One of the comments reads : Actually, we will probably never figure out, was it man or woman. but I thought this comment of the professor was an interesting eye opener. https://mastodonapp.uk/@MarkHoltom/112070436760917344
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IIRC “Calendar” was one of the proposed solutions, but the bone actually had a lot more than 28 holes. It’s one of the reasons it’s purpose is considered unknown.
I always find this particular strain of antiintellectualism deeply ironic, because it claims to oppose women being forgotten, but the premise assumes the “scientists” are all male.
I don’t see it assuming scientists are all men. Women are just as capable of internalized misogyny and just as capable of being dense as men.
With the willendorf Venus, it wasn’t until a woman who had already had children worked with it, that they suspected it might be a pregnancy self portrait. There had been women already there, but none who knew what a pregnant person looks like from that perspective.
Ok, now that example I like very much!
I’ve never been 7+ months pregnant (not a sad thing in my case, no worries), but I can 100% imagine that it feels like being the willendorf Venus. I love the idea of some woman however long ago half annoyed and half teasing making it and giving it to the father, saying “this is what I am now,” though.
“never more than 2 weeks pregnant” would be much less alarming, but it does have the implication of yeeting blastocysts at the grim reaper, however many or few…
I just meant showing, I’ve never been past seven weeks, thankfully.
I really like that idea, in principle, of a sculptor with no reflection to work from doing a self-portrait. But seriously, even somebody having triplets doesn’t look like that unless they’re like… super morbidly obese already. Even accounting for foreshortening, I mean damn. That kind of figure is a strictly modern invention. But maybe, it’s still an interesting idea. But seriously.
I’ve got a bmi of 19 and it doesn’t look so significantly different looking down when I’m not pregnant, lol. I even asked my husband to confirm it wasn’t hella body dysmorphia. I, uh, am not going to post a picture, but you can plug various values into this visualizer and change the angle of view. It has always been pretty accurate for me.
So they nailed it with the 28 day calendar and we are stuck with this one
13 months of 28 days with an extra holiday at years end, it works so much cleaner than what we use.
That’s just what Big February wants you to think.
Yeah, but then how could we make the important months longer than the rest? That would really piss off Julius and Augustus.
Slightly more sensibly, 12 months is easier to synch to the seasons, and calendars are very important to agriculture. 3 months for each season is convenient.
Thirteen also can’t be divided evenly and is widely considered bad luck.
I always read this type of statement as man = species.
I know this particular thinking is falling out of fashion but it’s not totally dead yet
This specific instance probably.
But the point is soo much of history ignores the female perspective (or the non-european perspective). Sometimes intentionally like all the female scientists that contribute to foundational studies and don’t get their name on the published paper.
And this is really damaging; I have a family member that legitimately believes that european-descent men are the smartest throughout history (when I brought up the Islamic Golden Age as a counter example he accused it of being propaganda).
American schools are so bad at teaching diverse history. So many still struggle with the basic truths about Columbus and the Natives.
So I what you are saying that we should ban all DEI activity, ban a bunch of books, and regulate Women’s bodily autonomy? /s
Everyone loves traditions!
Look at the ancient structures found throughout the world. The only one I know of in non-Mediterranian Europe is Stonehenge which, while impressive, is some stones hauled over a great distance and placed is an astronomically significant manner. Then you have pyramids and ziggurats in just about every other region except Northern Europe, North America, Australia, and Antarctica, ancient cities on every continent except Northern Europe, Australia, and Antarctica, Polynesians developing a means of marine navigation that is effective across the southern hemisphere (the Norse had a system that was effective in the North Atlantic), Australia having an oral history that has evidence of recording events that go back at least 10000 years (while surviving in some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet). When you look at it, significant achievements in ancient Northern Europe were pretty sparse. We do seem to have caught up in the modern era, though.
I don’t know about English, but in French in the 19th century men did enforce the use of homme (men) instead of humain (human) in the déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, and in the language, because they did want to segregate women. It was a purposeful and deliberate decision.
