I wish we could appreciate women's talents without feeling forced to prefix the whole thing with a blob about restoring them to their righteous place on the pantheon of whatever.
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.
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.