Tool bag lost in spaceThe Associated Press headline reads, Astronaut outside space station loses tool bag. However, a better title for the article would have been, Helpless women losses tote in space. I first saw this story reported in Florida Today, my local paper. Florida Today provided a non-biased tag line and article title, and left out all the negative gender stereotyping when reporting on the incident. The AP story title seems harmless, but the (female) AP reporter, Marcia Dunn, makes astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper look like a damsel in distress, “helplessly” watching her “tote” float away outside of the International Space Station.

You can compare the Florida Today and AP reports describing the incident yourself. Here are two snips from Marcia Dunn’s AP story describing the incident:

A spacewalking astronaut accidentally let go of her tool bag Tuesday after a grease gun inside it exploded, and helplessly watched as the tote and everything inside floated away.
…
She said her grease gun exploded, getting the dark gray stuff all over a camera and her gloves. While wiping off herself, the white, backpack-size bag slipped out of her grip, and she lost all her other tools.

Here are two snips from the Florida Today article describing the incident:

A tool bag lost in space Tuesday didn’t stop two Endeavour astronauts from kicking off a two-year effort to repair a critical joint on the International Space Station.
…
She [Stefanyshyn-Piper] discovered that a grease gun had exploded in one of her tool bags, coating the bag and smudging her spacesuit gloves and helmet camera when she handled it. As she mopped up the mess with a terry-cloth wipe, the bag slipped from her grasp, carrying a set of tools and tethers with it.

Notice a difference in the reporting. Either Marcia Dunn is a female chauvinist pig (FCP) who clearly sees the female astronaut as helpless or Dunn is projecting her own feelings of helplessness into her reporting. Who knows and who cares. Dunn needs to get a grip, get help, or get over it because it’s this type of gender stereotyping that leads to this type of thinking. Our resident male feminist, New Hampster, found this stinky sexist brain fart yesterday — a Breitbart reader dugg the AP Story with this male chauvinist pig (MCP) headline, Stupid Woman Astronaut Loses Her Purse In Space and added the following MCP summary:

breitbart.com — CAPE CANAVERAL%2C Fla. – A spacewalking astronaut accidentally let go of her tool bag Tuesday and helplessly watched as the tote and everything inside floated away. It was one of the largest items ever to be lost by a spacewalker, but is pretty typical for someone with a hyphenated last name. [emphasis added]

Now, Breitbart is a conservative-leaning news portal run by conservative Andrew Breitbart that tends to have right-winger readers that peddle this kind of sexist drivel, but the Associated Press is supposedly a respectable news organization with top rate reporters that should know better than to serve up sexism for mass media syndication.

It looks like an AP editor caught some of the problems I did because Dunn’s article has been quietly revised (correction notes are missing). I double checked the original report against several other news outlets to confirm the edits. You can compare Dunn’s first version with the revised version. Here is a snip of her revised version:

A spacewalking astronaut whose grease gun erupted in a backpack-sized tool bag accidentally let go of the tote outside the international space station Tuesday, and it floated off along with everything in it.

The “helplessly watched” description was dropped from the revised version. They should have removed “tote” as well. If a male astronaut lost his tool bag, I seriously doubt the reporter would describe it as a tote, well, unless Tim Gunn wrote the article. I also doubt that a MCP reading the article would describe it as anything more than an heroic spaceman’s slippery setback.

Image credit: (AP/NASA) Image from NASA TV. Astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper reaches for tool bag, upper left, that slipped away during spacewalk on Tuesday, November 18 outside the International Space Station.