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Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

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Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#51
post #48
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mostly agree, but I don't think that's responsive to what I said. My point was that, to the best of my understanding, the idea of "female DNA" just doesn't seem like a good way of conceptualizing biological sex, to the point where it doesn't seem useful to me for explaining anything.

The actual changes needed to flip an embryo from male to female are fairly tiny. On the other hand, the number of genes related to sex characteristics is large, but they're mostly shared between both sexes and not uniformly expressed in members of a given sex (hence why transgender HRT administered before puberty results in development largely indistinguishable from a natural puberty). So proposing "female DNA" as a cause for some observation seems unenlightening to me.

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#52
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 I ask because as a take this is 40 years out of date.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…

My qualm with this is thinking is that it supposes the gender role binary is created then reinforced, rather than emergent and reinforced. The key difference being the conclusion: is the gender role binary reinforced by oppressing individuals or is it reinforced by indulging individuals?

My opinion and probably the most popular side across all cultures and all time: human gender role binaries are emergent behavior, and we indulge that emergent behavior. If humanity restarted from day 0, on day 1 girls would be playing with dolls far more frequently than boys, and boys would be playing with trucks far more than girls. On day 2, parents would buy their girl a new doll she wants and buy their boy a new truck he wants. The gendered behavior emerged without social construction of any kind, but because parents love their kids they indulge that behavior, thus reinforcing it.

In your view, if humans began at day 0, what would happen on day 1? Would boys and girls play with trucks and dolls evenly? Is it only on day 2 that parents start reinforcing gendered behavior?

Now obviously there’s a discontinuity here because there was never a day 0 for humans, but the fact that practically every culture across space and time no matter how separated, including all the way back to chimps, shows girls playing with dolls and boys playing with objects suggests that this isn’t some societal cram down, it’s an emergent phenomenon from biology, or group behavior (one sex is larger, one is smaller) that causes this to appear almost always.

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#53
post #41

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…

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 -…

I don't have any idea why you're bringing "Critical Race Theory" into this? I didn't think there was any analysis of race in the article, only gender?

Critical Race Theory is not some kind of boogeyman that encompasses everything you don't like.

> 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.

I don't know what you consider "reinforcing gender stereotypes" means, but to me that's fitting the bill pretty solidly! The mother (presumably) acts in the way that her society expects of a woman, and in playing with the doll to mimic her mother the child is more deeply internalizing those ways.

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

OK, yeah, I'll bite: Da Vinci was comissioned by Francesco del Giocondo to paint a portrait of his wife Lisa del Giocondo. The thing about painting for patrons is you're supposed to make them look good. If you try to make Lisa dG look good, you're going to be relying on "gender stereotypes of feminine beauty".

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

David (in the "vs Goliath" version) is a young fit man armed with a sling. Furthermore, that David was often a symbol of Florence, and if Michelangelo (a Florentine) hadn't made him so youthful, fit, and masculine there might have been trouble.

If you look at other depictions of David from that time, they're all stereotypically youthful, fit, and masculine (and sometimes horned up as in Donatello's second take). Michelangelo (and contemporaries) had similar ideas of what a young, fit, masculine person should look like and that's what they sculpted.

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#54

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…

Part of feminism is the agreement that "the experience of girls and women" is a topic worth studying in the first place.

Re: Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

#55
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

I don't have any idea why you're bringing "Critical Race Theory" into this? I didn't think there was any analysis of race in the article, only gender? Critical Race Theory is not some kind of boogeyman that encompasses everything you don't like. > 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…

The commenter brought up Critical Race Theory (or at least 'Critial Theory') I was responding to that.

You're making my point for me:

Every portrayal of society reinforces the norms in that society.

So it's not 'scholarship' (or even relevant) to point it out the possibilities.

In fact, to avoid talking about the more material issues, and to go right into indirect fuzzy issues of feminism is 'anti scholarship'.

Not only that - it's probably false - as I pointed out, 'bad feminists' lament Barbies and more anatomically correct dolls at the same time, literally for opposite reasons.

It's speculative ideological rubbish. If a 'gender theory' researcher actually wants to do some research and put some sound logic together, that's find, but otherwise it's just politics.

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