Just caught the tail end of a story on CNN about the female pilot who flew President Obama in Marine One.
The breathless anchorwoman (sorry, didn’t catch her name) called it “an amazing achievement.”
OK, sure, it takes considerable skill to fly a helicopter, and it’s an honor to be selected for Marine One duty. No argument there.
But what’s gender got to do with it? Or should I just assume that women are incapable of piloting helicopters, so that I may be appropriately “amazed” when they do?
Are we really doing anyone any favors by making such a big deal of this?
I would think that her amazing achievement is not the ability to fly a chopper, but to go up through the ranks of the Marines to get a special top-honor spot.
There are only so many women in the Marines and only so many top-honor spots. The fact that she is part of two very small minorities (female marines, top-honor spots) is an achievement in a “man’s world.”
You could apply the same logic to Barack Obama’s presidency being a major achievement. It’s not that black people aren’t good enough to become President, they are just a minority group aiming for a position where there aren’t many spots open to begin with (er, 1!)
See, I think of someone like Maj. Tammy Duckworth when something noteworthy about a woman piloting a helicopter is mentioned.
If this is the first time a woman has flown Marine One that’s interesting and an “about time” kind of situation, but kind of disappointing that anyone (other than the pilot in question and her friends and family) would have to be all agog about it.
Edit: ZipperJJ has a point, but I’m still sad that it hasn’t happened earlier/we aren’t at the point where it isn’t that special.
I’ll buy this.
I’m not very well-versed in military culture, but on reflection I can imagine it’s still quite a testosterone-soaked world… Which means the bar gets set higher for women, which makes getting to fly Marine One all the more impressive.
Still, the CNN anchor’s fawning was a bit off-putting.
Two Many Cats, are you saying my post was sexist? Please elaborate.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the acheivement here is being the first woman to fly Marine One. I flew with a female chopper jockey when I was in service, and I got out in 1992. Incidentally, that female chopper jockey was one of my favorite pilots…good stick, mission focus, willing to do whatever I asked her to do to get me in position to take the pictures we needed.
Not at all. I was just emphasizing your point about this sort of coverage. I would love to remember this as a specific example for when someone says sexism is dead. Coming up with specific examples on the spot is not something I do well.
You may laugh. But my ex-fiancée flew Black Hawks in the first Gulf War. When she got back to the States her ‘superior’ officer told her she’d never make it as an Army helicopter pilot because she’s a girl. (I guess her two Air Medals didn’t count for much.)
CNN ran a tag with this piece called “Breaking the glass rotor.” One of the worst attempted jokes I’ve ever seen on the news.
She’s the first woman to get this job. Is it a big mystery that that’s a story? I agree it’s not page one stuff, but it’s a fair topic for a news story.
Ummm…no. Some of them are probably still classified. Others are probably kicking around in government archives. A few may have been published in various places…but unless you’re kinky for bombs, airplanes, and such they ain’t likely to do much for ya.
Maybe you should just assume most reporters are freakin’ idiots - because that’s my impression. I think reporters have an IQ maximum in the two-digit range these days.
You know, I’m still freaked out by something a Doper wrote about how she couldn’t buy real estate on her own, but had to have a male relative cosign with her. This was in the mid to late 70s - during my lifetime. That just seems so weird.
That reminds me of the first couple days after the Metro Rail crash in D.C. Some of the local radio commentators I heard kept saying “female operator of the second train”. I seriously doubt they would have said “male operator” every darn time if he had, in fact, been a he. It sounded like a “woman driver” joke.
As a sometimes journalist (wrote for about nine months or so when I was in college), I don’t think the problem is necessarily that journalists are stupid (though many certainly are), just that they are not experts in the fields they write about. Which is probably because many of them went to school to learn to be journalists, rather than pilots or firearms experts or whatever.
But yeah, they do a sadly poor job of learning much about what they’re writing about before it goes to press.
