when clueless textbooks attack
Mar. 27th, 2006 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseThe theoretical text for my anthropology class is irritating me already. I'm only on page eight.
1. Last time I checked, female animals in estrus had no more choice about sex than males in the state of rut brought on by the pheromones of nearby females in estrus. Repeating that the males "have little or no choice" about whether or not to go into rut is pointless when both are purely biological.
2. When discussing human sexual dimorphism, it is plainly insulting to only discuss the ways women play up dimorphism, ignoring that men do similarly stupid things in pursuit of the same. Seriously, he mentions nothing that men do, while listing a whole slew of things that some women do, from wearing "notions and lotions and magical potions" to discussing how perfume does nothing to really attract men, to talking about how deadly breast implants can be and how women might act "stupid" so as not to frighten off "some attractive but unintelligent male." Because apparently men don't do anything like that. Riiiight.
3. Perfumes weren't invented during a period of time in Europe when people "did not bathe." Ding, I'm sorry - please go back to square one and re-take basic medieval history. People did not bathe as frequently as we do today. Neither did people in the 19th century. Nobody, with possible exception of the ancient Greeks, has ever bathed nearly as much as we do today. That does not make medieval Europe a place where people just plain didn't.
4. Discussing how some cultures, like traditional Islamic societies, "limit sexual dimorphism to its 'natural' parameters: beards on men, eye shadow on women." I realize those quotation marks are meant to call the 'natural parameters' into question, but... eye shadow? Since when is that any more natural than those "potions" he mentioned a paragraph or two ago? More importantly, it seems to me that eye shadow is popular in those cultures because the eyes are the only visible part of a woman aside from her hands - wouldn't that be considered a way of emphasizing dimorphism?
5. "In the preindustrial world, our potential for elaborating dimorphism simply wasn't there--but people almost always differentiated with specific dress and hairstyle." Umm - no. Unless by "potential" he means silicon implants, I'm pretty sure that women (and men, damn it!) in the preindustrial world used a variation on every method we have today for enhancing sexual dimorphism... and a lot that we don't, even. Stays, anybody? Bum rolls and bustles? Giant fucking skirts that one has to walk sideways to get through a door in? And then there's the gowns from the middle medieval period that seem to've been specifically engineered to make a woman look pregnant... Has this guy ever even picked up a history book?
6. Please - talk about something that men do. Please. These paragraphs on dimorphism are the greatest example I've ever seen of normalizing the male, even though he just got through, in the section on biology, explaining how the female of the species is the 'basic model' for all mammals. Don't believe me? Here - have a full and complete paragraph, the end of the section on dimorphism.
Note here that there is absolutely no agreement among cultures as to what specific traits constitute desirability in looks. In some societies women are required to wear long hair--in others to have smoothly shaven heads. In some places men wear skirts and women pants; in others that is reversed. In Western culture, pants have become acceptable for women only recently--remember that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for wearing men's trousers: that 'proved' her heresy. Dress can connote all sorts of cultural implications. Women in power seldom wear skintight, low-cut clothing and miniskirts. For some women who rank lower on the totem pole, such dress is almost a uniform. And we have known since 1919, when anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber pointed it out, hemlines rise and fall in regular patterns--and in contrast to the economy. He called it "style."
I'm going to have a real hard time buying anything he says after the amount of totally stupid stuff he's written in the first fucking chapter.
1. Last time I checked, female animals in estrus had no more choice about sex than males in the state of rut brought on by the pheromones of nearby females in estrus. Repeating that the males "have little or no choice" about whether or not to go into rut is pointless when both are purely biological.
2. When discussing human sexual dimorphism, it is plainly insulting to only discuss the ways women play up dimorphism, ignoring that men do similarly stupid things in pursuit of the same. Seriously, he mentions nothing that men do, while listing a whole slew of things that some women do, from wearing "notions and lotions and magical potions" to discussing how perfume does nothing to really attract men, to talking about how deadly breast implants can be and how women might act "stupid" so as not to frighten off "some attractive but unintelligent male." Because apparently men don't do anything like that. Riiiight.
3. Perfumes weren't invented during a period of time in Europe when people "did not bathe." Ding, I'm sorry - please go back to square one and re-take basic medieval history. People did not bathe as frequently as we do today. Neither did people in the 19th century. Nobody, with possible exception of the ancient Greeks, has ever bathed nearly as much as we do today. That does not make medieval Europe a place where people just plain didn't.
