A coat and a hairstyle.

Elizabeth Holmes is part of a storied tradition of feminist pioneers who were willing to do what it takes to be like trailblazing men.  Holmes of course has patterned herself after Steve Jobs:

Like Jobs, Holmes wears a daily “uniform” of a black suit with a black cotton turtleneck.

But long before Holmes proved that she could be a tech pioneer by donning a lab coat and pulling her hair back, Amelia Earhart proved that she could be an aviation pioneer with a different coat and hairstyle combination.

Earhart immersed herself in learning to fly. She read everything she could find on flying, and spent much of her time at the airfield. She cropped her hair short, in the style of other women aviators. Worried what the other, more experienced pilots might think of her, she even slept in her new leather jacket for three nights to give it a more “worn” look.

Some readers no doubt will think this is unfair to Earhart, as she was only dubbed “Lady Lindy” and “Queen of the Air”, thrown a ticker tape parade, and invited to the White House after her ground breaking 1928 transatlantic flight.  It was this great achievement that she detailed in her bestselling 1928 book 20 Hours, 40 Min.  The book was published by the same publisher as Lindberg’s We, and is still in print nearly 80 years later.  Goodreads begins its description of the book with:

Amelia Earhart captured the hearth and imaginations of people around the world when she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean by airplane. This book, her personal account of the historic flight, sparkles with her high-spirited charm and adventurous determination.

But this flight that made Earhart an aviation pioneer was 100% image, 0% skill and accomplishment.  Earhart was in fact a passenger on the flight that made her famous as the female counterpart to Charles Lindbergh.  While Earhart was a licensed pilot, she wasn’t qualified to even assist with such a flight.

Since most of the flight was on “instruments” and Earhart had no training for this type of flying, she did not pilot the aircraft. When interviewed after landing, she said, “Stultz did all the flying—had to. I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes.” She added, “…maybe someday I’ll try it alone.”[52]

Have you come a long way, baby?

Four years later she did in fact try it alone.  Fortunately for Earhart aircraft technology advanced greatly during the five years between Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and her own attempt.  Lindbergh accomplished his 1927 solo flight in a single seat aircraft custom built to his specifications around a 223 hp Wright Whirlwind J-5C engine.  Earhart was able to make her 1932 solo flight in a 500 hp 6 passenger airliner.   To give herself a further advantage, Earhart decided to shave 30% off the distance by starting her flight to Paris from Harbour Grace Newfoundland instead of New York City.  Even with these huge advantages, Earhart didn’t make it to Paris and landed instead in a farmer’s field in Northern Ireland.  The farmer asked “Have you flown far?”, to which Earhart famously replied “From America”.

Earhart was a creation of powerful media forces and wealthy benefactors.  She was chosen for her role as “Lady Lindy” by Amy Phipps Guest, the wealthy daughter of Henry Phipps, Jr. and wife of Frederick Guest.  Guest hired the pilot, purchased the airplane, and secured the services of George Putnam, the publisher of Lindbergh’s autobiographical account of his aviation career.  As Sylvia Branzei and Melissa Sweet explain in Rebel in a Dress, Earhart was selected for the role because she fit the desired image:

Amy Guest, wanted the “right sort of girl” and that girl had to be American. The project coordinators interviewed Amelia Earhart. She was attractive, bright, and confident. Also, Earhart looked like a female version of Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Amelia fit the bill.

This entry was posted in Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, Elizabeth Holmes, Envy, Fantasy vs Reality, Feminists, You can't make this stuff up. Bookmark the permalink.

35 Responses to A coat and a hairstyle.

  1. LB says:

    This is truly brilliant. Thanks for the article.

  2. Pingback: A coat and a hairstyle. – Manosphere.org

  3. White Guy says:

    Wow. Thanks Dalrock for posting this. So ‘yougogrll’ has been around since they got the right to vote…How interesting. All in favor of repealing the 19th amendment, say Aye.

