But I think it's disingenuous and anti-intellectual to ignore historically constructed gender dimensions. In a given case, gender dimension might be irrelevant or of low importance, yes. But to think about is not such a ridiculous thing! Please don't caricature the topic by bringing in silly non-issues.

So keeping those old barriers in place is your "intellectual" answer to this question?

Join us in the twenty-first century, Gibb, you'll find women doing lots of things they weren't doing as much in the era of sea chanteys. And let me suggest that the sophisticated response to women singing chanteys is to not wince and apply a mental asterisk *used to be sung by men when you hear such a performance.