at the captain and the captain says, “I can’t
leave Bob behind. He’s my son.”
Who is the captain?
Pat Murphy, a renowned female Science Fiction writer, once said this in a speech at WisCon. There’s more to this speech aside from this story and it gives a very large outlook on our perception.
It’s scary how much this makes you think about gender roles and assumptions in our modern society. We don’t expect the captain to be female because we see what we expect to see, and distort other evidence to fit our expectations. Its one of the major problems of today and it needs to be fix. It’s not the job of solely women to aid in altering these perceptions, it the whole of our people. Change lies in everyone’s hands.
P.S. Everyone should check out Pat Murphy’s speech titled “Illusion And Expectation” from WisCon 15 March 2 1991. It’s one of the most alluring things I’ve read recently and it forces you to think about how you perceive gender in this society. So check it out.
