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
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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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.
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 wrong, because without those things they won't actually learn the truth.
Further than that, I think it's necessary for women learning 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.
The gender-bigotry comes from the "what man needs to mark 28 days?" There's snark behind the comment, and it's unnecessary. That said, a woman could be just as likely as a man to mark moon phases. But saying "man" doesn't mean "male" when talking about us as a species from my understanding. Seems like a broader term to use which includes the entirety of the homo-whatevers.
I'm just some guy here and am not educated in this stuff, though!
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
The point would be a lot more impactful if they didn't make up a story to support their position.
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
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.
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.
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.
There's both practical and more spiritual/philosophical reasons for this.
Before artificial light sources, especially electrical ones, moon light let people stay productive longer whilst outside. This was especially important for comunal activities like hunting, harvests or celebrations too. Keeping track of moon cycles is thus valuable for preparation in scheduling. And once you do that it can also be used to organize other social events around that. Similar to how our modern calendars and schedules are built around important fixed events.
The moon and sun as celestial bodies also gained prominent religious and mystical significance in ancient cultures. Remember that people didn't actually know what the moon or sun were in the modern scientific sense. But for some strange reason these mystical glowing disks on which people were so reliant kept rising with unerring synchronicity. The inquiry into the movements on the firmament lead many a civilization down the paths of observation, record keeping and math too.
So you're arguing that people would have more use to write moon cycles than women cycles? And you talk about bigotry?!