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> These toys carried strong messages about girls’ expected roles in society. It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. Chi

by seneca 6y ago

> These toys carried strong messages about girls’ expected roles in society. It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. Children play pretend, and they dress their dolls like their mothers and other people they admire. It's not an insidious plot, it's a culture and youthful admiration. If you can look at a toy a child loves so much that they were buried with it and see a ploy by society to control them, you've gone off the rails.

crocsarecool 6y ago
Yeah, I was surprised they made that leap to the dolls carrying messages about their expected roles in society. As a little girl, my doll was more an outlet to be able to imitate my mother. She’d give me a cuddle, clothe me, put me down for a nap, and I did all that with my doll. I also had a play telephone that I’d pretend to use while watching my parents speak on the telephone. My expected role in society isn’t a telephone operator.
dbspin 6y ago
Right? And the message they carry is that adulthood is possible. The entire point of dolls for both boys and girls is to play at being adults, which they do spontaneously cross culturally anyway. These toys facilitate fantasies of empowerment and maturity, and as such are an important part of how we develop into adult humans. They're not top down imposed cultural conditioning.
frellus 6y ago
Spot on. I have two girls. Neither were "encouraged" to play with dolls, nor was it any sort of "gender role re-enforcement". Girls like dolls because it's roll play on many levels (relationships, role) as well as a way to nurture something, as is likely built into the female DNA and brain. If you think dolls are some sort of abusive form of biased gender conformity, you're sick in the head and we could never hang out together.
- RIMR 6y ago
  You're right. I would never want to hang out with someone who, because of a single difference in opinion about dolls, would conclude that I am "sick in the head" and therefore socially worthless. And I'm not even touching your "female DNA" comment, though I'm sure if we dug our heels into that we'd find several more reasons you're no good to be around.
  - crocsarecool 6y ago
    I get that the female DNA comment might sound ignorant, but I was going down a rabbit hole about why girls play with dolls and came across the article below. It says that there might be some biological factors why girls gravitate towards things like dolls. Basically, girls might be wired to prefer “socially interesting” toys whereas boys like “mechanically interesting” toys. Obviously, it’s not 100% guaranteed what your kid is going to like based on DNA, but I thought it was an interesting article anyways. https://www.romper.com/p/do-little-girls-really-prefer-playing-with-dolls-new-study-claims-its-biological-29160 https://www.romper.com/p/do-little-girls-really-prefer-playi...
    - ordu 6y ago
      > Basically, girls might be wired to prefer “socially interesting” toys whereas boys like “mechanically interesting” toys. If we try to generalize findings of primatologists onto humans, namely what Franz de Waal writes about chimpanzee, than I'd rather say that boys prefer toys that model objects, while girls prefer toys that model subjects. Chimpanzee males seek power and control, they play political games forming coalitions, breaking from them out, they are friendly when it seems beneficial for them and hostile when needed. Chimpanzee females seek stable relationships, their relationships last longer, easily they could last for life. I mean, if we think of chimpanzee as of humans, then how we model the mind of a male? He sees his neighbors as objects which should be manipulated for his benefit. While females see others as subjects: it helps to respect their needs and to be respected back, it allows understand each other needs, and to form a long-term relationship based on a cooperation. See how it nicely fits together? It is not a some kind of a science theory, it is just my own unfounded speculations. What I want to say, that it one of the reasons because I doubt that all the difference between boys and girls preferences could be explained by a nurture. Some of it must be a nature thing.
- chc 6y ago
