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Comment by daptaq | Hacker News Reader

> Honestly this comment was a very long winded way of saying "women aren't oppressed"

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.

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This isn't a nuanced important discussion rife with opportunities to learn or some such BS

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

They are saying that you have to look at the past from the perspective of the people who lived in the past, and not from the perspective of the present.

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).

If you look at the past from the perspective of the people who lived in in, then it's plain fact that many cultures oppressed women and that women were often seen as less strong, able, smart, etc. which led to reduced opportunities for whatever education existed at the time, learning specialized skills, or ability to hold positions of power.

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.

It's somewhat of a misconception that women did not work to produce food as men did. They did and do. An idle pair of hands was a luxury that only the rich could afford. The only reason that we think that there was such a disparity between the sexes is because our history is distorted by the perspective of the rich and privileged classes, who created an entirely separate world for themselves, while also contributing the most accounts of their time. We only remember those who were so well off that they had free time to indulge in the arts and sciences.

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).

We're not talking about making food, we're talking about notable people on the map that OP shared. None of those people are notable for 'producing food', they advanced science, culture, sports, etc. What are you even talking about?

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