gruntledandhinged:

dataandphilosophy:

There’s something that I’m really uncomfortable about that I keep running in to, and I’m not sure what to do about it. It’s casual erasure of important women when people are trying to make arguments that a whole group or genre is irredeemably sexist.

I remember an article talking about how sexist all, not just some but all, old philosophy was. That didn’t mention Harriet Taylor. Presumably because she would have been inconvenient, and undercut the thesis. Same thing happened to several other brilliant female philosophers.

I recently got annoyed at something themerryladymidas reblogged, because it talked about all these great female political leaders in positions like prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, and then said that there was nobody like that in the United States. Completely erasing two fantastic secretaries of state.

Below the cut there is really angry ranting in all caps at this article, which takes a few paragraphs to tell us how sexist a (miscategorized, by the way, as the author apparently didn’t realize that Dragonriders of Pern is sci-fi, not fantasy) series by a woman, where many of the main characters are women, without mentioning these facts. She also attacks the sexism of a world of Brandon Sanderson, who I’ve praised before for being a remarkably tolerant and thoughtful human. She doesn’t bother to mention that the main character is a woman.

I get that it’s really tempting to erase women when they’re inconvenient for your thesis. But, please don’t.

Keep reading

Yepyepyepyep