I am convinced it’s exactly the same in English.
Any source on this claim about the declaration?
That’s the correct interpretation of that use of the word, and the quote in the post is meaning to use it in that way before pretending it’s a gotcha.
The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- “person”) and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age. In traditional usage, man (without an article) itself refers to the species or to humanity (mankind) as a whole.
But its taken to mean both, so at least lightly attributes it to a man rather than a woman.
In the context of prehistory it’s to my knowledge taken to be short for mankind and feck all else. I agree its ambiguous in the modern age which is likely why it’s dieing out. Science doesn’t like ambiguous wordage
In history where we have names and context I absolutely agree and it is good to see the important women in history finally getting brought to the forefront
I’m pretty sure that was the intent behind the original wording. The interpretation of this being the remnant of a female human makes sense to me, but as this is an anecdotal account of Sandi Toksvig’s time in university, we really have no idea if this is a good example of the lack of a female perspective in anthropology or just a convenient strawman to make a point.
In any case, cool meme.
Thing is, statements like the one in the post are just as ignorant as the claimed “enemy”.
You know what else takes 28 days? A moon cycle. We have absolutely no context, what this means. A period tracker bone is a perfectly valid hypothesis, but without any proof or context nothing more than this. It could have been used for moon phases, sheep counting, trade, or simply for testing stone knives.
look how much deeper blade three cut with a single stroke! Are you sure you want to go with brand 4?
Seeing the reactions in this thread, it does seem that a lot of men are indeed enemies of women. Why would it be so hot otherwise to discuss this?
And this reaction of yours is a prime example of jumping to conclusions based on political views.
You can argue, that this bone was used for 400 different things. Without context, arguing that it’s definitely something about menstruation is just pseudo-feminist circle jerking. They just choose this interpretation because it fits their views and goals. That’s unscientific.
What you’re doing here is also not much better. Instead of actually engaging with the argument I brought, you just assume, that everyone who disagrees with a pseudo-feminist interpretation of a bone, must be the enemy. That is not exactly scientific.
you talked about enemity first, remember? you have this view of a fight, and that anyone who dare say that a woman did something and not a man, is fighting men.
You have a very defensive position. Which means you feal attacked. You say it directly when you talk about “enemy”.
You are the problem my friend. Your first comment is aa problem. And the support it receives is concerning and scary.
Nope, I just pointed out, that an absolute statement like the one above is not valid. And the “enemy” I brought up, was used as a description of the position shown by the proponents of the menstruation bone absolutism.
And labeling me as a “problem”, without even an attempt at telling me where I might be wrong is pretty, well, bold?
Think about it, I write, that absolutism is not good, and your first response is “you are evil because you dare question whatever I happen to believe in”.
You don’t help feminism like that. And that’s pretty sad.
Professor: Maybe it was a woman? Just consider it with an open mind.
You: This gender absolutism is the enemy™!
Same here. My native langauge is not gendered and I rarely associate “man” in academic spaces with “gender” category. I usually need more info to tilt to gender in discussions.
Which is your native language? I keep looking for ways to ungender my english if possible. Removing gender from language feels more honest.
English is not a grammatically gendered language. Otherwise, all languages have gender.
Why do I have to know the gender of a person in order to talk about them in third person singular? On more days than not, there is conversation about someone I never met where there is an irrelevant sidebar to clarify gender before communication can continue. I find this relic of the language to be inefficient, pointless and annoying. Daily life would be a lot easier with a non-gendered word for referring to a single person in third person. Languages like Spanish, with gendered nouns, is confusing for even native speakers. I am fascinated by how different languages have different ways of being complicated as well as by their phonology and syntax. I asked my question because I was looking into how other languages use gender and came to the conclusion that none were free from that complication. So I agree with you so far. All languages have gender.
‘Natural gender’ has nothing to do with ‘grammatical gender.’ The reason we have words for male and female persons and pet animals is because they are male and female. Calling something male or female is not grammatical gender. It’s just reality, something the trans supremacist militia hates.