  4. Cane Caldo says:

    Guest hired the pilot, purchased the airplane, and secured the services of George Putnam, the publisher of Lindbergh’s autobiographical account of his aviation career. As Sylvia Branzei and Melissa Sweet explain in Rebel in a Dress, Earhart was selected for the role because she fit the desired image:

    You can touch
    You can play
    You can say I’m always yours!
    Come on Earhart, let’s go party

    Life in plastic. It’s fantastic…

  5. Dota says:

    Where does this all end? The current feminist paradigm is not sustainable because as men are edged out, the burden of maintaining civilization falls on women’s narrow shoulders. This would inevitably lead to a declining standard of living at some point. The only alternative, as Rollo often says, is to coerce men. I can’t see how this will be accomplished save by a totalitarian state that coerces men to play their role in a civilization that openly disdains their interests. As such, I don’t think women are being empowered to become a new class of Fords and Rockefellers, but rather a class of wardens that insulate our current overlords from the serfs they seek to dominate.

    It seems like society will resemble a large corporation where the ones in power will be parasitic elites, the workers at the very bottom will be supervised by an “empowered” class of HR types who do no real work, but wield coercive power over those that actually produce output.

  6. Red Pill Scare says:

    Dota, in a recently-popular YouTube video, a woman plays “Let’s You and Him Fight” with her doughy white boyfriend and two black guys during a traffic incident. The audio is terrible, but he attempts to get her to go back into the truck and stop inciting the two guys. Eventually, she wins the game, getting the three of them to fight, except she quickly receives her winnings: involvement in the fight.

    She went from tankgrl to crying little girl in an instant.

    I predict that this will be the case in nearly all women when the ball drops.

  7. Dalrock says:

    @Dota

    Where does this all end? The current feminist paradigm is not sustainable because as men are edged out, the burden of maintaining civilization falls on women’s narrow shoulders. This would inevitably lead to a declining standard of living at some point. The only alternative, as Rollo often says, is to coerce men. I can’t see how this will be accomplished save by a totalitarian state that coerces men to play their role in a civilization that openly disdains their interests.

    This has already happened, as we have moved from a marriage based family structure to a child support based family structure. The former created incentives for men to be productive. The latter relies on an elaborate system of coercion to set income quotas for each individual man and imprison men who don’t meet quota. Part of what makes this new system palatable is the game of make believe that we really haven’t fundamentally changed the model. Marriage still exists in theory, but it can always be transformed to the child support model for any or no reason at the whim of the wife. Thus even though only half of all fathers formally fall into the enforced quota model, deliberate public policy is to keep the other half in line with threats to formally put them in the new model.

    But coercion based models are far less effective at getting maximum productivity than incentive based models, especially over the long term. Under a coercion model, economic actors learn to avoid excessive production, lest their quota be increased accordingly. There is also the problem that men can avoid the quota system altogether by avoiding becoming a father.

    The system is a prescription for long term decline, but what we can’t tell is exactly how long it can be sustained (it could well be decades), nor how hard vs soft the landing will be. There is enormous good will among men, even today, and this is what we are squandering to keep the new model functioning. It is impossible to say how long this good will will last, but my guess is that once it starts to measurably decline the decline will accelerate. The other question is how married we are to the new system. Theoretical pain is one thing, and it is easy for people to say they won’t change course no matter what the cost. But real pain is something different. Notice how quickly public opinion on immigration has shifted in just the last year. When it hurts enough, I have no question that we will start trying to move back to an incentive based structure (we already see rumblings in this direction). The only question I have is how quickly that can be done, and how responsive men will be after the good will is exhausted.

  8. Danno says:

    It is clear that Earhart was not qualified to fly or navigate. On the flight in which she was lost, the navigator was supposed to get them close to the destination island using celestial navigation and she was supposed to then find the island using radio navigation. The navigator did his job and she got close enough to hear the destination on the radio. Unfortunately for both of them, she had never successfully used the radio navigation equipment in the aircraft. It had only recently been installed and during a test run she could not operate it. Add to that the fact that she didn’t realize that the frequency that the destination was transmitting (at her request) wasn’t a frequency that she could use for navigation, and the frequency she was transmitting wasn’t a frequency that the destination could get a bearing on, and incompetence results in tragedy. Earhart was an optimist at a time when aviation was unforgiving. Why was she an optimist? Probably because other people had always bailed her out.

