The Wrong Stuff
Letter to the Editor - Published 08/29/2019
(For a while, I will be posting links to older writings that I have already shared with people. I will also be adding notes about the writing if something occurs to me. Once I get my backlog of stuff posted, the pace of publication will slow down to realtime. After this first one goes out as an email, I will publish other previously-shared writings on the blog, but will only have emails sent out for brand new works. You can always see all published posts by visiting the blog, whether or not I sent an email.)
From the Anniston Star of 08/29/2019. Click this link to see the letter.
This was my first published letter to the editor of a mainstream newspaper. I had retired a week earlier and I immediately set about taking up writing. While I mainly wanted to write fiction, I also enjoy writing short humorous pieces. Twenty years earlier, I had gotten a good number of articles published on a satirical news website. I thought it would be fun to try to get things with a similar tone into regular newspapers. Newspapers don’t often hand over significant column space to folks who just send stuff in, but they do publish letters to the editor, so that’s the avenue I chose. Letters must be short and to the point. While this one was published exactly as written, I was later to learn that the editor might edit a letter for length or clarity, and in the process they might ruin a joke or alter your meaning. I will whine more about that at the appropriate time.
I know it looks like I chose to cruelly dump on lady astronauts as my first act of writing for publication. However, as with my earlier articles for the satirical website, I was trying to be clever by satirizing news reporting itself. “The Wrong Stuff” was prompted by news stories around that time about how a female astronaut could not go on an unplanned spacewalk because her hips were too wide for the spacesuit. The fact is, spacesuits are tailored to specific astronauts, and so neither gender nor the female body type were the actual issue. A tall man would have been just as unable to use a suit tailored for a short man (or woman). I then realized that nearly every news story about female astronauts seemed to focus on gender, or bizarre behavior. A very accomplished woman could train for years and live in space for months and perform brilliant, daring acts, but the “hips too wide for the suit” or “she stalked her spouse…from space!” thing would be the big story.
Of course, there’s not much room for context in the letters column, so I went with producing the ultimate no-content “gosh those lady astronauts are wacky” story I could make up, in the form of a letter. Imitation can be mistaken for flattery, but it’s also handy as mordant commentary.
I suspect that, except where they lapse into breaking major laws, the female astronauts are probably as good as, or better than, the men when it comes to hijinks. We won’t know until they write about it, because most of us don’t have what it takes to get on the spaceship.
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