This past weekend, the New York Times published an article on Silicon Valley that started like this:

MEN invented the Internet. And not just any men. Men with pocket protectors. Men who idolized Mr. Spock and cried when Steve Jobs died. Nerds. Geeks. Give them their due. Without men, we would never know what our friends were doing five minutes ago.

The only good thing about this stupid article is the major shitstorm it provoked. Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing published an excellent rebuttal, and women and non-idiots everywhere chimed in with stories of the female inventors and pioneers who helped create modern computing. I don’t have much to add on that score, though if you’re interested I suggest you run down biographies of Radia Perlman (the “Mother of the Internet” who developed the STP network protocol), Sally Floyd (whose work on congestion control made the internet scalable and stable), Elizabeth Feinler (the pioneering ARPANET manager who created the domain name system), and, for the Stone Age angle, Grace Hopper (in the early 1950s she invented the compiler, which is of such humongous importance to everything that it’s like she invented the wheel and the alphabet).

But I’m not really going to get into all that. What I want to do is address a certain line of defense some people are taking on behalf of the Times.

For example, this guy argues that it was technically correct to say that men invented the internet because the key ARPANET-era conceptual pioneers were all men: “Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Robert Taylor, JCR Licklider, Lawrence Roberts, Vince Cerf, Leonard Kleinrock, and Robert Kahn. Arguably, there are others from that timeframe that contributed significantly, but its from these core group of people that the primary supporting concepts for the internet were born.”

Yep, those eight guys were all important, though I don’t know if that particular collection of names makes sense as the canon. But regardless, the real problem with this argument is that the Times wasn’t talking about those guys. The New York Times was not talking about the specific individuals who came up with packet-switching or developed TCP/IP.

The Times was talking about men. Men as a group. Male humans. Male geekdom, to be precise.

Let’s look at the Times article again (bolding mine):

MEN invented the Internet. And not just any men. Men with pocket protectors. Men who idolized Mr. Spock and cried when Steve Jobs died. Nerds. Geeks. Give them their due. Without men, we would never know what our friends were doing five minutes ago. But are these men trapped in the past even as they create the future?

See? The Times isn’t talking about ARPANET pioneers, who are all either dead or retired now and certainly aren’t out there in Silicon Valley creating the future. The “men” referred to in the article are the same “men” who allegedly invented civilization, the “men” who made all the discoveries and composed all the music and thought all the thoughts, the “men” who built the world and who now have to share it with johnny-come-lately feminists. Those men.

What the Times is doing here is the same thing Stephen King did when he offered up this bit of lying drivel as the credo for the women’s movement:

Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold on to America for a while longer, since they were here first. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I’d like to vote, please, and have the right to set my own course and make my own destiny. Once I was chattel, but now that is obsolete. My days of slavery must be over; I need to be a slave no more than I need to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat with sails. Jet planes are safer and quicker than little boats with sails and freedom makes more sense than slavery. I am not afraid of flying. Thank you, Men.

Nauseating, isn’t it? That’s in The Stand, by the way, and when I came to that passage I instantly became an ex-Stephen King reader. Never again, fucktwit. But this is what men do: steal credit for every goddamn thing in the world, and then whine about having to share. Whine that if it weren’t for them we wouldn’t have anything and why won’t you bitches be grateful?

It’s like that Baumeister clown—remember him?—who argued that not only did women fail to contribute anything to human civilization, but they couldn’t even handle childbirth properly until men became obstetricians and took over.

So here’s what I want to say to all that:

Women invented all the core technologies that made civilization possible. This isn’t some feminist myth; it’s what modern anthropologists believe. Women are thought to have invented pottery, basketmaking, weaving, textiles, horticulture, and agriculture. That’s right: without women’s inventions, we wouldn’t be able to carry things or store things or tie things up or go fishing or hunt with nets or haft a blade or wear clothes or grow our food or live in permanent settlements. Suck on that. Women have continued to be involved in the creation and advancement of civilization throughout history, whether you know it or not. Pick anything—a technology, a science, an art form, a school of thought—and start digging into the background. You’ll find women there, I guarantee, making critical contributions and often inventing the damn shit in the first place. Women have made those contributions in spite of astonishing hurdles. Hurdles like not being allowed to go to school. Hurdles like not being allowed to work in an office with men, or join a professional society, or walk on the street, or own property. Example: look up Lise Meitner some time. When she was born in 1878 it was illegal in Austria for girls to attend school past the age of 13. Once the laws finally eased up and she could go to university, she wasn’t allowed to study with the men. Then she got a research post but wasn’t allowed to use the lab on account of girl cooties. Her whole life was like this, but she still managed to discover nuclear fucking fission. Then the Nobel committee gave the prize to her junior male colleague and ignored her existence completely. Men in all patriarchal civilizations, including ours, have worked to downplay or deny women’s creative contributions. That’s because patriarchy is founded on the belief that women are breeding stock and men are the only people who can think. The easiest way for men to erase women’s contributions is to simply ignore that they happened. Because when you ignore something, it gets forgotten. People in the next generation don’t hear about it, and so they grow up thinking that no women have ever done anything. And then when women in their generation do stuff, they think “it’s a fluke, never happened before in the history of the world, ignore it.” And so they ignore it, and it gets forgotten. And on and on and on. The New York Times article is a perfect illustration of this principle in action. Finally, and this is important: even those women who weren’t inventors and intellectuals, even those women who really did spend all their lives doing stereotypical “women’s work”—they also built this world. The mundane labor of life is what makes everything else possible. Before you can have scientists and engineers and artists, you have to have a whole bunch of people (and it’s usually women) to hold down the basics: to grow and harvest and cook the food, to provide clothes and shelter, to fetch the firewood and the water, to nurture and nurse, to tend and teach. Every single scrap of civilized inventing and dreaming and thinking rides on top of that foundation. Never forget that.

That’s all.