    Tighar thinks she wound up alive on the island of Nikumaroro. I hope she didn’t. If she had, she would have been eaten by coconut crabs every time she stayed motionless for more than about 30 minutes unless she could have gotten off the ground. Imagine being sleep deprived and, every time you try to sleep, huge crabs starts picking at your flesh. Eventually, you’re too tired and weak to fend them off. Google an image of the coconut crabs of Nikumaroro if you want to see what I’m talking about.

  9. greyghost says:

    Dalrock you said that well. As soon as I saw Dota’s comment I had the same thought. Other areas tend to do the same type of thing. Some jobs like an industrial mechanic may have occasion when 60 to 150 lbs just has to be man handled. Other occasions require mental thought with troubleshooting and judgement calls. Women regardless what the culture says are horrible in those situations. The work around is to get one of the fellas to go with her or to dilute her as a member of a team just has you would a new guy or a less the reliable mechanic. The last thing PC to do is to have her cleaning parts a you would a bad mechanic. Ironically this female mechanic we have was girl power when she started. A few years later and the white knights retiring out have put her in full exposure to reality and she has changed to come to respect the job and the men she works with.

  10. Red Pill Scare says:

    Famous coercion-model quote: “So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.”

  11. Dalrock says:

    @Danno

    It is clear that Earhart was not qualified to fly or navigate. On the flight in which she was lost, the navigator was supposed to get them close to the destination island using celestial navigation and she was supposed to then find the island using radio navigation. The navigator did his job and she got close enough to hear the destination on the radio. Unfortunately for both of them, she had never successfully used the radio navigation equipment in the aircraft. It had only recently been installed and during a test run she could not operate it. Add to that the fact that she didn’t realize that the frequency that the destination was transmitting (at her request) wasn’t a frequency that she could use for navigation, and the frequency she was transmitting wasn’t a frequency that the destination could get a bearing on, and incompetence results in tragedy.

    As I understand it, another problem was the frequency she was using to communicate was only for Morse Code, which she didn’t know. Everything I read says she was in way over her head and if the men on board couldn’t solve the problem, they were all doomed.

    Conversely, Lindbergh’s navigation abilities were astounding. He flew for 33 hours and landed on a specific airstrip near Paris (pre planned), navigating in part by the stars. In addition, his only forward visibility was a periscope, as the location of the fuel prevented a windshield. By contrast, Earhart took off much closer hoping to land at the same Paris airstrip, and after 15 hours ended up landing in Northern Ireland.

  12. Dota says:

    @ Dalrock

    I understand that this is already happening, what I meant was that our elites will double down on the coercion, which would necessarily entail a more intrusive state with an expanded array of powers. Feminism is a per-cursor to totalitarianism precisely because our elites understand that women are indifferent to political authority whereas men have a propensity to rebel against it. Women, OTOH, rebel against social authority. Men may rebel for greater government accountability, transparency, and political freedoms while women will rebel for the right to smoke in public and be slutty and hypergamous.

    “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.“ – George Orwell, 1984

    I suspect that is the real reason women are being empowered. It is imperative that we follow the money trail if we are to understand the source of these deleterious trends.

    You mentioned that Earhart was a manufactured icon, however feminism itself was a manufactured rebellion. We need to be able to better pinpoint the source of this rot. We are being sabotaged by those who traditionally held the mantle of Shepherds of culture.

  13. ayatollah1988 says:

    In addition to her nauseating “you go grrl” phoniness, Earhart was a full-on nightmare of a feminist. She married at 32 to a guy who proposed to her 6 times and before they got married she sent him a letter insisting on an open marriage. And this was in the 1930’s!