  You seem to be reading in a bit here. Observing how societal traditions and roles are passed on and reinforced is a far cry from "thinking dolls are some sort of abusive form of biased gender conformity."
RIMR 6y ago
Yeah, how dare anyone study the past and the present in order to consider the best path for the future. Real science is about accepting things at face value and never asking hard questions.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I agree with you that this article is a tiresome attempt to spot-weld an archaeological subject interesting in itself to the gender-and-power fad. However, with regard to this: > If you can look at a toy a child loves so much that they were buried with it and see a ploy by society to control them many toys sold in North America over the last several decades have been closely tied to media franchises, and there has been plenty of criticism of those media franchises for accepting strings-attached help from the US military to bolster its image, e.g. the Transformers movies [0]. [0] https://www.wired.com/2008/12/pentagon-holl-1/ https://www.wired.com/2008/12/pentagon-holl-1/
- seneca 6y ago
  Yes, that's a very fair point. I do think hijacking childrens' toys and entertainment as a means of social engineering is an avenue of influence. I suppose what I mean to say is that the default case is not that, and to act as if it is is perverse. A weak simile: the fact that a relationship can be abusive does not mean that all relationships are.
bigbillheck 6y ago
> It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. Are you posting from the ARPAnet? I ask because as a take this is 40 years out of date. Feminist analysis as applied to archaeology has a pretty solid history : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_archaeology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_archaeology The thing about archaeology is the objects of its study are things made by people who happened to be living in a society (ok sometimes they study actual human remains, but I have to point out that those too were made with untrained labor). If you want to use the things to understand the people--and if you don't, why are you doing archaeology in the first place?--it's important to use what we know about people and societies in general to guide your analysis. What are some important facts about people and societies? Well, people are generally bilateral bipedal, have a mineralized internal skeleton, like to wear clothes and get out of the rain, and so on. In particular, people tend to be weakly sexually dimorphic (with substantial overlap and exceptions), and societies tend to divide among that line with varying intensities (again with overlap and exceptions). So if we want to study the people of the past, one of the things we need to understand is how that division tends to manifest and be maintained, and one way to do that is to understand how it manifests and is maintained in observable, i.e. modern, societies. And once you start looking at things from a "how" perspective it's not too hard to start noticing that one mechanism is giving children toys that encourage play in ways that reinforce the ways in which they will be expected to act in the side of that subdivision they were assigned at birth. (This isn't necessarily a comfortable thought! All of us on this forum were young children at one point in our lives, and with probably some rare exceptions would have been soaking in this boy-side or girl-side split the whole way through. I know I certainly was!) Anyway, this is getting kind of long. To sum up, understanding how people on both sides of that division lived and how their society maintained that division is necessary to understanding their society as a whole, and if 'acknowledging that women are people and an honest examination of how they are treated by society' isn't feminism, I don't know what is.
- cambalache 6y ago
  Nothing of value has been added by having a "feminist" point of view. People (men and women) have been doing archeology for a long time, and the experience of girls and women have been studied (You could argue the extent of course) by countless scholars. I suppose I dont belong to the enlightened crowd when I dont understand quotes like these: > “Is e=mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest.”
cambalache 6y ago
My dear Seneca,what you are watching is, in the word of Herr Spengler, "Der Untergang des Abendlandes". China will rule the world, their Confucian worldview is extremely pragmatic and has zero time for all this nonsense.

