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

[EmbarrassingAdmissions]

Sally Hines: "Before the Enlightenment the female skeleton didn't exist"

The pure joy of the riposte to this (tweeter reportedly suspended, I don't know for what):

twitter.com/shirleysascot/status/1403949421663039489

via twitter.com/shirleysascot/status/1403949421663039489?s=20

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.

@NiceGerbil

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.

You know they’ve already retrospectively transed that female warrior don’t you? I won’t post a link to prick news but here’s a screenshot instead

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.

WithLarge. Well that explains it then!

Phew. Sex role is maintained.

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.

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.

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!

@Grellbunt

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.

Excellent point

"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.

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?

@cheugy

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.

People before the enlightenment knew what dead people looked like inside, and dead animals too.

What they didn't have was a scientific theory of why it was like it was, apart from the obvious, or how different creatures were related.

The tendency to take what the classical sources said as the gold standard was a Renaissance thing though, the medievals respected the ancient philosophers but were much more skeptical of the things they said. It was one of the reason the early moderns thought the medievals were backwards.

@NecessaryScene
you may well be right. Aristotle said that women were 'natural slaves' so there was a big push to justify this. Also.... we don't actually know what Aristotle himself wrote. We only have the notes from a really bad student (God, what a legacy.) So we don't know for sure what they actually thought.

And I agree with you. They knew who the sex class were. They knew who got pregnant and who to have sex with to have babies. They knew who to treat like shit. Their ignorance about biology didn't mean they didn't know who the women were. They were able to reliably identify the females and treat them poorly. There weren't any cases of men getting forced to stay at home, uneducated because they were mistakenly thought to be women.

It's a bit like race theory. In the early Enlightenment period there was a debate about whether black people were members of the human species, or whether they were a different species altogether. But the theory didn't actually matter, because the racists of the day were able to justify their prejudices no matter what.

So in essence we can sum up Sally Hines argument as

"As a Gender Studies person, you need to believe me about how many sexes there are, because 500 years ago, Gender Studies departments were talking gibberish and didn't know how many sexes there are."

How about we never listen to the Gender Studies departments, and just carry on with the traditional 2-sex model the general public has always used? Just a thought.

I'm not sure why it's a shocker that ancient Greek philosophers had certain views about women.

Then and always and still now there's often a conclusion (biased) that is to be proved.

Looking at the skulls brains etc of different races to 'prove' that some were naturally superior is not a thing done any more for obvious reasons.

The studies designed to find the differences between men and women- their brains their behaviour etc- has never stopped.

The bias of the ancient Greeks is still there.

There are men and there are like-men-but-lessser. Non men.

The ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers on women have never gone away.

Weird how the rest of the animal kingdom just gets on with it.

@NecessaryScene

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?

You are not wrong about this.

One of the problems with looking far back at how people thought about these things is that certain ways of thinking about science are so embedded in us that they colour our interpretation, without us realising.

It's also worth knowing that there were a lot of theories in the premodern world, it's not like there was only ever one way to think about things, and it's a huge span of time. And they also didn't always think of explanations in quite the same way either.

As far as why some people were born women, and some were men, so far as it goes some of their observations were not wrong, there area lot of the same building blocks in male and female reproductive organs. But not knowing about genes and such they tended to look for what we might call environmental explanations. So maybe if the mother is very nervy, she has a girl, or if she eats a lot of eggs, she has a boy. SImilarly they thought that other things that happened during gestation could affect the way the baby would turn out - which is actually true though not so much in the way they hypothesised.

So what they seem to have envisaged is that the basic blueprint was male but if certain things happened during gestation it would develop as a female. Rather like turtles, I always think.

The Christian philosophers couldn't quite look at it the same way because they have to see men and women as having a real ontological distinction because of the creation story, among some other reasons. But it's not until the end of the medieval period that you begin to see an approach more like we would recognise to these questions.

So has Sally Hines inadvertently shown what we all knew? That trans ideology is a return to the Dark Ages.

@DdraigGoch

So has Sally Hines inadvertently shown what we all knew? That trans ideology is a return to the Dark Ages.

How old is that tweet?

Yes. They thought there was man. And then there was a defective sort of man

Just like the Green Party!

Women contributed nothing to the process except being a vessel

Some men still think this, especially in regards to surrogacy.

They were wrong, the ancient Greeks.

They believed that women were like men but rubbish, and then looked to confirm that.

The creation story. Man came first in god's image. Woman was to keep him company. Not in god's image, she came from a bit of him. From man but different. Not in god's image. And then she went and fucked it all up. And was punished by having pain in giving birth.