False, English is a gendered language that lost most of its gender usage. Some words still retain gender, such as blond/blonde.
I though yhe blonde spelling was just used for beer
Male or female beer?
🤦♂️Yes, in that sense, English could be gendered. But what it actually means is that English used to be gendered and retains some gendered words from that time.
Another example, Russian has noun cases, but not the vocative case. However, it does have two words that have a vocative case from when the language as a whole did use to have the vocative case - Бог (Боже) and Господь (Господи) - but that doesn’t mean that Russian has it now.
Also, blond/blonde are pronounced the same so the distinction is lost in speech and probably soon in writing as well, and words like fiancé/fiancée (which are also pronounced the same), widow/widower, actor/actress do not signify grammatical gender by itself.
Swahili. If you want to translate “she/he went to the river”, you say “Alienda mtoni” which collapses she/he into the subject A- (Alienda) to mean “the person”. You always need context to use a gendered word (like mwanamke for woman) otherwise general conversation does not foreground it. There is literally no word for he/she in Swahili, as far as I know.
I love you how specified “as far as I know” even though it’s literally your native language lmao
That shows you have no idea what grammatical gender is. It has no relation to your social behavior or what you have between your legs.
Agreed, when speaking of the distant past, I always assume that by “man” they mean “mankind” aka human… Not males.
In the grand scheme, I don’t think it matters whether the thing was done by a male or female, the fact that it happened is the interesting thing about it.
I’m 100% positive that both men (males) and women contributed to these things, and it is impossible to know how much influence each sex had on any given thing, so I’m not sure why the sex of the ancient person who did it, matters.
I’m not sure why the sex of the
ancientperson who did it, matters.Make that a common sentiment and a good chunk of the division surrounding modern discourse goes away. People care way too much about genitals both in the past and present.
Not only what your genitalia is, but what you do with it, seems to be a top priority for far too many people. They’re not your genitals, so maybe don’t worry about it?
But “God” or something. I don’t know.
Not sure why you phrased that as correcting them when you were agreeing and adding to it.
I didn’t take it as a correction. More of a clarification. I omitted some extraneous detail that they added. I felt it was implied well enough by context that it didn’t need to be said, obviously they wanted to add more clarity to the statement.
In my mind the two statements are identical, except that mine relies on context and theirs is a bit more explicit in what is said.
Fair enough.
I don’t think that’s phrased as a correction. It clearly wasn’t as you noted
“clearly wasn’t”
I see now, you just phrase things abruptly in a way that SEEMS rude but clearly isn’t. My mistake. Have a nice day.
You figured out what it meant. That’s clear enough for communication purposes imo. You’re welcome to your own interpretation though
You are ignorant of recent history then.
Men did do their best to segregate women in the 18th and 19th century. And they succeeded. Even in the language.
Women fighting for women to be recognized in history is an important fight for women to be respected and recognized for their doing, because even now they aren’t.
And I’m not saying it’s an all men problem. It’s a society problem.
Oh, wow. Um…
We’re talking about bone carvings. And you’re well into or after the bronze age.
What I’m referring to is significantly prior to anything you’re talking about. The events you’re referring to are a few hundred years ago, part of recorded history, while I’m talking about the early days of mankind, well before the printing press, paper, or even writing instruments like the fountain pen or quill.
When you go back, well over 1000 years ago, more like 3000+ years ago, why does it matter if a thing was done by a human person with male genitalia or female genitalia?
That was my statement. Either you vastly misunderstood, or you’re so occupied by making a point, you didn’t care.
We’re talking about history where mysoginy left a big footprint because it was made by men that incapable of thinking that women could be more than what they were in their time.
Exactly like today. You’re asking why it matters whether it was a man or a woman, yet this whole conversation sparked because someone said that it could be a woman.
That’s conservatism for you.
I’m not disputing the fact that misogyny was (and is) and big problem, that women’s contributions were either disregarded or coopted by some guy and credit taken away from the actual contributor.
That happened. A lot.
