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Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

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Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#41

Post by jariel »

bigbillheck wrote: post #32
seneca wrote: post #13

> These toys carried strong messages about girls’ expected roles in society. It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. Children play pretend, and they dress their dolls like their mothers and other people they admire. It's not an insidious plot, it's a culture and youthful admiration. If you can look at a toy a child loves so much that they were buried with it and see a ploy by so…

> It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. 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 I ask because as a take this is 40 years out of date.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 so…

This is a misrepresentation.

1) Critical Race Theory as a mainstay of scholarship is relatively new it it's broad intervention into all disciplines.

2) The 'big misrepresentaion' in your thesis is that you're alluding to some of the material value in the CRT lens (a kernel of truth) to posit it as the lens through which we should be understanding everything (the article used only CRT language to describe the dolls - nothing else).

3) By your own assertion, we're having to make some very broad assumptions about culture in order to draw conclusions, but in reality there isn't enough information to draw upon.

The assertion made in the article that 'Dolls are used to reinforce genders stereotypes' is a secondary artifact of the dolls, and frankly it's an insult to scholarship because it has little to do with the dolls directly.

Dolls were toys, used for a variety of reasons, the fact that those activities possibly reinforced gender roles is a secondary artifact. To represent that as 'the first truth' of the dolls is the giant CRT lie.

A female commenter here on the board gave some insight when she indicated: "She used the dolls to mimic her mother" - which is something I never would have thought of. Now that's thoughtful. What we could infer from these dolls from antiquity is possibly how little has changed.

The dolls, more than anything are probably just a reflection of society as a whole - like everything.

By CRT logic, the first thing we should say about 'The Mona Lisa' is that Da Vinci was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Feminine Beauty'

The Statue of David? Michelangelo was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Youthful Masculinity'

Yes - there are elements of validity in CRT, but as soon as you start with that hammer, everything crumbles into nonsense.

The article, as it stands, is rubbish, it has no intellectual value other than to give us a few nice photos to glean our own understanding.

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#42

Post by kikokikokiko »

bigbillheck wrote: post #33
kikokikokiko wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that "female DNA" is a fact right? XX vs XY anyone? Do you really believe that human beings are 100% blank slates, biology has no effect whatsoever?

So is it the extra X or the absence of the Y that you're suggesting is the reason for a preference for dolls?

Not only this diference per se, but the XX XY difference is a simple way to show that there is, in fact, a thing called "female DNA". The preference for dolls by girls is just evolutionary behavior, females are the ones that bare the responsibility for raising the offspring, in 99.9% of animal species, so it is just logical that the female cubs of humans and chimpanzees would "practice" raising babies. If you can't see this self evident truth, only ideology can explain it.

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#43

Post by chc »

kikokikokiko wrote: post #28
RIMR wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I would never want to hang out with someone who, because of a single difference in opinion about dolls, would conclude that I am "sick in the head" and therefore socially worthless. And I'm not even touching your "female DNA" comment, though I'm sure if we dug our heels into that we'd find several more reasons you're no good to be around.

You know that "female DNA" is a fact right? XX vs XY anyone? Do you really believe that human beings are 100% blank slates, biology has no effect whatsoever?

That doesn't really make "female DNA" a thing, because XX vs. XY does not tell us enough to know for sure if someone is male or female in the sense that the words are normally used. There are natural XY females who have a mutation in the SRY gene, XX males who randomly got a functional SRY on one of their X chromosomes, and other XY people whose bodies can't process testosterone and thus are female in almost every respect except lacking a uterus and having underdeveloped testes where ovaries would be. Most of what we think of as "female biological traits" seem to come down to that one gene and how the body (any body) reacts to hormones, rather than an overall difference in DNA.

This is not to say that there aren't biological aspects to gender, just that if such a thing does exist, it doesn't seem to be as simple as "female DNA" or "XX vs. XY."

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#44

Post by chc »

cambalache wrote: post #40
bigbillheck wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. 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 so…

Nothing of value has been added by having a "feminist" point of view. People (men and women) have been doing archeology for a long time, and the experience of girls and women have been studied (You could argue the extent of course) by countless scholars. 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 th…

I don't think you're supposed to understand that quote. While the quote was attributed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont to a feminist writer, nobody seems to be able to find an actual appearance of the quote before Sokal and Bricmont's usage, so it seems most likely that the quote was fabricated by one of those authors (perhaps as a placeholder that they forgot to replace with an actual quote — who knows?).

