• happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    I similarly like that feminist theory of Venus statues. They aren’t dummy thicc proto-porn but the perspective of someone who’s pregnant looking down at their reflection in a river and cataloguing the most dangerous/important point of their life.

    • AlpineSteakHouse [any]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      It makes more sense for the former unfortunately.

      The original theory was that it could have been a pregnant women looking down and that’s what lead to the proportions. The idea was they wouldn’t have been able to see themselves in a river or something. But rivers and puddles, not to mention OTHER pregnant women, were extremely common so it’s less likely.

  • jackpot@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    i think they mean ‘man’ as in ‘mankind’. also any ideas why would they carve it into bone and not bark or something more flat?

    • Rowan@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 months ago

      Likely durability and portability. Think of it as something they use month over month and just mark the day with something like a string band. Bone would be light enough to keep with you, strong enough to not break, and common enough to be available for household use.

    • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Likely durability. A bone and a stick can both be thrown into a bag and carried with you, but a bone is much more durable than a stick. It’ll be less likely to break or wear down as it rubs against everything else in your bag.

    • survivalmachine@beehaw.org
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      9 months ago

      Sure, you can say “man” means “mankind”, but when you use gendered language like that, most people picture a couple of caveMEN sitting around a fire carving bones rather than caveWOMEN. Even though we try to use gendered language in a neutral way, listeners will often perceive the language in a gendered way.

      • jackpot@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        no i mean, by the people ‘who consider it’. i think the speaksr didnt understand that theyre saying it’s mankind others are talkint abkut

        • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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          9 months ago

          Oh but the word mankind in itself overlooks women. We’re all supposed to be saying humankind now.

          • jackpot@lemmy.ml
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            9 months ago

            etymologically speaking im not even sure if thats right. i heard somethibg like this and they either said woman doesnt derive from man or that man used to mean woman and man but woman became its own thing, cant recall

            • John_McMurray@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              “man” in the contexts not directly related to being a male, means human. “Man” used to have a prefix vaguely pronounced “were” and “woman” used to be “wifman”. Female werewolf would be a “wifwolf” then. So anyways, “Man” never changed it’s meaning, it really just gained an additional one, and yet again, whiners need to read a book.

  • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Never mind anything, making the abstract connection between one event and the number of marks you scratch on a wall was probably the equivalent of genius of the time, the first mathematician.

  • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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?

  • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    A woman’s cycle varies between 15 and 45 days, averaging 28.1 days, but with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That’s a hell of a lot of variability from one woman to the next. And the same variability can be experienced by a large minority of women from one period to the next, and among nearly all women across the course of their fertile years.

    On the other hand, the moon’s cycle (as seen from Earth) takes 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes to pass through all of its phases. And it does so like clockwork, century after century.

    Of the two, I am finding the second to have a much stronger likelihood of being the reasoning behind the notches.

    Strange how gender-bigotry style historical revisionism and gender exceptionalism seems to get a wholly uncritical and credulous pass when it’s not done by a man.

    • bouh@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      So you’re arguing that people would have more use to write moon cycles than women cycles? And you talk about bigotry?!

    • Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      While I agree with you that the teacher in this post is wrong about what this is, I don’t think labeling “gender bigotry” indiscriminately as something both sexes do under one umbrella is accomplishing anything but minimizing the struggle women have endured for basically all of human existence up until the last few decades.

      Personally, I wouldn’t fault this woman for thinking what she does if she’s willing to accept a broader explanation later, given that women have literally been sold as property up until a couple hundred years ago.

      Women have the right to at least posit the ways they as a group have been held down, and that includes accepting their indignation and allowing them grace for when they’re actually wrong, because without those things they won’t actually learn the truth.

      Further than that, I think it’s necessary for learning women now to have the same realization this one did that women throughout all of history save for this recent tiny sliver have been oppressed, even if it’s built on an incidentally faulty premise, that doesn’t mean the realization itself is wrong.

      Covering up the discourse by labeling the process of realization as “gender bigotry” is itself an attempt at erasure, and very much puts you on the side of the oppressors, just because you think it’s distasteful to have this realization yourself.

      I’m sure gender bigotry exists in the direction of women towards men. This ain’t it.

    • ChexMax@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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. Plenty of women are regular like clockwork, I was at 26 days almost exactly for years.

      • KredeSeraf@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        If you start to notice one thing happens pretty regularly and another thing happens regularly but on a larger scale… Say the monthly moon phases and the seasons, you can use the more frequent one to roughly track the less frequent one.

    • SqueakyBeaver@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      9 months ago

      I doubt the teacher really believed this, and they were likely striving to just open their students’ minds to the idea that most innovations are probably assumed to be made by men

        • WldFyre@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          This is a class on anthropology, the point was to challenge the assumptions made when interpreting artifacts/history with little context. No one made anything up lol

      • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        Why not use a real and confirmed example, then? Because they do exist.

        Making a story up - such that it can be actively undermined - certainly does the job poorly at best, and actively hurts the objective at worst.

  • kromem@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Yep. A bit like a 7 day publicly displayed tracker of days on a 28 day lunar calendar cycle.

    Was “I am the God of your Father” an editorial attempt to distinguish the deity from the gods of Egypt, or from the god of a Mother?

    There’s some pretty odd details in that book, like in Isaac’s supposed patriarchal blessing which discussed “the sons of your mother bow down to you” or it being the only place there’s the male form of gebirah (“Great Lady”) - a title first applied in the text to Isaac’s mother whose name is based on the word for ‘chief.’ Who is supposedly later followed by a figure ‘Deborah’ (‘bee’) who is a leader of the people around the time we now know bees were being imported into Tel Rehov and regularly requeened to avoid genetic drift with local bee populations. Also weird that the events regarding a “land of milk and honey” supposedly take place in a land with no honey and only one discovered apiary.

    That apiary gets burned down right around the time Asa allegedly deposed his grandmother the gebirah (“Great Lady”).

    • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      well yes, but 28 day months dont divide nicely into 365/366 days, so it would not have worked well… uh, hang on. i’m being handed a note. huh. apparently our current calendar also doesnt solve this neatly at all, and is in fact a patched monstrosity more batshit than anything any single malicious person could come up with. well.

          • NuraShiny [any]@hexbear.net
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            9 months ago

            Essential work will always need doing on holidays. Anyone doing essential work gets their free days at other times before of after these holidays.

            Good point about hemispheres though. Put half of the days in between December and January and half in between June and July. Since it’s an odd number of days (unless it’s a leap year), alternate which of these gets one more every year.

        • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          well yes, the clear answer is to have “days outside the calendar”. this is how the hobbits do it too :)

      • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        Anyone working with dates and times was cursed in a past life. Timezones are a pain to work with. Daylight savings sucks. Some countries change daylight savings at different times. Some countries change timezones sometimes. Go further back and some countries had their own leap days. Different calendars don’t form neat cycles and must be manually synchronized every few years. Did you know Easter, for about 300 years, needed to be announced by the Pope each year because it was a lunar holiday based on a Jewish calendar but the Christians followed a different one? Also, every now and again we throw a leap second into the computers because the Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down and 365/366 days isn’t quite precise enough anyways.

    • Carvex@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      13 months of 28 days with an extra holiday at years end, it works so much cleaner than what we use.

      • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        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.