Nowadays when I watch films or read books from the 50s, 60s, and 70s the depth of casual sexism is quite shocking. So that shows some progress. But still there’s a tremendous amount of inequality to be overcome.
[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Up_The_Long_Ladder_(epi...
[2] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(episode)
Here's more fun recaps:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...
Honorable mentions:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNext...
It's pretty hard to make truly alien aliens, as the more alien they are, the harder they are to understand, identify with etc, making the stories themselves less interesting.
The aliens in The Gods Themselves are pretty alien but still have, from time to time, a human-like mode of thinking which Asimov used to explain their behavior. The Bug Wars is the only book I've read that has no humans at all, though the aliens' mentalities are somewhat human, again to make them comprehensible.
Famously "different" aliens (e.g. Moties, the bugs of Ender's Game & sequels) are actually pretty human in motivation.
And the inscrutable aliens (e.g. Starship Troopers) are clearly inscrutable stand-ins for contemporary political enemies.
The various literature on intelligent machines has the same problem.
Well, they already have Space Knights, Space Gunmen, and Space Witches, so why not.
Often times it seems we are overshooting with attempts to create better societies - or worse shooting off in the wrong direction.
As they say, "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". So if you're in a previously favored category, it's only natural that the loss of that boost might seem like overshooting.
The real test, of course, is objective metrics. Looking at who's in Congress or who's running Fortune 500 companies, it seems like we're a fair ways from overshooting. (If you have data otherwise, please do share.)
But if we do overshoot, so what? Overshooting is common in all sorts of systems as they self-correct. The important thing to me seems to be reducing the magnitude of the swings as we converge on a new norm. Given that the previously baseline is a couple millennia of violent gender oppression, seems like we're certain to do better than that.
Today it is absolutely necessary to “prefix the thing” and there is still a long road ahead of damage to undo.
After equality has been the norm for several generations (it is still not the norm today), maybe then we’ll be ready to talk about removing the prefix.
It's possible that in the long run, people will consider Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, etc. to rank with Beethoven, Mozart, etc. It doesn't seem likely, though. I don't think Elvis will rank either, or even does now - does anyone consider Elvis a great musician?
To me, it looks like canonization is more to do with our primate desire to find/create status hierarchies. That seems bad enough when we do it with living people, creating the sort of structures that enable oppression of disfavored groups. But it seems both sillier and worse to do it with dead people.
So I suspect the point of a canon as selected by people of social power is to reinforce the social power structure. Something like what the Catholic church does with canonization. They get to gatekeep "goodness" and control the knowledge and resources that let up-and-comers grow. It becomes another stick to beat the young with, a way to make them "pay their dues" to people holding power.
So my hope is that in the future nobody will waste much time doing fantasy mental tournaments for "greatest" artist between different eras.
I also don't see how your egalitarian vision of a 'flat' cultural world is practically possible. There is limited attention and time span available to people to experience culture (read/listen to music/look at paintings, etc.) That time span will have to be allocated to certain works over others, and doing it randomly is obviously a bad system. People will inevitably give each other advice on the best way to invest that time and a canon will emerge.
If it could exist, I think it would be a very unpleasant world, personally, with no common cultural referents. Allusion would disappear from cultural works, because only a tiny fraction of your audience would recognize what you're alluding to.
I'm not interested in a perfectly flat world. I disagree that a unitary canon will emerge on its own. I don't object to individuals saying, "I like X, maybe you will too." What I object to is the use of power to create and maintain status hierarchies.
I also think it's ridiculous to suggest that lack of an imposed canon will end cultural references. When I look at social media, I see a carnival of reference. Things still become widely seen, widely heard.
And if your dark fantasy came true, so what? That would mean that each person has found art that is more meaningful to them than whatever was previously being imposed as important, and found community with that "tiny fraction" of others who found the same things valuable. Should they required to spend time on things they like less?
> Should they required to spend time on things they like less?
This is where I'm not getting you. What are the powerful forces imposing the canon? Who is forcing you to listen to music (or read books, or watch movies, etc.) that you don't like?
What is considered great arises out of organic, decentralized processes. There's no central bureau of music that requires everyone to listen to Mozart because they decided he's the best.
I suppose by the same token, the highly improbable demographics of Fortune 500 CEOs, legislators, and faith leaders are just some statistical quirk?
Please tell me more about this world you live in. I would like to visit sometime.
Not even those with a massive PR campaign, plus many experimentalists do not want to divert that kind of effort away from technical progress.
So this is expressing a lagging indicator of a lingering statistic.
Well, electronics itself is only about a hundred years old and it started out completely male dominated and decades of development continued from that point.
Mainly development of technology not diversity, and that was truly challenging.
And even though male dominated from the start, it was still out of reach to almost all men too, more so for those few oportunities mostly to undertake experimental efforts.
So statistically at the beginning, electronics was virtually inaccessbile for almost all men & women to a somewhat equal degree.
It was just not one of the things you could certainly do no matter how much you really wanted to, you had to basically get lucky in addition to your ambition.