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#45

Post by cambalache »

chc wrote: post #44
cambalache wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing of value has been added by having a "feminist" point of view. People (men and women) have been doing archeology for a long time, and the experience of girls and women have been studied (You could argue the extent of course) by countless scholars. 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 th…

I don't think you're supposed to understand that quote. While the quote was attributed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont to a feminist writer, nobody seems to be able to find an actual appearance of the quote before Sokal and Bricmont's usage, so it seems most likely that the quote was fabricated by one of those authors (perhaps as a placeholder that they forgot to replace with an actual quote — who knows?).

[flagged]

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#46

Post by chc »

cambalache wrote: post #45
chc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're supposed to understand that quote. While the quote was attributed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont to a feminist writer, nobody seems to be able to find an actual appearance of the quote before Sokal and Bricmont's usage, so it seems most likely that the quote was fabricated by one of those authors (perhaps as a placeholder that they forgot to replace with an actual quote — who knows?).

[flagged]

Thank you — I've never been able to find any actual references to the page, and have found a lot of other people who found the book Sokal and Bricmont cited without being able to turn up the actual quote. I'm not sure your hostility is called for.

At any rate, that quote seems to be something of a weak-man argument that doesn't give us much insight into the question you meant to be addressing. You don't find insight in an odd passage by one particular author in an obscure French publication from 1987 that seems to have mainly been cited by way of disagreement, therefore an entire field of modern scholarship is useless?

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#47

Post by cambalache »

chc wrote: post #46
cambalache wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Thank you — I've never been able to find any actual references to the page, and have found a lot of other people who found the book Sokal and Bricmont cited without being able to turn up the actual quote. I'm not sure your hostility is called for. At any rate, that quote seems to be something of a weak-man argument that doesn't give us much insight into the question you meant to be addressing. You don't find insight…

Jog off troll

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#48

Post by seneca »

chc wrote: post #43
kikokikokiko wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that "female DNA" is a fact right? XX vs XY anyone? Do you really believe that human beings are 100% blank slates, biology has no effect whatsoever?

That doesn't really make "female DNA" a thing, because XX vs. XY does not tell us enough to know for sure if someone is male or female in the sense that the words are normally used. There are natural XY females who have a mutation in the SRY gene, XX males who randomly got a functional SRY on one of their X chromosomes, and other XY people whose bodies can't process testosterone and thus are female in almost every re…

There's are days during the year when the sun doesn't set at all around the arctic circle. No one would argue with the statemet "the sun sets at night".

More directly, there being extremely rare exceptions to a general rule doesn't make the rule false. There's a reason the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" exists.

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#49

Post by jariel »

yetihehe wrote: post #3
jimmyed wrote: post #2

This article does the difficult job of actually saying nothing interesting but still giving the impression that it holds some great newly discovered insight about Roman doll playing.

It just specifically lists how children could play with those dolls, not all articles must have "newly discovered insights". For example, I didn't know they had such precisely made and articulated dolls in those times.

"It just specifically lists how children could play with those dolls, "

No, it doesn't at all do that.

Not even in one instance.

The article says 'these dolls have certain characteristics' - and then goes on to speculate bout the potential social ramifications of such playtime without any real evidence.

The article fails to hone in on the social nature of playtime at all.

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#50

Post by jariel »

chc wrote: post #44
cambalache wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing of value has been added by having a "feminist" point of view. People (men and women) have been doing archeology for a long time, and the experience of girls and women have been studied (You could argue the extent of course) by countless scholars. 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 th…

I don't think you're supposed to understand that quote. While the quote was attributed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont to a feminist writer, nobody seems to be able to find an actual appearance of the quote before Sokal and Bricmont's usage, so it seems most likely that the quote was fabricated by one of those authors (perhaps as a placeholder that they forgot to replace with an actual quote — who knows?).

Fabrications are unnecessary to make his point.

'Math is Racist' is an accepted idea in parts of government and programs are designed around the fact that 'getting the correct answer' can be an artifact of White Supremacy.

Here is a hefty dose of Newspeak [1]

And Oregon teachers material on : "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction" [2]

The first sentence:

"White supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms"

"• The focus is on getting the “right” answer."

(Notice the word 'right' in quotation marks!)

"Students are required to “show their work.”"

"These common practices that perpetuate white supremacy culture create and sustain institutional and systemic barriers to equity for Black, Latinx, and Multilingual students. In order to dismantle these barriers, we must identify what it means to be an antiracist math educator."

In Critical Race Theory - quite literally Math and 'getting the correct answer' (or even a focus on that) is 'White Supremacy' and if you don't get that, you're racist and must be pushed out of the system so that teachers who begin their instruction from the basis of 'anti racism' can 'teach'.

Of course, there's no evidence of this offered, but that's irrelevant.

This is a government document, not a random quote from the internet.

[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2021/03/opinion-antiracis...

[2] https://equitablemath.org/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govde...

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