But in the times before the written history books, we should be less concerned about the gender of an individual who we think used a thing in a new/innovative way for the time. I don’t think that studies of bone carvings or other ancient artifacts, being referred to as an “achievement of man” should imply, or was ever meant to imply, that it was done by someone with a penis. In that context, in all cases, for all intents and purposes “man” should, and as far as I know, is, thought of as “human” or “mankind”.
This isn’t a debate about the sociopolitical unfairness towards women, it’s a semantic argument about using the term “man” to refer to a human individual or someone who is a part of mankind. Bluntly, I took the statement in the OP as a tongue in cheek joke by the professor. They know that’s not what it meant, and used the assumption that “man” = “mankind” as the juxtaposition to subvert expectations, to crack wise about it. The same way someone would say “you know what sucks about twenty six year olds? There’s twenty of them” where the premise directs you to think of someone who is 26, and the punchline indicates that your assumption of it being a statement about people who are 26 years old, was wrong. That’s what makes it funny. Granted, that’s not very funny, but it’s the structure of a very common type of joke.
That’s what’s in the OP.
Instead, here we are talking about women’s suffrage for a field where they probably only remark about the gender of someone as a footnote.
This and “hey guys”
Derek, halt! Unga unga, no cave cuddles now. Me check bone-calendar, unga bunga, big chance for baby bump. We wait, sky spirits nod-nod. Timing everything, unga!
Sure, that was the way for woman to use a calender…
Lol, mansplain harder! I’m sure it had nothing to do with wanting to know when their next period was due, to, you know, know when their next period was due, and be prepared for that, without it having anything to do with a man… 🙄🤦♀️😂
No meme, only bait.
It’s under the sauce.
Man just needs to look at the moon to mark 28 days
Sometimes it’s cloudy. Sometimes you can’t tell if that’s were 2 or 3 days away from a full moon.
Cool thought, but why is this in meme /C/ ?
Why wouldn’t a male have figured out a lunar cycle and tried to track the moon? Not that the female explanation is lesser in any regard, but why exclude all possibilities?
It could be both.
A few weeks ago I blew my wife’s mind after she commented that both her and her best friend had started their period and I responded with ‘well, it is a full moon.’
She thought I was being ’boomer humor’ sexist until I brought up the studies about it. (Which are not 100% conclusive, mind you, but there are trends.)
As a man living with three menstruating women I learned very quickly how to count to 28 on three different cycles.
As a woman I’m offended but also feel seen
Menstruation sucks and anything I can do to make their lives easier makes my life easier.
But that’s because I’m the man: The man with a good attitude towards menstruation
Offended? Start the clock…
Ah yes one of the memes of all time . Also true af.
The crux with all of those “first calendars” (idk which one is meant here, but there are multiple who claim this) is that we don’t even know if it’s a calendar at all. I mean, if this professor’s approach serves as an eve-opeher for some, we should retell it whenever possible, yet it doesn’t reflect any of the questions we should ask ourselves when seeing 28 carvings in a bone. Assuming that htis can only be a calendar is just the hidden assumption that numbers 25 and up could not have played a role anywhere else, because ppl were to primitive for those numbers somehow.
Perhaps they tracked how many calves in herd they had, or how many horses they had or how many bows they needed to make or how many children there were in the village. Perhaps they wanted to go higher and track something completely different and only got to 28 before they abandoned their approach to whatever they were doing.
eve-opeher
LOL. I guess if it reads, it reads
d e e p t h o u g h t s
I keep track of my girlfriend’s ovulation because she can’t be bothered to do it. I don’t want her to get pregnant either. Just pointing that out.
I hear you but it’s far more likely for a woman to track her own period than for a nearby man to track it. You’re the reason this professor felt the need to give this example. Because men assume all progress and intellectual pursuits were obviously sought by men. You guys think it’s the automatic default, and even the suggestion that a woman might have accomplished something is met with, “hey! It could have been a man!”
There’s some faulty reasoning here.
Parent comment challenges the assumption that the marks were made by a female, and you say “you’re the reason the professor felt the need to give this example”, although the example was given in order to challenge assumptions of gender.