I'm also not really sure what you mean by "general principle", either, to be honest?
Thanks in advance!
Not the parent, but a common take on pieces like this is that they’re trying too hard, and end up trying to promote people who’d clearly not have made any kind of “pantheon” even if they’d been men, yet frame it as if they would have. The tone of this piece is a lot like one of those, even if the film isn’t doing that (haven’t seen it).
As for how that might be demeaning, imagine if things were reversed and you read a piece about the forgotten Great Men Inventors that opened with put-downs of Roberta Oppenheimer and Thelma Edison and the Wright Sisters and demanded that we consider among their ranks the unjustly forgotten men inventors, who are just as good and important... like Edwin Moore, who patented the push-pin. Would that be inspiring to men, do you think? Or would it come off as lame pandering and an indictment of the premise (“there are tons of men who accomplished great things in the past but were ignored because they were men”) that they couldn’t find any better examples? Nb that a scarcity of such examples even given perfect record keeping is exactly what one would expect in a society in which one sex had had far fewer opportunities to do work we consider notable, no matter their actual potential.
Those articles already exist though? I'm thinking about The Oatmeal's article on Nikolas Tesla versus Edison, which in no way actually devalues "Men as a concept". There are very many articles in which this is done and I haven't seen it been observed that it devalues men.
What's different here is that this is centering the oppression that these women faced from the men around them, and the society that they lived in. Now, of course you can't do that with most men, since they haven't faced of crushing, systemic oppression to that all-encompassing degree on a large scale like this. However, when it is relevant, it is told. For example, Turing's story is often interwoven with the fatal systemic oppression he faced, because he was a gay man. And I'm not sure anyone can say that specifically is demeaning to him.
What you're calling out here, excusing my arguments above, is merely hyperbole as part of marketing, and I'm not at all sure that's relevant to what this comment thread is talking about.
> who are just as good and important... like Edwin Moore, who patented the push-pin.
I'm... not really sure what you mean to do here? This is a confusing comparison to draw here.
I can't actually see an example of where Edwin Moore is remembered as 'inventor of the push-pin', whereas the women in these articles are remembered to some degree -- after all we have this archival footage! It's just that their names are not as prominent after the fact, which is unexpected given the tangible contributions that they made.
The fields you're comparing here are disparate, and Edwin Moore hardly had a professional career out of, say, making aeroplanes. Whereas these women were both highly regarded (The one woman turned down a prestigious job offer in a highly regarded musical establishment specifically to make electronic music), and their work was influential to their contemporaries -- they just aren't mentioned after the fact.
Given these two pieces of fact, the only reading I can see here is that you intended to deliberately draw a bad, dodgy example, and hoped I and other people wouldn't notice. Which seems rude at best. I'm not sure how the article demeans women, but your comparison here certainly seems to? I hope you can correct this, if this is not what you intended! Thanks for your response anyway!
The Army is not the arts ... but for whatever reason at least in that organization the women generally really, really don't want to be treated differently. It's nice to be the 'first so and so to do such and such' but that's definitely not the point. They're not 'Lady Rangers', they are 'Rangers', full stop, and generally don't want a sliver of space in between what they are, and what the Men are.
Having not heard the music of 'Women With Transistors', I could be wrong ... but I'll suggest they're not on par with 'Beethoven'. So the issue then becomes the degree to which these ladies were overlooked, possibly due to sexism, and the nuances in that. That's the story. And there's a lot to unpack there obviously.
I think the controversy arises because some people question the legitimacy of comparisons with 'historical greatness' and then others interpret that to be a form of delegitimisation of the challenges the women faced, or that they were overlooked. Which could be true in some form of rhetoric, but I think is not true on it's face, or rather, it's a least reasonable to question whether or not the people in question here are 'Beethovens'.
And I'll say again - I haven't seen it, so I can't really be sure of this specific case, rather, I'm explaining how confusion can arise in these kinds of cases.
But it looks like an exciting watch for sure.
The subtle implication is that most smart and talented people are not black, that smarts and talents are atypical in blacks and more common in other races.
That would essentially be gaslighting half of earths population.
The cycle will end by itself in time through a series of under-corrections, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
And I’m sorry to say that comments like yours that undermine attribution of women are not part of the solution.
No.
> The cycle will end by itself in time through a series of under-corrections, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
Perhaps, but that’s not what the reality is at the moment. At the moment, there are what amounts to large corrective movements, which some argue to be over-corrective, and others who argue that anyone who is against any large amount of correction must be arguing against any correction at all.
> comments like yours that undermine attribution of women
Clearly you are part of the last of the aforementions groups.
I see progress as a series of under corrections, like a pendulum swinging back and forth, eventually settling into a neutral middle state.
Yeah, so do women of the last few centuries! (and more)
Thing is those people aren't born in different bell curves with different expectations, considerations, cultural histories, and preferences.
Additionally this isn't just about talents, this is about being talented in a seemingly traditionally male arena, engineering. Women in engineering will always be of note since most women do not choose to be there.