by seneca 6y ago

crocsarecool 6y ago

Yeah, I was surprised they made that leap to the dolls carrying messages about their expected roles in society. As a little girl, my doll was more an outlet to be able to imitate my mother. She’d give me a cuddle, clothe me, put me down for a nap, and I did all that with my doll. I also had a play telephone that I’d pretend to use while watching my parents speak on the telephone. My expected role in society isn’t a telephone operator.

dbspin 6y ago

Right? And the message they carry is that adulthood is possible. The entire point of dolls for both boys and girls is to play at being adults, which they do spontaneously cross culturally anyway. These toys facilitate fantasies of empowerment and maturity, and as such are an important part of how we develop into adult humans. They're not top down imposed cultural conditioning.

frellus 6y ago

Spot on. I have two girls. Neither were "encouraged" to play with dolls, nor was it any sort of "gender role re-enforcement". Girls like dolls because it's roll play on many levels (relationships, role) as well as a way to nurture something, as is likely built into the female DNA and brain. If you think dolls are some sort of abusive form of biased gender conformity, you're sick in the head and we could never hang out together.

RIMR 6y ago
You're right. I would never want to hang out with someone who, because of a single difference in opinion about dolls, would conclude that I am "sick in the head" and therefore socially worthless. And I'm not even touching your "female DNA" comment, though I'm sure if we dug our heels into that we'd find several more reasons you're no good to be around.
- crocsarecool 6y ago
  I get that the female DNA comment might sound ignorant, but I was going down a rabbit hole about why girls play with dolls and came across the article below. It says that there might be some biological factors why girls gravitate towards things like dolls. Basically, girls might be wired to prefer “socially interesting” toys whereas boys like “mechanically interesting” toys. Obviously, it’s not 100% guaranteed what your kid is going to like based on DNA, but I thought it was an interesting article anyways. https://www.romper.com/p/do-little-girls-really-prefer-playing-with-dolls-new-study-claims-its-biological-29160 https://www.romper.com/p/do-little-girls-really-prefer-playi...
  - ordu 6y ago
    > Basically, girls might be wired to prefer “socially interesting” toys whereas boys like “mechanically interesting” toys. If we try to generalize findings of primatologists onto humans, namely what Franz de Waal writes about chimpanzee, than I'd rather say that boys prefer toys that model objects, while girls prefer toys that model subjects. Chimpanzee males seek power and control, they play political games forming coalitions, breaking from them out, they are friendly when it seems beneficial for them and hostile when needed. Chimpanzee females seek stable relationships, their relationships last longer, easily they could last for life. I mean, if we think of chimpanzee as of humans, then how we model the mind of a male? He sees his neighbors as objects which should be manipulated for his benefit. While females see others as subjects: it helps to respect their needs and to be respected back, it allows understand each other needs, and to form a long-term relationship based on a cooperation. See how it nicely fits together? It is not a some kind of a science theory, it is just my own unfounded speculations. What I want to say, that it one of the reasons because I doubt that all the difference between boys and girls preferences could be explained by a nurture. Some of it must be a nature thing.
chc 6y ago
You seem to be reading in a bit here. Observing how societal traditions and roles are passed on and reinforced is a far cry from "thinking dolls are some sort of abusive form of biased gender conformity."

RIMR 6y ago

Yeah, how dare anyone study the past and the present in order to consider the best path for the future. Real science is about accepting things at face value and never asking hard questions.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

I agree with you that this article is a tiresome attempt to spot-weld an archaeological subject interesting in itself to the gender-and-power fad. However, with regard to this: > If you can look at a toy a child loves so much that they were buried with it and see a ploy by society to control them many toys sold in North America over the last several decades have been closely tied to media franchises, and there has been plenty of criticism of those media franchises for accepting strings-attached help from the US military to bolster its image, e.g. the Transformers movies [0]. [0] https://www.wired.com/2008/12/pentagon-holl-1/ https://www.wired.com/2008/12/pentagon-holl-1/

seneca 6y ago
Yes, that's a very fair point. I do think hijacking childrens' toys and entertainment as a means of social engineering is an avenue of influence. I suppose what I mean to say is that the default case is not that, and to act as if it is is perverse. A weak simile: the fact that a relationship can be abusive does not mean that all relationships are.

bigbillheck 6y ago

> It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. Are you posting from the ARPAnet? I ask because as a take this is 40 years out of date. Feminist analysis as applied to archaeology has a pretty solid history : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_archaeology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_archaeology The thing about archaeology is the objects of its study are things made by people who happened to be living in a society (ok sometimes they study actual human remains, but I have to point out that those too were made with untrained labor). If you want to use the things to understand the people--and if you don't, why are you doing archaeology in the first place?--it's important to use what we know about people and societies in general to guide your analysis. What are some important facts about people and societies? Well, people are generally bilateral bipedal, have a mineralized internal skeleton, like to wear clothes and get out of the rain, and so on. In particular, people tend to be weakly sexually dimorphic (with substantial overlap and exceptions), and societies tend to divide among that line with varying intensities (again with overlap and exceptions). So if we want to study the people of the past, one of the things we need to understand is how that division tends to manifest and be maintained, and one way to do that is to understand how it manifests and is maintained in observable, i.e. modern, societies. And once you start looking at things from a "how" perspective it's not too hard to start noticing that one mechanism is giving children toys that encourage play in ways that reinforce the ways in which they will be expected to act in the side of that subdivision they were assigned at birth. (This isn't necessarily a comfortable thought! All of us on this forum were young children at one point in our lives, and with probably some rare exceptions would have been soaking in this boy-side or girl-side split the whole way through. I know I certainly was!) Anyway, this is getting kind of long. To sum up, understanding how people on both sides of that division lived and how their society maintained that division is necessary to understanding their society as a whole, and if 'acknowledging that women are people and an honest examination of how they are treated by society' isn't feminism, I don't know what is.

cambalache 6y ago
Nothing of value has been added by having a "feminist" point of view. People (men and women) have been doing archeology for a long time, and the experience of girls and women have been studied (You could argue the extent of course) by countless scholars. I suppose I dont belong to the enlightened crowd when I dont understand quotes like these: > “Is e=mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest.”

cambalache 6y ago

My dear Seneca,what you are watching is, in the word of Herr Spengler, "Der Untergang des Abendlandes". China will rule the world, their Confucian worldview is extremely pragmatic and has zero time for all this nonsense.