  14. >before they got married she sent him a letter insisting on an open marriage. And this was in the 1930’s!

    Well that certainly makes the coconut crabs possible fate a whole lot more palatable. Yummy for justice.

  15. PM says:

    The current feminist paradigm is not sustainable because as men are edged out, the burden of maintaining civilization falls on women’s narrow shoulders. This would inevitably lead to a declining standard of living at some point.

    Men are still doing most of jobs that keep civilization going. I don’t see that changing. A few women are being propped up with false accomplishments here and there but it doesn’t have much impact overall.

    Most people male or female won’t invent something that changes the world or be the first to do anything. I think that Amelia Earheart’s “success” inspired a lot of women. My sister has her pilot’s license and it seems harmless enough. Doesn’t change the fact that most pilots are men.

  16. Pingback: A coat and a hairstyle. | Reaction Times

  17. SirHamster says:

    Conversely, Lindbergh’s navigation abilities were astounding. He flew for 33 hours and landed on a specific airstrip near Paris (pre planned), navigating in part by the stars.

    This inspired me to learn more from wiki. He’s a much greater man than public education ever impressed on me.

    Lindbergh later charted both polar and South American air routes, developed techniques for high-altitude flying, and during World War II, demonstrated how to increase flying range by developing techniques of refining flight attitudes and leaning fuel mixture to decrease the rate of gasoline consumption and improving efficiency.

    Not just a pilot with endurance and ambitious goals; he had a strong understanding of the underlying chemistry and physics and how to harness them to push flight performance.

    But hey, at least public ed taught me that Amelia was also a “pioneer”.

  18. Dalrock says:

    @PM

    Men are still doing most of jobs that keep civilization going. I don’t see that changing. A few women are being propped up with false accomplishments here and there but it doesn’t have much impact overall.

    I disagree, and may write a post on this. This isn’t a few one offs. It is systemic. We have ordered our society around trying to assuage feminist envy, and still it isn’t enough. The more you feed the beast, the hungrier it gets. If this were just a few hundred million here and there devoted to make believe it would indeed be a small matter. Every decision we make now has to be considered through the feminist paradigm. Our number one priority is minimizing feminist offense, and the harder we try, the more offended they become.

  19. Jeff Strand says:

    This was posted a long time ago, worth repeating. Amelia Earhart was hype, a media creation. Here was the real deal:

    Hanna Reitsch (29 March 1912 – 24 August 1979) was a German aviatrix and the only woman awarded the Iron Cross First Class and the Luftwaffe Combined Pilots-Observation Badge in Gold with Diamonds during World War II. Along with her flying skills Reitsch was photogenic and willingly appeared in Nazi Party propaganda throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, which made her a celebrity. Reitsch was the first woman to fly a helicopter, a rocket plane, and a jet fighter. She set over forty aviation altitude and endurance records during her career, both before and after World War II, and several of her international gliding records are still standing to this day.

    In 1937 Reitsch was posted to the Luftwaffe testing centre at Rechlin-Lärz Airfield by Ernst Udet. She was a test pilot on the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka and Dornier Do 17 projects. Reitsch was the first female helicopter pilot and one of the few pilots to fly the Focke-Achgelis Fa 61, the first fully controllable helicopter. Her flying skill, desire for publicity and photogenic qualities made her a star of Nazi party propaganda. In 1938 she made nightly flights of the Fa 61 helicopter inside the “Deutschlandhalle” at the Berlin Motor Show.

    With the outbreak of war in 1939 Reitsch was asked to fly many of Germany’s latest designs. Among these were the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet and several larger bombers on which she tested various mechanisms for cutting barrage balloon cables. After crashing on her fifth Me 163 flight Reitsch was badly injured but reportedly insisted on writing her post-flight report before falling unconscious and spending five months in hospital. Reitsch became Adolf Hitler’s favourite pilot and was one of only two women awarded the Iron Cross First Class during World War II. Reitsch became close to former fighter pilot and high ranking Luftwaffe officer Robert Ritter von Greim who became her lover.

