Lisa Nowak, Astronaut

By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet. Posted February 20, 2007.

I live in a world where there are sensationalistic news stories about female astronauts going on possibly murderous rampages. Let me tell you why this makes me a happy person.

But first let's recap. Lisa Nowak is a former astronaut who two weeks ago attacked Colleen Shipman, a woman whom she considered a romantic rival. What Nowak did was violent, stupid, and wrong -- as well as fairly typical for a crazed stalker. But the facts of the case were undeniably salacious headline bait. Nowak is famous for flying in the space shuttle, so you've got the celebrity angle. She committed a crime for love, which is always sort of thrilling; and the way she did it was bizarro. As you'll recall from newspaper accounts, she zoomed to a rendezvous with Shipman in a grueling, 12-hour cross-country trip, wearing adult diapers so she wouldn't have to take bathroom breaks (something she no doubt learned on the shuttle). She'd packed her trunk with a BB gun, a mallet, rubber hoses, and garbage bags. When she attacked Shipman with pepper spray, she was wearing a strange wig and freaking out.

Now charged with attempted murder, Nowak has been widely described in the press as having developed some sort of post-space traumatic syndrome because she knew she would never fly the soon-to-be-retired shuttle again. And this is where I start to feel happy. It would have been easy for pundits and sensation-loving journalists to paint Nowak's situation as an example of why women crack under the pressure of being astronauts. But you know why they couldn't do that? Because there are too many female astronauts, such as Eileen Collins and Bonnie Dunbar, who didn't crack and are leading perfectly normal lives. Even better, there are men such as early astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who did crack up -- in a big way -- when he got back to Earth and had to shed his "hero" identity. Aldrin became an alcoholic and was consumed with depression for many years after his moon walk, and he's talked about this openly in some of the stories about Nowak.

Nearly every story I've read about Nowak's actions -- in both small and large publications -- has attributed her breakdown to stress over having such a high-profile job. There are no hints that she suffered from girly nerves or that women can't juggle home life and work life. Instead, the entire situation is reported exactly the way it would have been if she'd been a famous man who lost it for reasons that have nothing to do with gender. I like living in a world where we explain women's sensational crimes in the context of their careers rather than their gender or their families.

The other thing that makes me happy about the Nowak case is that it confirms something I've always known to be true: women can be as physically dangerous as men. In courtrooms and pop culture, women have traditionally been viewed as essentially passive, capable of violence only under extraordinary circumstances. As a result, women have often gotten lighter sentences than men for everything from murder to battery. Ann Jones's sociological study Women Who Kill is in large part a chronicle of how judges have refused to convict women of murdering their children because the ladies are considered victims of postpartum depression. (Men under similar circumstances are given harsh penalties for filicide.)

In a twisted way, the public reaction to Nowak's assault on Shipman -- the fact that she was accused of attempted murder and that her violence was taken seriously -- is heartening. Nobody is framing this incident as a catfight; nobody is saying Nowak is innocent because she was going through menopause or something absurd like that. She is being treated like the dangerous and potentially homicidal person that she is. Nobody is fishing around for a way to let her off the hook because she's a chick.

I like living in a world where women are dangerous. Even better, I like living in a world where people acknowledge that women are dangerous, so they're less likely to fuck with us. By the same token, when women do go on violent rampages, I want them held responsible for their actions and punished the same way men are. That's not p.c. equality. That's the real thing.

See more stories tagged with: nowak, astronauts, women, dangerous women, gener equality

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who has paid for her violent crimes.

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