> As First Officer Ryan listened, interjecting only occasionally to affirm his captain
So, I think the sexism is important to the explanatory narrative because it demonstrates the scale of the power imbalance between the captain and the first officer - the captain sat there and blabbed for 32 minutes including something so objectionable as musing about how if annoying women get murdered, it's their fault. Quoth the article:
> “These are the kind of women you don’t wanna get married to,” he said. “You know, some men, they lose their temper and the next thing you know, the wife is dead, you know… they start punching them and kicking them, and they lost their minds, you know… they kill the woman… it’s the woman who can drive you to do crazy stuff, you know?”
But the first officer was not empowered to object to that - not empowered to object for sexism and murder, not for tabs vs spaces, not for anything. There was, therefore, possibly nothing the captain could have said in that 32 minutes that the first officer would have objected to.
> So, I think the sexism is important to the explanatory narrative because it demonstrates the scale of the power imbalance between the captain and the first officer
Exactly. Patriarchy isn't just a system where all men have power over all women. It's also about hierarchies of men. A good example is the FLDS [1], which Jon Krakauer wrote about in Under the Banner of Heaven. [2] There, the highest-status men are supported by other men who are rewarded with dominance over other lower-down people. That produces a bunch of surplus young men who are eventually driven off.
This sort of continually enforced dominance hierarchy, whatever you think of it morally, is poisonous to the kind of mindset and relationships you need to keep up our (extraordinarily good) airline safety record.
And let me also add a plug for Dekker's "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'", which is on the surface about understanding airplane crashes, but does a great job of conveying why important technological systems require a very different way of thinking about things to succeed. One of my top books of all time, especially for anybody in tech who cares about uptime.
Or the first officer just didn’t care. He didn’t call it up in the post interviews as something that he felt uncomfortable about. Sexism is shockingly rampant.
You don't think women might trade tirades about men when having off the record conversation with just two of them in the cockpit? People vent, it doesn't mean much by itself. If he had a fight with a male copilot, he may have had a different tirade.
Agreed. Women can be certainly be sexist and should be held to the same standard as men. If a woman crewmember said women can't be blamed for murdering annoying husbands while taxiing a 737, that would absolutely be inappropriate. And, the main point here wasn't that there was fight followed by sexist reflections on said fight, but that there was a fight.
> You don't think women might trade tirades about men when having off the record conversation
Just in case it's news to anyone: they absolutely do. It's very eye opening when you witness such things. Women can be and often are just as hateful as men.
Dang, that really sucks about your formative experiences. I'm sorry for you and hope you don't have to spend the rest of your life harboring a secret hatred for half of all humans. I'm guessing that at some level you realize women are people and it's not healthy or sensible to despise them as a group, but it's not an opinion you can just "fix". Have you tried counselling for this?
And frankly, yeah, it's disqualifying. Having read this comment, I wouldn't consider hiring you for any position or voluntarily working with you at all until I had some assurance that you're able to transcend this issue. (n.b. I'm a straight, cis, white, man)
At some point you have to deal with the fact that your formative years are not an excuse for holding a life-long grudge against such a large group of people. This makes no sense at all.
I’m having trouble parsing your comment. What behavior falls under “men being humans”? Like, “we’re all flawed” or the killing-your-wife idea from the article?
Also obviously on board with the other comments explaining that bad childhood experiences are not an excuse to form beliefs you know to be biased and false.
So, I think the sexism is important to the explanatory narrative because it demonstrates the scale of the power imbalance between the captain and the first officer - the captain sat there and blabbed for 32 minutes including something so objectionable as musing about how if annoying women get murdered, it's their fault. Quoth the article:
> “These are the kind of women you don’t wanna get married to,” he said. “You know, some men, they lose their temper and the next thing you know, the wife is dead, you know… they start punching them and kicking them, and they lost their minds, you know… they kill the woman… it’s the woman who can drive you to do crazy stuff, you know?”
But the first officer was not empowered to object to that - not empowered to object for sexism and murder, not for tabs vs spaces, not for anything. There was, therefore, possibly nothing the captain could have said in that 32 minutes that the first officer would have objected to.