    During the last days of the war, in light of Hermann Goering’s dismissal as head of the Luftwaffe for what Hitler saw as an act of treason (sending the Göring Telegram and allegedly attempting a coup d’état), he appointed Colonel-General Robert Ritter von Greim as head of the Luftwaffe. To enable him to meet Hitler, von Greim asked Reitsch to fly him into embattled Berlin.

    Red Army troops were already in the downtown area when Reitsch and von Greim arrived on 26 April in a Fieseler Fi 156 Storch. With her long experience at low-altitude flying over Berlin and having already surveyed the road as an escape route with Hitler’s personal pilot Hans Baur, Reitsch landed on an improvised airstrip in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate (Greim was wounded in the leg when Red Army soldiers fired at the light aircraft during its approach). They made their way to the Führerbunker, where Hitler promoted von Greim to Hermann Göring’s former command of a now wholly defunct Luftwaffe. During the intense Russian bombardment, Hitler gave Reitsch a vial of poison for herself and another for von Greim. She accepted the vial willingly, fully prepared to die alongside her Führer. On Hitler’s orders, she escaped from Berlin with von Greim during the evening of 28 April, flying the last German plane out of Berlin shortly before the fall of the city by climbing through heavy Soviet anti-aircraft fire. Hitler had ordered them to rendezvous with Karl Dönitz, who Hitler thought was rallying troops for a counter-attack.

    Reitsch was soon captured along with von Greim and the two were interviewed together by American military intelligence officers. When asked about being ordered to leave the Fuhrerbunker on 28 April 1945 Reitsch and von Greim reportedly repeated the same answer, “It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer’s side.” Reitsch also said, “We should all kneel down in reverence and prayer before the altar of the Fatherland.” When the interviewers asked what she meant by “Altar of the Fatherland” she answered, “Why, the Führer’s bunker in Berlin…” She was held and interrogated for eighteen months.

    After her release Reitsch settled in Frankfurt am Main. Following the war German citizens were barred from flying powered aircraft, but within a few years gliding was allowed, which she took up. In 1952 Reitsch won third place in the World Gliding Championships in Spain (and was the only woman to compete). She continued to break records, including the women’s altitude record (6,848 m). She became German champion in 1955 and later went on to meet President John Kennedy, who personally congratulated here on her extraordinary record of lifetime achievement.

  20. A says:

    Every decision we make now has to be considered through the feminist paradigm. Our number one priority is minimizing feminist offense, and the harder we try, the more offended they become.

    This is why some people have said that artificial intelligence is going to be a disaster for women. Most people won’t even be able to connect the dots, hence ‘feminists’ won’t figure out what to pinpoint for a ban.

    But businesses that use AI to outcompete those who don’t, will simply have the feminist imperative stripped out of numerous small decision where the cost of feminism adds up. Not to mention that the jobs women do are more vulnerable to being replaced by automation to begin with, and government protectionism can only save so many hos…

  21. mmaier2112 says:

    I have to admit I like the idea of coconut crabs eating her alive for her stupidity.

  22. Anon says:

    Dalrock said :

    The latter relies on an elaborate system of coercion to set income quotas for each individual man and imprison men who don’t meet quota. Part of what makes this new system palatable is the game of make believe that we really haven’t fundamentally changed the model.

    The fundamental premises that ‘feminists’ and cuckservatives have assumed in their creation of this model :

