Sexism in space

In the far reaches of our solar system, over 10 billion miles from the small blue dot we call home, the Pioneer probes are soaring into the oblivion of deep space. However, these cosmic messages in a bottle carry with them a lie, purposely told, that incorrectly reflects the biology of half the human population.

Launched in 1972 and 1973 to send back data about Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer regions of the solar system, Pioneer 10 and 11 lived up to their names. They were the first manmade objects to pass Mars, and the first to travel fast enough to escape the solar system. Whilst they have since been overtaken by the Voyager probes in the race into interstellar space, the Pioneer probes contained the very first messages that humankind had sent into the void, with each bearing an engraved gold-plated plaque.

These probes have long since lost contact with Nasa, with their last signal received back in 2003. Though they will each take millions of years to come close to any other star systems, there is still a microscopically small chance that, one day, somewhere, one of them might be picked up and studied by whoever or whatever is roaming space.

A journalist named Eric Burgess initially came up with the idea of leaving some kind of message in Pioneer 10 and 11, detailing where they came from, and who sent them. He approached astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan with the idea, who in turn approached Nasa. “I’d seen that we’d put plaques about the president and Congress and all sorts of people on some of the other vehicles that had gone to the Moon,” said Burgess, as recounted by science writer Mark Wolverton in his 2004 book The Depths of Space: The Story of the Pioneer Planetary Probes. “I thought, that’s ridiculous, these people will be forgotten in a million years. We need a message that will last.”

Nasa agreed to the idea, but only allowed for a few weeks to prepare Earth’s first message intended for alien eyes. Sagan, his artist wife Linda Salzman Sagan, and Frank Drake (a pioneer in the field of SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), were then faced with the fairly significant task of composing the perfect first contact. Several important images were carved onto the plaque, including instructions on how to find our solar system using nearby pulsars, a map of the solar system indicating Planet Earth, and an image of a naked man and woman.

Pioneer F/G Plaque: Pioneer 10 the first spacecraft to leave our solar system carries a message to other worlds, designed by Drs. Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, artwork prepared by Linda Salzman Sagan. Image from NASA Ames Research Centre via Wikimedia Commons

The choice to send nude images was made by Salzman Sagan, in order to avoid the problem of choosing a style of clothing. It would represent the human species as a whole, and also educate potential extraterrestrials about human reproductive anatomy. Salzman Sagan initially drew the humans holding hands, but then realised that an extraterrestrial might mistake the pair for one weird-looking creature rather than separate individuals. She also endeavoured to make the figures racially neutral, including a blend of traits from people around the world.

But this was the early 70s and there was significant public outcry over the nudity, with pundits denouncing the figures as pornographic, while media outlets censored them due to letters of complaint. “I was shocked by the blatant display of both male and female sex organs on the front page of the Times,” one Los Angeles Times reader complained. “Surely this type of sexual exploitation is below the standards our community has come to expect from the Times … Isn’t it bad enough that our own space agency officials have found it necessary to spread this filth even beyond our own solar system?”

The irony was that these naked images had already gone through a process of censorship, before being shared with the public. While the male figure on the Pioneer plaque is anatomically correct, with a normal-looking penis hanging between his legs, the female is missing something minute but also crucial. Specifically, the female figure has no pudendal cleft – in other words, no “slit” at the front of the vulva where the labia majora separate. The pudendal cleft indicates the presence of an opening, into the vagina. But to a hypothetical alien observer, there is no visual sign that around half of Earth’s population have a whole organ tucked away between their legs.

Censorship from above

The inaccurate female figure wasn’t the result of a mistake or accidental oversight. The detail was removed, due to fears it might be considered too obscene. In the memoirs of Robert S. Kraemer, Nasa’s former director of planetary exploration, he notes that the original design, created by Salzman Sagan, did indeed include the little upward line to indicate the labial opening. It was later censored, to avoid upsetting the public.

“When the plaque design was submitted to Nasa headquarters for approval I must confess that I was a bit nervous about it,” Kraemer writes. “Linda was a skilled artist and her naked human figures were very detailed and realistic, as they needed to be. It seems a bit silly today, but at the time I feared that some taxpayers, the true owners of the spacecraft, might label it pornographic.” It was removed, Kraemer writes, at the behest of John Naugle, the former head of Nasa’s Office of Space Science. “My boss, John Naugle, had no such fears and approved the design but with the one compromise of erasing the short line indicating the woman’s vulva. (The poor extraterrestrials are probably going to be puzzled by the functional differences in anatomy between the two figures.)”

Reproduction mystery

It might not seem like a big deal to have censored this small detail on the Pioneer plaque, but there was a good reason why all of the design choices were agonised over at length. To our hypothetical alien, observing the image with no context, any omission increases the chance of incorrect conclusions. The male and female figures were otherwise carefully designed to clearly and accurately communicate the basics of human biology. On receiving complaints from feminist groups that the female figure was standing in a “submissive” posture, with both arms hanging at her sides, while the male waved, Salzman Sagan and Drake pointed out that if both figures were depicted with their arms raised, that might be mistaken for the default position of human limbs.

Given what was otherwise a project that benefited from great attention to detail, it seems bizarre to have removed any sign of the organ from which every single person alive emerged. Pallavi Pareek, founder and CEO of gender equality consultancy Ungender, also believes that the female’s pose could have been improved. “The censorship of the female body on the Pioneer plaque reflects a historical discomfort with female representation in science and public discourse, even in something as groundbreaking as interstellar communication,” she said. “While the male figure on the plaque was shown with clear anatomical detail, the female figure was noticeably lacking genital definition and was posed passively, which sends a subtle but powerful message about whose identity was being prioritised.”

