Important discussions ought to have more nuance than a assigning a binary value of being oppressed or not. One step towards this direction will have to be to abandon the notion that you can say X is "more oppressed" than Y, especially when talking about different categories, societies and historical periods. There is nothing to be gained from these comparisons, except for infighting and wasting opportunities to improve one's understanding of the issues that are being dealt with.
If the conversation was about how this map doesn't have a lot of women on it, how open and nuanced are you being when the first thing you say is "women aren't being ignored"?
Talk about assigning binary values. I'm not the one denying anything. I'm just pointing our the non sequitur
While from your perspective as someone living in an individualist culture in 2022 there are few women, someone in the past would not have perceived it from that viewpoint as modern individualism had not yet been developed.
The history of our culture and in fact all of humanity is the history of kin groups, that then developed into families, then into individualism (in some places).
All of these circumstances existed because of how people in the past thought and acted. This has a direct impact on the map we're looking at, which has mostly famous men. Men who had education, learned specialized skills, ascended to positions of power, etc.
So again like GP said, it's a bad-faith argument to try and shift to talking about class issues when the original point was simply about the gender inequality. They are different issues.
Before mechanized agriculture and the green revolution, the vast majority of society was involved in the act of producing food. It had to be that way. People lived in a position of abject food insecurity. Failed harvests killed, and in particularly bad cases such as the great Irish Famine, wiped out vast quarters of the population.
Beliefs are technologies. Just as an iPhone wouldn't work if you took it back in time (no electricity to charge it), most of our beliefs about how the world ought to be wouldn't work either (no food security to sustain them).
The major form of oppression back then was by class, then by gender.
It is of course better to be a male aristocrat than a female aristocrat (measured from today’s individualism values ie domestic duties have zero value), but both lived vastly better lives than serfs. Being a lower class woman was an extremely oppressed state, illustrated vividly by books from Victor Hugo.
To that point I'll not get distracted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
Did you know that the world's first programmer was a woman? She published the first algorithm for the Analytical Engine.
I felt this was an interesting article about how women were stripped of the opportunities to get into software in the 80s to much the same effect as likely many women were stripped of their opportunities during Ada's time: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
> Intersectionality opposes analytical systems that treat each axis of oppression in isolation.
Edit: I am not saying that explains all the complexity, and there has been a lot of criticism, justified or not. However, it is at least a good starting point.
This is true, but also read The Road To Wigan Pier to see the lives of lower class men in England. Go to work, crawl 2 miles underground (unpaid) to get to your work site, work for hours in a small space mining coal, crawl back, get home, scrub off as best you can, eat, sleep, repeat. Almost nothing that wasn't either a crime or being sent to war was as bad as that nightmare of a life.
If you think that's what they believe, then if you ask questions instead you give them the opportunity to explain it better. When you tell someone what they're saying rather than letting them say it, they have to spend time defending themselves against things they never said.
If they wanted open and constructive discussion, they shouldn't start out with a destructive statement.
Your apologetics are frankly worrying. If you really think lines of reasoning that downplay the importance of taking note of women and shoehorn male victimhood into those discussions should be given a chance to breathe, I don't think we can have a productive conversation.
Fair enough, I'm not going to argue too hard on that matter since I do agree with your original statement that there could be more women on the map.
> Your apologetics are frankly worrying. If you really think lines of reasoning that downplay the importance of taking note of women and shoehorn male victimhood into those discussions, I don't think we can have a productive conversation.
You're assuming a position I don't have. I was pointing out that your discussion style is counter-productive, that doesn't mean I side with the other commenter, or yourself. But since your point wasn't to engage in discussion, I guess it doesn't matter.