    1) Men will devote the same effort to their careers despite the ‘stick’ replacing the ‘carrot’. The man who would have become a doctor or executive in the past will still do exactly the same thing, exerting the same amount of effort, as before.
    2a) The left’s willingness to import Islam, and not demand any changes from them, will somehow not affect this new model between domestic men and women. This is where the left has punctured the grand scheme of cuckservatives, via a second scheme of their own.
    2b) Almost no one understands that women are in fact voting in more Muslim men, since women vote for gina tingles first and foremost. The cuckservative cluelessness about what women want ensures that cuckservatives will never grasp why ‘voters’ are voting for this..
    3) Technological disruptions can rapidly shift power balances in a manner than few will understand until after the fact. Most such disruptions took power away from average men, but a few upcoming ones may be in the opposite direction.
    4) Creating a generation of children who grow up without both biological parents, will somehow still produce the same number of responsible, productive men as before (see point 1)).
    5) International competition has not been taken into account. I am surprised that a country like China isn’t courting US male expertise under a ‘if you are under a US child support judgement, come to China as an expat. We will give you a good job, and will never extradite you’. The US no longer has the clout to obstruct this, unless they seize passports before the man leaves, which itself reduces his ability to work in jobs that require international travel, etc….

  23. RedPillPaul says:

    We have not seen too much of it yet but there is technology that has to do with automation that is just waiting on the sidelines.
    When this technology is fully implemented,our paradigm/perception on how we view the material world will have a massive shift.
    What i am getting at is that technology is already available to make men obsolete, besides the beast of burden work (the real hard manual labor rather than menial work).
    Men have been used to create for the ruling party the very things that will be used to replace them. Mem created things to be replaced by the created.
    Marriage was only a tool used by the ruling class to ramp up productivity. It is true that when men are freely able to rule over their own family unit, they become very productive.
    The ruling party only “allowed” this previous state of existence to the point that the excelerated output of production came closer to producing the very means that make the creators of that production obsolete in the system that the ruling class created (on the backbones of the “every-man”)
    Biblical patriarchal marriage is God ordained and the means that God made for man to fulfill the commandment to “be fruitful (productive) and multiply”.
    The ruling class are trying to replace God and create the world and humanity in their own image

  24. Anon says:

    Our number one priority is minimizing feminist offense, and the harder we try, the more offended they become.

    Even the wealthiest, most deep-pocketed set of countries in the world (the West) will eventually run out of money when the goal they are spending towards is impossible to attain….

  25. Looking Glass says:

    Her and her Navigator were captured by the Japanese and they likely died somewhere in custody. Oh, and they were far more than likely also working for the US Government in some capacity on the trip.

    It popped up in the news about supposed discoveries maybe 2ish years ago, so I went looking. There’s a guy who runs some group that makes a living pushing theories and that’s the only person the media actually reports on. The people that have actually done the study figured out most of the details a long while ago. (It helps that they found eyewitnesses, which isn’t too hard when it was the only plane to crash land on an island and the first Whites the people had ever seen.)

  26. Pingback: A Strength, A Weakness | Spawny's Space

  27. Spike says:

    Busting feminist myths (lies) is a Red-Pill necessity, Dalrock. Earhart is an icon that needs exposure to the truth, as is Rosie The Riveter, as well as “influential thinker” Gloria Steinem. The idolatry of feminism needs to be tilted at, Like Gideon in the time of the Judges.

  28. Cane Caldo says:

    @Looking Glass

    Her and her Navigator were captured by the Japanese and they likely died somewhere in custody.

    Who, Earheart? I thought she disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle? When I was a kid I read a book about the “mystery” of the Bermuda Triangle and I’m sure that’s where I first heard about her.

    The idea of a Bermuda Triangle enthralled me.

  29. Lost Patrol says:

    Dota writes:

    “The current feminist paradigm is not sustainable because as men are edged out, the burden of maintaining civilization falls on women’s narrow shoulders.”

    Sublime.

    Do you care if I memorize this and trot it out at appropriate venues?

  30. Elizabeth Holmes banned from operating blood testing labs for two years: https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/07/elizabeth-holmes-banned-from-blood-testing/

  31. Looking Glass says:

    Theranos didn’t pay off the right people.

    Plus, it helps when the tech actually works.

  32. Pingback: Going through the motions. | Dalrock

  33. Pingback: A brave new world. | Dalrock

  34. Pingback: Will trans acceptance push women to look more feminine? | Dalrock

Please see the comment policy linked from the top menu.

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.