OP is actually learning from the example if anything, since they are challenging gender assumptions.
On top of that, your use of “you guys”, and your generalisations about men are evidence of the exact type of biased thinking this example is trying to challenge.
I’m confused by this quote - no sane person would assume a male did something just because we say man did it. In this instance, man would simply be referencing humanity
The want to define whether a male or female did it without any evidence is simply sexist
Isn’t it a shame though that the way we refer to humanity as a whole is by using the specific word that represents only half of humanity?
Its not hard to see how this is exclusionary. Honestly, how many people immediately conjure an image of a woman in their head when someone says “man’s first attempt at X”? Male as the default is the root of the issue here. Its not difficult for us to use more suitable language like " humanity" or “humankind”.
Sandi clearly isn’t up in arms about the language used here, she’s just simply pointing out this exact problem. First thought is of a man’s work. Only through thoughtfully examined details do we invoke a woman’s presence. Men are the default, but why? Many of these ancient cultures revered their women; attributed vast amounts of the success of their people to them and we set up their historic legacy into the future with poor choice of words. Its sad, really.
Fortunately things are changing for the better.
I agree that English is a constantly changing language, with many words meaning the same thing or single words meaning multiple different things. It’s the case with the male man, derived from werman, as is such with many other words
But your point ignores what I was trying to say
Anybody who feels the need to specify gender with such limited information is simply being sexist. Neither male nor female should be assumed in this instance
This goes for people other than those in the post; scholars and students should be held accountable alike
Whether these historic individuals were male or female is irrelevant. Only their creations truly matter
I get you. All I have to say is this in response: Its easy to say that specifying gender is irrelevant when the speaker is a man. Women have been forgotten or purposely obscured in history books since forever. There’s nothing wrong with positing that a woman may have done X. If there’s an obvious potential for female context, why suppress it?
I am sure the comments on this meme community post in a niche social media site will not be filled with butthurt men’s rights activists.
You could have at least used the term “misogynist” so as to not imply that men’s rights are a bad thing.
Hey, we found one!
Not seriously, “men’s rights activists” are a specific group of people that only exist to complain about and hate women. They don’t care about men’s rights, they are anti-feminists.
If you genuinely didn’t know this, then I’d love to know what Internet rock You’ve been hiding under. If you’re trying to concern troll, fuck off, MRAs are fucking scum.
-signed, a man.
Feels good to go with the flow, doesn’t it? And going for the audience’s applause? And while we’re at it, what are “women’s rights activists”, then? The undisputed incarnation of everything that is right and good in the world, I suppose?
-signed, a man, like you.
signed, a man
You could have left this part off, it was perfectly clear you’re a man
Have my upvote!
I’ve definitely heard of misogynists, and of misogynists disguising themselves as legitimate men’s advocates, but I’d never heard of “men’s rights activists” as a specific group of misogynists before this.
Without this explanation, had someone said “men’s rights activists are misogynists,” I would have thought they were a misandrist, because it sounds like a general descriptor and not a specific group.
So what do you call it when someone who’s not a misogynist advocates for equal treatment in the areas where men get the short end of the stick?
Generally, they’re described as part of the men’s liberation movement. The men’s movement split decades ago into men’s rights movement, which often comes at the issue from a more conservative premise that views feminism as going to far and eroding men’s rights, and the men’s liberation movement which generally is more liberal and wants to critically look at traditional masculinity and how those expectations may harm men.
I mean the lunar cycle is roughly 29 days with the argument that it’s 28 if you don’t count the new moon.
I realize this is a neat thought idea but it I think best demonstrates how easy it is to jump to conclusions.
I conclude the moon has a vaj
Mussy?
Moossy
Well duh, Sokka was trying to get all up in it
I just finished TLA. I’d never seen it, and now I have, and it’s gone, and my life feels empty. Why would you bring this up? Why would you hurt me so?
Korra is good, but it doesn’t hit the same, and 70 years is not enough to fully industrialize a society.
