"Before the Enlightenment the female skeleton didn't exist"

So this is where the theory gets really stupid and is obviously false. They didn't think that women were necessarily needed as the vessel. There was all kinds of myths and theories that babies could be grown in jars, in the earth etc. It was all nonsense, but the point was they thought that women's role in reproduction was entirely contingent and happenstance.

This sounds to me like the product of their Gender Studies departments, trying to justify whichever misogyny was in vogue at the time.

I'm not actually believing any real life people were failing to notice 100% of actual real-life babies came out of actual non-virgin females, or were in any doubt that there were 2 sexes.

If people looked back at our current literature, should they conclude that we don't know there are exactly 2 sexes, because of all the stuff written in Scientific American?

"Even if the woman's role is only "vessel", that's still two sexes - you need one sperminator and one vessel."

So this is where the theory gets really stupid and is obviously false. They didn't think that women were necessarily needed as the vessel. There was all kinds of myths and theories that babies could be grown in jars, in the earth etc. It was all nonsense, but the point was they thought that women's role in reproduction was entirely contingent and happenstance.
They also thought that women themselves were entirely contingent and happenstance - their 'deformity' was caused by women not getting enough food, or sleep, or relaxation during pregnancy. This caused stress to the developing baby which caused it to turn into a deformed male. So theoretically, in a perfect world you would just have males and no women at all. The Greeks never paused to consider what the hell they would do to continue the human race in such a circumstance.

They didn't really have a theory of sexual reproduction - males were the only ones who produced children and contributed the material. it was more like asexual production, with women being the equivalent of plants for pollen.

But look, while the theory was flawed it still enabled them to, in reality, accurately track who the females (in fact) were and who the males were. The deformed males ALL happened to be females, and all the females were locked up inside for their entire lives and never allowed out, and just treated as baby making machines. So in practice their weird theory didn't lead to any differences in treatment.

I'm sorry to say but that is just completely fucked up . It's so incredibly bigoted that I am actually feeling a bit (not envy) having read such stupid post-modern non-think.

Gah!

Necessary the ancient Greek philosophers are I think the source of this.

It doesn't make sense of course. Unless you are steeped in the misogynist thinking of s couple of thousand years ago.

If you read Mary beard's 'women and power' she goes through with examples how many of those ideas resonate today.

Channelling my inner Dr Hilton...

Male and female predate knowledge of gametes. Everyone knew you needed male and female to make babbies. Just not why.

And for mammals and other similar animals, you could say which were male and female just by seeing which one had a willy. Lots of animals worked basically the same way as humans.

(Rather odd because we clearly weren't animals, but hey...)

Anyway, males = willies, females = missing willies.

So definitely two sexes, by that definition.

Later on we figured out how reproduction worked, which in turn meant we could define sex in a way which was more widely applicable. You're no longer looking for the willies, you're looking for the gametes.

Going back in time and saying they had a "one sex model" (with current gamete sex definition) is rather misleading. That implies they thought there was one sex.

No, they thought that only one sex was providing gametes, and they weren't defining sex through gametes at the time because they didn't know about them. They knew there were two sexes, but they thought they were "inseminator" and "vessel".

They had a two sex model, they just had a different definition of sex (which still provided the same answer in humans). It was a one-gamete model.

WithLarge. Well that explains it then!

Phew. Sex role is maintained.

I'm wondering if you're retrofitting a more advanced "genetic sex" definition in place of the more fundamental one to say they had a "one sex model", when obviously they'd always have known you needed one of each sex.

They just didn't know why.

Yes. They thought there was man. And then there was a defective sort of man (i.e. woman).

Right, but they knew there were two sex roles in reproduction right? You need one defective and one non-defective. The number of sexes wasn't in question.

So the theory switched from the one sex model to the two sex model - females were their own biological category.

No, lost me again. What was a "sex" in the "one sex model"? "Provider of characteristics to offspring"? Has that ever been the definition? It's "role in reproduction", surely?

Even if the woman's role is only "vessel", that's still two sexes - you need one sperminator and one vessel.

This all seems very Eurocentric, which is a Bad Thing.

Tut, tut, Sally.

