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.