70 years is not enough to fully industrialize a society
Russia, China
Also, I imagine industry in general becomes significantly easier when you have people that can summon construction projects out of the ground or weld with their bare hands.
Also, society isn’t industrialised. One city state within society is industrialised.
Also, the fire nation was already undergoing industrialisation at the time of ATLA.
Seriously, the Fire Nation had mass produced internal combustion engines in ATLA. They put them in their mass produced tanks. Not to mention the fleet of ships with smokestacks indicating they probably had either diesel or steam powered ships. The Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes are both still in the process of industrializing, but the Fire Nation was already pretty much there, and the United Republic is primarily a Fire Nation breakaway state.
More than likely steam. Don’t need fuel to burn when when you can just make fire with magic. And we know people get employed for their bending ability since Mako got a job lightning-bending at the power plant.
Look up the Meiji Restoration in Japan. They went from a feudal, near-medieval society to an industrial society between 1870 and 1920, by the time they were done they are participating in both world wars.
You actually don’t have to suspend your disbelief so hard here, it’s the most believable part of the story of people who can bend elements with tai chi
Even if you take a Western lens to it and say ATLA takes place around 1850 that still puts Korra in the 1920s (and the air nation falling around 1750) and the only thing that really would be innacurate for comparing their timeline to ours is the lack of trains connecting the cities, at least in the earth kingdom where theres a lot of land to be crossed.
I suppose if you assume that Ba Sing Sa is self-sufficient with it’s large farms in the outermost ring then it makes sense from a tactical perspective to have fewer points of entry to the city. You’d also have to assume there’s either significant brain-drain from the villages into the city or that the villages keep to themselves so much that they have no need for better transportation between them
I’m not finding any good sources right now but some of the earliest trains were actually a singular railcar on wooden rails pushed by 1-2 people in much the same manner that the trains in Ba Sing Sa do, just sans Earth bending of course
I over thought this a lot and the only conclusion I could come to is the earth nation should be covered in railway lines. Extremely shortly after some of the first viable self-propelled steam locomotives were invented the first railwaya were built, and within 50 years entire countries were covered in railway lines connecting the smallest towns both that existed before the railroads and many built by the railroads.
The existence of bending would only accelerate this development since right of way would be rapidly built through earth bending, and locomotives could simply have a closed system of water to be bent to produce propulsion. An earth bender could also spin a stone flywheel attached to gears to produce propulsion too. Or combine these with steam propulsion to overcome the limitations of early steam engines and the poorer iron and steel alloys of the time
Other than tides, why do you need to know when the next full moon is? And can’t you just look at the moon and see how close it is waning to the full moon?
Not saying the calendar is definitely a woman’s, but wanting to know when you’re going to start leaking blood onto everything near you seems like a good reason to track a period.
I mean you can look at the moon to get a general sense, but if you want to be more precise then I’d use the new moon as the start and count the days until the next new moon.
As far as why, I mean the seasons generally follow the lunar cycle so it would be a way to count the seasons and time and plan and do literally anything you’d need to do that you’d track time for.
I bet you’d even want to track your menstrual cycle, I just wouldn’t limit it to that.
I think the real “issue” with the OP statement and what my response is meant to say is that it doesn’t have to be either or.
So, since Islam uses the lunar calendar, you’re telling me that the reason why they use it is to track menstruations?
Good to know they are attentive to their women’s needs
I’m saying you don’t need to make marks on a bone to track the lunar cycle… you just look up.
In English common law, a “lunar month” traditionally meant exactly 28 days or four weeks, thus a contract for 12 months ran for exactly 48 weeks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_month
So, depending on the legal framework, a 28 day marker could be very useful. If they were actually tracking the moon, you’d think it would be 29 units even though a lunar month can vary between about 29.1 and 29.9 days. Then again, 28 notches on a stick means 29 sections, so…?
It’s interesting that a woman’s menstrual cycles is approx 28.1 days on average, with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That means 28 days is a lot closer to the average menstrual cycle than the average lunar month. But, the standard deviation is a lot greater.