4. Discussing how some cultures, like traditional Islamic societies, "limit sexual dimorphism to its 'natural' parameters: beards on men, eye shadow on women." I realize those quotation marks are meant to call the 'natural parameters' into question, but... eye shadow? Since when is that any more natural than those "potions" he mentioned a paragraph or two ago? More importantly, it seems to me that eye shadow is popular in those cultures because the eyes are the only visible part of a woman aside from her hands - wouldn't that be considered a way of emphasizing dimorphism?
5. "In the preindustrial world, our potential for elaborating dimorphism simply wasn't there--but people almost always differentiated with specific dress and hairstyle." Umm - no. Unless by "potential" he means silicon implants, I'm pretty sure that women (and men, damn it!) in the preindustrial world used a variation on every method we have today for enhancing sexual dimorphism... and a lot that we don't, even. Stays, anybody? Bum rolls and bustles? Giant fucking skirts that one has to walk sideways to get through a door in? And then there's the gowns from the middle medieval period that seem to've been specifically engineered to make a woman look pregnant... Has this guy ever even picked up a history book?
6. Please - talk about something that men do. Please. These paragraphs on dimorphism are the greatest example I've ever seen of normalizing the male, even though he just got through, in the section on biology, explaining how the female of the species is the 'basic model' for all mammals. Don't believe me? Here - have a full and complete paragraph, the end of the section on dimorphism.
Note here that there is absolutely no agreement among cultures as to what specific traits constitute desirability in looks. In some societies women are required to wear long hair--in others to have smoothly shaven heads. In some places men wear skirts and women pants; in others that is reversed. In Western culture, pants have become acceptable for women only recently--remember that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for wearing men's trousers: that 'proved' her heresy. Dress can connote all sorts of cultural implications. Women in power seldom wear skintight, low-cut clothing and miniskirts. For some women who rank lower on the totem pole, such dress is almost a uniform. And we have known since 1919, when anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber pointed it out, hemlines rise and fall in regular patterns--and in contrast to the economy. He called it "style."
I'm going to have a real hard time buying anything he says after the amount of totally stupid stuff he's written in the first fucking chapter.
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Date: 2006-03-28 05:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 05:51 am (UTC)That icon is perfect.
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Date: 2006-03-28 05:32 am (UTC)Randomly, Dave tells me that Viking men almost definitely wore eyeshadow. Just in case you're interested :)
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 05:53 am (UTC)Ooo... Now that's a new one to my knowledge! Ask him what his source for that is, please? I'd love to look it up!
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 10:16 am (UTC)That men might take great care of their beards and moustaches can be seen from the carving of the Sigtuna warrior. If the Arab merchant Al-Tartushi is to be believed, and he did visit Hebedy about the year 950, then its inhabitants prepared 'an artificial make-up for the eyes; when they use it their beauty never fades, on the contrary it increases in both men and women.'
The passage then goes on to detail how both Viking men and women bathed regularly. Apparently in England the men were a hit with the ladies because of their cleanliness :)
The passage is taken from:
Graham-Campbell, James (1989 revised ed) The Viking World WINDWARD, Trading as WHS Distributors, St. John's House, Leicester, 220pp
ISBN: 0-7112-0571-X
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 04:35 pm (UTC)I was always amused by how Ibn Fadlan described the Vikings as foul barbarians who never washed... there was always some dork in my Scandinavian classes who didn't get that it was because a) medieval Islam was pretty much obsessed with its own defintions of cleanliness and b) those definitions were pretty much completely different from the ones the Vikings followed.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 06:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 06:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 11:55 pm (UTC)Especially since I know (and somewhere I have a study that I had to read for my methods class...) that GUYS are more likely to 'play dumb,' at least in their teenage years, than girls. It's acceptable, even EXPECTED for girls to be interested in education, knowledge, success in school, etc. It's NOT as socially acceptable for boys to exhibit the same interest.
I'm very glad I don't have to read that book. I was in ONE class where I had a textbook that irritated me that much. Unfortunately, the prof wrote it (and I never EVER again took a class if I knew the prof wrote the text. Too much ego there).