First off, we know very little about the Minoans, since, y’know, Linear A hasn’t been deciphered yet, but from what we do know, they had an incredibly gender-segregated society, far more than we have today. In lists of family members, for example, the men and the women are in completely separate lists, which would be pretty weird for a place that didn’t have “arbitrary social constructs” like gender roles, and women seem to have been forbidden from most traditionally male jobs in their society.

There were distinct gender roles, all the way to the top (such as the lead religious figure as female and the lead ruling figure as male), but in accounting records where there was overlapping labor they were both paid the same (don’t need to know Linear A to read numbers).

For the Hittites it’s even worse

You’d be wise to keep in mind that these kingdoms cover a very long period of time when history and social norms shift around. A given individual in one generation does not reflect the society as a whole, but in turn the society at other periods doesn’t necessarily reflect all the individual generations within it.

We can’t look at America as a whole and use the records of women being denied the right to vote at one period of time to reflect a woman’s role in America in a different time.

The historical reality is that Paduhepa was co-signing the treaty of Kadesh with Egypt alongside her husband, when the Egyptian pharoh’s wife was not. Whether or not that was anomalous in the context of the entire Hittite empire is besides the point of whether or not at that point in time it was a political reality.

to act like Hittite queens were on par with Hittite kings in any way is completely false

I didn’t say that. But I did say that she cosigned the first treaty in the historical record, and I think you’ll have a hard time showing another example since where the wife of the ruler was co-signing a treaty unilaterally.

Their role in court was mostly religious

Here I think your modernism may be showing. In cultures where the chief deity was a goddess and the chief religious official for that goddess was the queen, you don’t think maybe in antiquity the impact that religious role would have had would be more than superficial?

For example, you have Akhenaten inscribing in the dedication of Amarna an assurance that his wife didn’t tell him to build the city there, but the Aten himself. So clearly at the time there were allegations that his wife, who had been depicted worshipping the Aten directly without her husband before this, was influencing his building of an entire new capital for the country.

Much like the paradigm outlined in Marinatos’s Minoan Kingship and the Solar Goddess, bringing us full circle to another society with empowered women within their society.

In fact, in pretty much every place you find one of the empowered women in antiquity there’s a connection to female deities.

So I think you underappreciate those “religious roles” in relation to the topic at hand.

While you are welcome to your take, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and here’s the writer/director responding to that very scene:

Li: Speaking of those video clips, let’s talk more about the ending. Can you tell me about the decision to have the Barbies and Kens reach, not a definitive solution, but kind of a détente? President Barbie, played by Issa Rae, does not allow Ken a seat on the Supreme Court. They’re still figuring things out.

Gerwig: We’re all still figuring things out—that’s part of it. But the only thing I could ever give anyone is that they’re all still in the mess. Maybe it’s a little better for the Kens. You don’t want to tell people how to watch things, but at the end of the movie, the production design incorporates some of Ken’s fascinations into Barbie Land. Like, the perfection is not as beautiful as the thing that started blending everything together. I remember when we went to shoot the finale, when we all walked on set, we were like, This is the most beautiful it’s ever been.

• Greta Gerwig’s Lessons From Barbie Land

“Arbitrary social constructs that have previously existed have previously existed, which is why we should carry them forward.”

Most of the reason people think this is because they don’t know history and the periods and cultures where women were badasses prior to patriarchal rewriting of history.

Cultures like the Minoans where women were paid equal to men for the same work, could divorce on their own, and seemingly felt safe from sexual violence given they walked around in outfits that accentuated their exposed breasts. A culture that had indoor plumbing over a thousand years before the Romans.

People like Nefertiti, the only woman in the history of Egypt depicted in the smiting pose who upended the entire religion and lines of succession such that there’s a pharaoh who follows with the only apparent qualification being that he’s married to her firstborn daughter. Had she been successful with the proposed second marriage to the Hittites it would have led to the largest kingdom in the region’s history - and without a single battle.