In the pre-Enlightenment era they thought there was one biological sex, male, with different degrees of perfection. Men were perfect males, and women were literally deformed, mutated males. So ovaries were undescended testicles, the vagina was an inverted penis, women's skeletons were 'deformed male skeletons' etc. Now, this theory was completely wrong and it goes to show that the theory itself didn't matter - everyone knew who the women were, everyone knew women got pregnant and had babies, everyone treated women like shit. The fact they were thought to be lesser males didn't lead to them being treated any better.

How did sexual reproduction work? They thought men's sperm contained a little human being inside it, and when it was placed inside the woman's body (which was just an empty cavity) this was like planting a seed. And the little human expanded and grew. Women contributed nothing to the process except being a vessel.

In the Enlightenment they managed to see gametes under the microscope and got to chop up some bodies (autopsies of women had been very rare before that point) and they realised that women weren't just mutated males, a subset of males, but were actually a different kind of thing - another biological sex. And they realised that women produced their own gametes which contributed to sexual reproduction, and that ovaries weren't just atrophied testes, and the vagina wasn't just an inverted penis. So the theory switched from the one sex model to the two sex model - females were their own biological category.

The two sexes always existed in reality, it's just that the Ancient Greeks didn't have the scientific knowledge to appreciate this. To say there was no such thing as a female skeleton in pre historic times is like saying there was no such thing as radiation, or bacteria, and that witches and magic existed. The theory changed, but reality was always the same.

I have to emphasise that this was just a change in the scientific theory. This didn't change how women were treated socially or in reality one bit. Women didn't get more respect when they were regarded to be a subset of males. What is interesting is that the scientific theories of the sexes didn't impact very much at all on how women were treated. Whether women were seen as males, or females, their social roles stayed the same and they were still oppressed.

The defective sort of man was inferior in every way. Smaller, weaker, slower. And obviously not as intelligent. How could women be equals to men when they were just a defective sort of man?

That thinking was very useful to men for thousands of years.

The understanding that women were not an incomplete version of man, no kind of man at all in fact, but in a category of their own, meaning there were two distinct and mutually exclusive sexes took some time to emerge. But thanks to the curiosity of the scientifically minded, we got there in the end.

I mean Sally Hines maybe hasn't...

She means I assume that no one had bothered studying female skeletons?

Which wouldn't surprise me. Similar to...

Viking warrior was buried with lots of weapons. Obviously a man of great fighting skill etc.
Years later. Erm. Actually that's a female skeleton. Ok. Female Viking warrior? Lots of historian types rethink. The weapons etc were probably ceremonial, a mark of respect etc.

Internal clitoris images for first time about what. 5 years ago?

Etc etc.

Does she think that before Newton there was no gravity?

In the same way that America didn't exist before a European "discovered" it?

You'd think with all the stuff about post-colonial guilt etc at the mo they'd twig. But no.

Yes, before the Scientific Revolution (which led to the Enlightenment) the experimental method wasn’t really a thing. They based a lot of their knowledge on ancient Greek and Roman texts and the bible. So limited knowledge all round and then male bodies prioritised because sexism and all the philosophers were male.

Is she quite well, that professor?

Oh, do you just mean they hadn't spotted the fundamental differences in the female skeleton? So just traditional limited knowledge of female anatomy, and usual male = default?

So, before the Enlightenment the THEORY about sex was that there was only one biological sex and women were just shit, malformed males. It was only during the Enlightenment (with autopsies etc) that scientists realised they'd made a mistake and there are two separate biological sexes.

Um, I'm assuming/hoping you can explain that better than Hines. I'm not getting it. What's the definition of "sex" there to make that make sense?

Do you just mean they discovered there are internal differences as well as external differences? Between the two sexes?

I'm not quite sure how the number of sexes is changing...

Or was it that they discovered that there really were two fundamentally different body types, rather than a "spectrum"?

Even when they did begin to recognise women's skeletons, they didn't get it right and would depict women as having smaller skulls and too wide pelvises to support their views that women are too stupid to be educated and should be kept at home for child rearing. The men's skeleton was still seen as superior of course.

@EmbarrassingAdmissions her ability to stab women in the back chills me to the marrow

I used to work with Sally. If she is on one side of an argument, I am probably going to be on the other. Almost as a point of principle.

She was appointed to a professorship when I worked with her, which kind of solidified my complete disillusionment with academia. She’s very good at using buzzwords to apply for funding.

I mean, I used to teach this stuff to second year undergrads, who got it. It's not bloody rocket science.