Through history women have been presented as whatever men wanted them to be at the time.

Temptresses who were highly sexed
Gatekeepers of sex
Intellectually inferior
Emotionally unstable
Stoic and self sacrificing
Property
Assets to collect to show wealth and power
Etc etc etc

I think it was the Bible (?) where over the years women were erased. Their names were masculined because the things they had done, were not fitting for women. Men should have done those things.

And still it continues.

The attempts to prove that women's and men's brains are fundamentally different. Which might be interesting if it didn't always go hand in hand with trying to prove that we're not as good at X as men. In a sexist society where 'male' traits are valued it's never going to benefit women.

It's always.
Spacial awareness.
Logic.
Analysis.

It's never.
Propensity to violence.
Social conscience
Stamina

Iyswim.

Aristotle

'Aristotle believed that only men possessed the quality of rational thought, while women were restricted to the emotive and passionate. He asserted his belief that men naturally were more fit to rule and lead, and therefore it was the natural order of things for women to be subordinate to men. He states, “The relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled” (Arist. Pol). He goes as far as to compare the relationship between men and women to that between children and adults'

These views are still essentially held, aren't they.

@NecessaryScene

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.

They didn't always know. There's a plausible hypothesis of the creation of the patriarchy, which posits that the agrarian revolution, and more specifically the knowledge about reproduction gained from early animal husbandry, led to creation of the patriarchy. Until then, the general way of thinking was that men had nothing to contribute to reproduction.

So about 12,000 years or so ago, the general idea was that women had this miraculous power to make new lives. And the life was put into the woman by whatever spirits her tribe believed in.

During the transition from a nomadic to a settled lifestyle, animal husbandry became of great interest to the people of the time. They started breeding animals, at first just to increase their livestock and later to improve the livestock.

Inquiring minds of the time soon noticed that soon after that peculiar-coloured bull had mated with the brown cow, it bore a peculiar-coloured calf.

Didn't take very long for those early agrarians to understand that male animals and male humans had a role to play in reproduction after all. And not only that, if they wanted to make sure their offspring had the best chances, they kept a close eye on their females.

And that was the beginning of the patriarchy according to that hypothesis.

Of course they held onto their one-sex model of reproduction. Instead of thinking of women as life-giving, that was now the man's role. The woman, as previous posters have already said, was now recast as a mere vessel. She made no contribution to the child other than providing a growing environment.

And the man who wanted to ensure his offspring had the best chances, exerted control over the woman he was mating with.

(It's entirely plausible that keen observers of the natural world realised the connection between mating and offspring long before the agrarian revolution. But there was no societal forces coming into play before people were settled, so any early knowledge didn't have widespread consequences.)

@StrangeLookingParasite

How old is that tweet?

General Twitter search for the phrase:

twitter.com/search?q=%22before%20the%20enlightenment%20the%20female%20skeleton%22&src=typed_query

Sally's comment - here, you'll see that Deborah Orr (the real one) now shows as deleted comments - the screenshot is contemporaneous from March 2019 in the OP): twitter.com/sally_hines/status/1110916692996182019?s=20

Looking at this brought up a tweet from Phillipa Black:

twitter.com/black_phillipa/status/1111069794948780032?s=20

Long way to say - does anyone else remember Phillipa Black and the biological facts sticker jail?

twitter.com/black_phillipa/status/1031210896553635845

Plenty of stuff found from way back, around the world. With women as important. The ones who gave life etc.

The old ideas got squished as per Charlie's post when the ideas of inheritance plus babies are made from the man and the woman were realised.

The global oppression of women has its roots from there. Male paranoia about paternity. All of our oppression globally and for thousands of years stems from that.

And yet again the underpinning attitudes exist to a greater or lesser extent everywhere.

Why do men feel it's ok to approach s group of 10 women in a pub? But don't if there's one man there?

Why are women out alone, or wearing certain clothes, essentially seen as 'asking for it'?

Why are women subjected to Street harassment?

Because no male owner around, fair game.

It's the same attitude that results in the taleban rules for women, or the situation in Saudi.

Different yes and more extreme in some places.

I read an article about 2 women who were murderered while traveling.
It said they were traveling 'alone'.

As soon as it was realised that babies were contributed to by man and woman. And there was a concept of inheritance. Women were reduced to chattels. To be watched. Controlled. Paternity and the fact you can't guarantee it in the same way as maternity. Made men paranoid and they still are today.