We have no idea how a hypothetical extraterrestrial species might react to the Pioneer plaque. They are likely to not resemble humankind in the slightest. However, there is a fairly consistent law of reproduction across most life on Earth known as anisogamy – where lots of small sex cells are released to fertilise one big sex cell – meaning that if these aliens had any knowledge of this kind of life, they might be able to speculate about the human reproductive system.

Without knowing that the vagina exists, however, they would have no idea how human sex works, how we have children, or if we can have offspring at all. This omission may be the key to an alien differentiating between humans being an asexual or sexually reproducing species, and would lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of our biology and culture.

Racist cultural homogenization

While senior figures at Nasa worried about causing offence, some members of the public took a different view and criticised the plaque for its notable omission. One letter, sent to the Washington Daily News, suggested that if we were censoring the genitals of the woman then we may as well paint their noses blue.

Other members of the public also took issue with the apparent race of the pair, with some saying they appeared too white to be truly representative of humanity as a whole. “We made a conscious attempt to have the man and woman panracial,” Carl Sagan explained, in his book The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. “The woman was given epicanthian folds and in other ways a partially Asian appearance. The man was given a broad nose, thick lips, and a short ‘Afro’ haircut. Caucasian features were also present in both. We had hoped to represent at least three of the major races of mankind. The epicanthian folds, the lips, and the nose have survived into the final engraving.”

Despite the figures possessing a mish-mash of features from around the world, people tended to perceive them as looking like themselves – apparently reflecting our natural inclination to see our own resemblance in an image of a human being. “Whites tended to see the figures as white; blacks saw them as black; Asians saw them with Asian features,” Wolverton explained in his book. “Some took pride in the belief that their race had been chosen to represent all humanity, while others considered the apparently blatant exclusion of others to be terribly racist.”

Most of the criticisms, however, were around sex and gender. The deletion of the pudendal cleft exemplifies a problem Earthlings suffer from even today: the sexualisation of women’s naked bodies. This continues to manifest in today’s moral panics around public breastfeeding and in the continued reluctance to properly teach the anatomy of the vagina in sex education classes – to the extent that even those who have vaginas are often unfamiliar with them.

Representations drifting towards infinity

Nasa’s apparent aversion to naked women reared its head again when they launched the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1977. The Voyager probes, which are the only two manmade objects to have reached interstellar space so far, also contain information about Earth and humanity in the form of the famous Golden Records.

These records contain various sounds and clips of music from across the world, and 116 images of people and nature, also organised by Carl Sagan. While there are various images of clothed people, one picture was originally going to be of a naked man and a naked pregnant woman. But due to the public fervour caused by the Pioneer plaque design, Nasa elected to change that image to a silhouette of the couple with the baby inside the womb. While the records do contain close-up diagrams detailing the anatomy of the sex organs, they are not shown located on the human body.

Only five objects we have crafted here on Earth are now drifting towards infinity, and four of them tell a lie about half of humankind. The fifth, New Horizons, contained no message for extraterrestrial civilisations. You could say that these records of humankind are uniquely honest – at least about the inequalities that existed on Earth in the 1970s, and which continue to exist today. But we also need to take any opportunity to set the record straight.

Nasa hopes to send another probe into interstellar space in 2036, which might give us this chance. Nicknamed “Voyager on steroids”, the Interstellar Probe would fly by Jupiter before reaching interstellar space 16 years after its launch – twice as fast as the Voyager probes. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory team, currently in the early stages of planning the mission, hopes to gather important data about the heliosphere – the zone encompassing our Sun’s influence – at the distant edge of our solar system.

According to an article in Science, the Interstellar Probe would likely follow in its predecessors’ footsteps and include some form of message to extraterrestrials representing humankind, “offering a flavor of life on Earth for aliens”. It might contain an updated, digital collection of material like the Golden Records, perhaps in thumbdrive form.

The contents of any potential time capsule of humanity are a long way down the list of things to plan in the coming decade. As Michael Buckley, senior communications manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, explains: “The decision on whether and what kind of message to put on an Interstellar Probe, and what that message would include, would be up to Nasa and whatever institutions implement an actual mission.” But members of the public influenced Nasa in the 70s. There is no reason why we shouldn’t put pressure on them today, in order to ensure that when the sixth relic of humankind eventually soars alone through the vast abyss of space, it will be more representative of the people who live on our planet.

The future of gender bias

These probes are the only physical evidence of our existence outside of our solar system, our tiny “we were here” scratched on the fabric of the universe. We should want these eternal records of our species to show who we are, both past and future, unmarred by the politics and prejudices of the era in which they are launched. One day, after the Earth is engulfed by the Sun, they may be all that remains of our pale blue dot and the people that lived on it.

“For messages intended to represent humanity on a universal scale, accuracy and honesty matter deeply. These ‘interstellar time capsules’ aren’t just technical data – they’re cultural artifacts. If we omit, distort, or soften the truth, especially when it comes to gender, we carry our biases into space and erase the fullness of who we are as a species,” Pareek said.

Even though the possibility of an alien species finding one of our far-flung probes millions of years in the future has an infinitesimally small chance of actually happening – hinging on extraterrestrial intelligence existing at all, living in a relatively close part of our galaxy, having the requisite technology to travel between stars, and simply being in the right place at the right time as the probe passes – we should want our first interplanetary communication to be true to who we are and where we came from.

“For any future interstellar probes, I hope we include representations that reflect the diversity of human life, not only across gender, but race, ability and identity,” Pareek said. “Humanity’s story should be told in its most authentic, inclusive form. After all, we’re not just broadcasting what we know. We’re broadcasting who we are. And that deserves to be seen fully and truthfully.”