Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

Are you posting from the ARPAnet? I ask because as a take this is 40 years out of date. Feminist analysis as applied to archaeology has a pretty solid history : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_archaeology

The thing about archaeology is the objects of its study are things made by people who happened to be living in a society (ok sometimes they study actual human remains, but I have to point out that those too were made with untrained labor). If you want to use the things to understand the people--and if you don't, why are you doing archaeology in the first place?--it's important to use what we know about people and societies in general to guide your analysis.

What are some important facts about people and societies? Well, people are generally bilateral bipedal, have a mineralized internal skeleton, like to wear clothes and get out of the rain, and so on.

In particular, people tend to be weakly sexually dimorphic (with substantial overlap and exceptions), and societies tend to divide among that line with varying intensities (again with overlap and exceptions). So if we want to study the people of the past, one of the things we need to understand is how that division tends to manifest and be maintained, and one way to do that is to understand how it manifests and is maintained in observable, i.e. modern, societies.

And once you start looking at things from a "how" perspective it's not too hard to start noticing that one mechanism is giving children toys that encourage play in ways that reinforce the ways in which they will be expected to act in the side of that subdivision they were assigned at birth.

(This isn't necessarily a comfortable thought! All of us on this forum were young children at one point in our lives, and with probably some rare exceptions would have been soaking in this boy-side or girl-side split the whole way through. I know I certainly was!)

Anyway, this is getting kind of long. To sum up, understanding how people on both sides of that division lived and how their society maintained that division is necessary to understanding their society as a whole, and if 'acknowledging that women are people and an honest examination of how they are treated by society' isn't feminism, I don't know what is.

If we try to generalize findings of primatologists onto humans, namely what Franz de Waal writes about chimpanzee, than I'd rather say that boys prefer toys that model objects, while girls prefer toys that model subjects. Chimpanzee males seek power and control, they play political games forming coalitions, breaking from them out, they are friendly when it seems beneficial for them and hostile when needed. Chimpanzee females seek stable relationships, their relationships last longer, easily they could last for life. I mean, if we think of chimpanzee as of humans, then how we model the mind of a male? He sees his neighbors as objects which should be manipulated for his benefit. While females see others as subjects: it helps to respect their needs and to be respected back, it allows understand each other needs, and to form a long-term relationship based on a cooperation.

See how it nicely fits together? It is not a some kind of a science theory, it is just my own unfounded speculations. What I want to say, that it one of the reasons because I doubt that all the difference between boys and girls preferences could be explained by a nurture. Some of it must be a nature thing.

I suppose I dont belong to the enlightened crowd when I dont understand quotes like these:

> “Is e=mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest.”