Or Paduhepa, the “great lady” of the Hittites in the time of Ramses II who was not only conducting diplomatic relations with other countries but was co-signing treaties with her husband.

Or Deborah (meaning ‘bee’), the prophetess and leader of the Israelites early on. Tracing back to a period when the archeology of an apiary in Tel Rehov indicates there was potentially awareness that the hive was ruled by a queen.

Most people, men included, have a false picture of history as one in which men built great empires that spanned the world. But this ignores survivorship bias and the great filter on our history by patriarchal revision of earlier norms. We only know of all of the above because of relatively recent archeology. Nefertiti was stricken from kept Egyptian history. Deborah precedes Asa deposing his grandmother the “Great Lady” and Josiah’s banning of goddess worship. We’re only left with the scraps and poorly covered up remnants of greatness for women, while male accomplishments are hyped up or literally stolen - such as Amenhotep II taking credit for an earlier female Pharoh’s accomplishments and he and his father trying to erase her from history.

So we’re operating from what’s effectively misogynistic propaganda treated as a blueprint carried forward and reinforced in the historical record. It’s not “how it’s always been” at all. It’s just how it’s been recorded as having been by one side.

Counterpoint - men need to be less hung up on gender.

There’s plenty of liberal spaces for people even if not exclusively for men.

As a guy, I don’t need a sign outside saying “Open for men” to know I can go into a store, just “Open” suffices.

While there are aspects of my life that are informed by my biology and its social construct, it’s one of the least defining aspects of who I am as a person. I don’t need it specially recognized.

I’d much rather live in a world where there’s spaces for “people who like RPGs and fantasy” or “people who like tech” over “people who identify as male.” I have a ton in common with the former two, irrespective of gender identities, and very little in common with the latter other than fairly superficial things.

“Hey, pee standing up? Me too! We have so much in common we should be friends. Oh, you want to meet up at the bar to watch the latest hockey game? Yeah, that sounds…fun…”

The very idea of a “liberal space for men” is antithetical to my sense of liberalism. We should be liberated from arbitrary notions of identity, not reinforced into them.

While this is true, it’s also true that pendulum swings can go further in the opposite direction than equality.

While a trite example, in the recent Barbie film, at the end when things are going back to the seemingly good way, the men in Barbieland ask if they can have a seat on the supreme court and are told no, which is then explained as Barbieland being a mirror to the real world such that as there’s increased equality in the real world then equality for men in the mirror would increase.

Apparently the writers weren’t familiar with the fact there’s four women on the supreme court right now and a woman has been on the court since 1981 (around twice as close to the creation of Barbie than to the present day).

Even in the context of its justifiably imbalanced equality it failed to be proportionally imbalanced.

There’s interesting research around how the privileged underestimate the degree to which the good things that happen to them are because of privilege, but that at the same time the underprivileged overestimate how often the bad things which happen are because of bias. In theory both are ego-preserving adaptations. But it also means that either side is going to have a difficult time correctly identifying equality from their relative subjective perspectives.

WhatsApp had 500 million MAU when it was bought up.

That’s 250x the fediverse.

They really don’t care.

Yeah, it’s been hilarious watching the fediverse think Meta gives a rat’s ass about either reaching them with content or getting access to their horde of memes.

This is about preempting regulation.

Meta would love nothing less than having their interoperability push still end up as a walled garden, and if I didn’t know better regarding their total disinterest about Lemmy or even Mastodon existing, would even suspect that the degree to which they’d be meddling in the conversion would be creating posts about how people should be irrationally upset and defederate from Threads.

Though they don’t care enough to be involved in the conversation at all, and know full well that the fediverse will hit scaling issues should it ever miraculously gain traction long before it is actually a threat in any way to their market dominance.

All that said, it’s still pretty hilarious to watch the inflated self-importance and slight paranoia that goes with it leading to bitter debates like this though.

Users.