Exploration Doesn’t Care If You Wear Lipstick And Nail Polish
“Not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.”
It is a story we often hear when an explorer attempts to do something that has never been done. In fact, it’s a parable almost as old as time. It’s one we’ve seen in attempts to reach the world’s highest mountains, the depths of the seas, the highest flight altitudes, and quests to reach the Moon: a well-intentioned journey to break a record or accomplish a “first” leads to tragedy.
The mountains, ocean, skies, and vacuum of space can’t distinguish gender, so this time, death struck two women on Shishapangma Mountain in Tibet via avalanche. One of the women was Gina Marie Rzucidlo, 45, an accomplished mountaineer who first summited the mighty Mount Everest in 2018. According to NBC, “…American climber Gina Marie Rzucidlo and her Nepalese guide Tenjen Sherpa were declared missing…when avalanches hit the slopes as more than 50 mountaineers and their guides made their way up the peak.” Both Rzucidlo and her guide were declared dead by Chinese authorities; when the slopes are reopened during more favorable weather conditions, a search might resume to recover the bodies. Rzucidlo and fellow climber Anna Gutu, also killed by the avalanche, were on a quest to become the first American women to scale the world’s tallest 14 mountains. More heartbreakingly, a New York Times article mentioned that Rzucidlo and her guide were believed to be only 80 meters from their goal.
However, before Rzucidlo was even confirmed dead, prominent members of the exploration community were, on social media, lamenting the state of a field that encouraged seasoned sherpas to take lipsticked “bimbos” with nail polish up to 8K summits. Less than two weeks ago, Rzucidlo posted a comely photo of her summiting K2, the world’s second-highest peak, wearing a stylish leopard coat. She looked glamorous, with pops of Barbie pink accessorizing the rest of her cold-weather getup. So she looked a far cry from explorers who may have worn more conservative mountaineering gear…but does that mean she was a “bimbo” who didn’t deserve to be recognized as an explorer, even though she had completed many challenging climbs previously? We all know if the pendulum swung the other way and Rzucidlo hadn’t fulfilled traditionally gendered female beauty norms, she also probably would’ve received nasty social media comments.
This raises two age-old questions: why do we explore, and who gets to be considered an “explorer”?
By all accounts, even though it was the end of the climbing season on Shishapangma, it doesn’t appear that Rzucidlo or any other climbers on the mountain at the time were restricted from climbing it for safety reasons. In addition, Rzucidlo was, as previously mentioned, a seasoned climber with the correct mountaineering tools. According to the NBC article, she utilized an experienced guide who “was recently the guide for Norway’s Kristin Harila when they ascended K2 Pakistan in July.” While I’m no mountaineer, nothing suggests that Rzucidlo was doing anything untoward or unheard of (other than wearing lipstick and nail polish). The answer, I suppose, is rooted in exploration history, which has always favored and championed male accomplishments, even though scores of men, too, have died in quests to enter the history books.
England’s George Mallory is one of these men; you may be familiar with him through President John F. Kennedy’s famous speech at Rice University in 1962. When asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, Mallory replied, “Because it is there.” Rzucidlo, too, likely wanted to climb these mountains not for the glory or the selfies but because the mountains were simply there. Mallory died during a 1924 British expedition in an attempt to summit Everest; his body wasn’t discovered until 1999. Mallory’s perilous journey echoed a previous British expedition: Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed attempt to reach the South Pole, where Scott lost his life in late March 1912. Even though Mallory and Scott didn’t quite reach their targets, and Scott in particular made mistakes that led to his death, no one disputes their status as pioneering explorers.
Nearly forty years later, the United States was swept up in the Space Race to reach the Moon; however, only male, white test pilots were selected for the Mercury, Gemini, and, ultimately, Apollo programs. By the year of Kennedy’s speech, it was well-established that U.S. women wouldn’t be considered for human spaceflight for many years. But NASA didn’t need women and the lipsticked, lacquered problems that came with them to grind the nascent lunar program to a near halt. In January 1967, three male astronauts — Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger Chaffee — didn’t even make it off the launch pad in an attempt to explore space. They and their Apollo 1 spacecraft fell victim to a devastating fire powered by the pure oxygen pumped into their spacecraft’s atmosphere.
Even though this mission was scrapped, no one has ever doubted Grissom, White, and Chaffee’s status as explorers leading the way in a dangerous field (and Chaffee, a rookie astronaut, had never completed a spaceflight). Many years after the Apollo 1 tragedy, I asked a woman astronaut about her status as one of the first women to fly the Space Shuttle, and her response was classic: “The spacecraft doesn’t care if you’re a woman; it doesn’t know your gender.” She was actually telling me that humans are mortal, and unforeseeable forces can overpower our relatively defenseless bodies regardless of what we identify as being. Simply put, exploration can kill.
So why can’t Rzucidlo, with her leopard coat, pops of pink, her nails, and plump lips, be recognized as the explorer she lived and died as? Did her Instagram photos of her looking glamorous put people off? Is that the factor that doesn’t allow her to be recognized as an “Explorer” with a capital E yet? No matter what the exploration community might think, I feel pride and admiration looking back at her achievements and sadness over her premature death. I did not know Ms. Rzucidlo, but I hope that someday, another woman might follow in her snowshoed footsteps and finish what she started.
And I also hope this woman — no matter what her appearance is or who she is — doesn’t receive or take to heart ire from a community of men (or women) who have judged her not worthy of being an explorer.
Thanks to Lois Huneycutt for aiding with research, inspiration, and guidance.
Let’s argue. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
*****
If you enjoy reading stories like these and would like to support me as a writer, please consider signing up to become a Medium member. It’s $5 a month and gives you unlimited access to stories on Medium. Thank you for reading!
