Safe Space: The Guardian is Worried About Sexism On Mars 

The first woman to be raped in space has probably already been born.

Far from the utopia we’ve cruelly been duped into expecting by patriarchy-produced propaganda such as Star Trek, it turns out that our future lives on Martian colonies won’t be happy ones in which a rainbow of ethnicities and sexes all live happily side by side.

No, it will be irrideemably marred by sexism and racism, and will rapidly descend into war against the current and rightful residents of the Red Planet: Spirit and Opportunity, the two NASA rovers, who will inevitably be enslaved.

We know this because, alarmingly, the mission to colonise Mars – often cynically depicted as a very human attempt to push the boundaries of our metaphysical lives by exploring our universe with a sense of wonder and delight – turns out to share a worrying number of similarities with the pioneer spirit employed by the people who pushed the American colonies ever westwards, eventually creating the capitalist hellhole that is the modern United States.

Also, because Douglas Adams once almost said that “space is white. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly white it is.” Sort of.

Also, because the Guardian says so.

Far from the vision created by the “endless propaganda” churned out by the space program which bangs on about “cooperation” between the nations (ugh!), humans will inevitably transport their male European-ness into space, ensuring that all female astronaughts or off-world colonisers are nothing but “sexy walking vaginas, whose main purpose is to provide the male astronauts with a place to dock their penis at night.”

Don’t believe me? It’s already happened. Prof Anatoly Grigoryev, a key figure in the Russian space programme who has lamentably failed to note the passing of humanity from the age of chivalry into the age of feminism, told an audience in Russia that “Women are fragile and delicate creatures; that is why men should lead the way to distant planets and carry women there in their strong hands.”

The biologist D N Lee has also thought about this, and has concluded: “When we look around and see a homogenous group of individuals discussing these issues – issues that command insane budgets, we should pause. Why aren’t other voices and perspectives at the table? How much is this conversation being controlled (framed, initiated, directed, routed) by capitalist and political interests of the (few) people at the table?”

Why indeed.