Slowly freeing ancient women from the patriarchy of the modern age

My Sunday movie was Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. I normally watch a movie on Sunday evening at home. I watched today’s movie in the afternoon and in a movie theater. This movie was released only last Friday. I rarely watch movies their opening weekend. But I wanted to show there really is a market for gay love stories. So I went. I’m glad I did because at this showing at 2:30 on a Sunday afternoon I was the only one in this theater. That isn’t good for convincing studios to make more gay love stories. Before the movie started there were the usual movie trailers. I think there were seven of them. Only one of them looked interesting. Alas, they couldn’t gear the trailers to the one person in the audience. And, yeah, the 2:30 movie actually started at about 2:50. The story is taken from the book of the same name by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. I wanted to see it because I had read the book, though I didn’t blog about it. The story is set in the Mexican community of El Paso in 1987. It centers on Aristotle – Ari – who is in high school and likes to stay invisible – relationships are too messy. While lamenting another summer of not learning to swim he meets Dante, who teaches him how. They quickly become friends. Dante’s parents treat him as one of the family and Ari’s parents are glad he has made a friend. Towards the end of the summer Ari saves Dante from being hit by a car, though Ari ends up in the hospital with a broken leg. Shortly after that Dante’s professor father takes the family to Chicago for a year. The boys trade letters over the school year and are back together the following summer. Now the spoilers. If you want to see the movie (and it’s a good one) skip this paragraph. When in Chicago Dante kissed a girl and she replied: Would you rather be kissing another girl – or a boy? During that second summer Ari finds out his favorite aunt is a lesbian, so his parents aren’t homophobic. And what I thought was a pivotal idea in the book but wasn’t used in the movie, Ari finally figures out the reason why he saved Dante from the speeding car was his body recognized his love for Dante long before his brain did. There is a sequel to the book and it’s on my list of books to buy next. Mettle Fatigue writes for the Daily Kos column This Week in the War on Women. Back at the end of July the column didn’t focus on the latest thing men are doing to women. Rather it was about what the men of archaeology have been doing to women for longer than a century. The post begins with a description of recent discoveries. In 2008 a body was found in a grave from about 4700 years ago. Because of the magnificent grave goods around it the body was assumed to be male and only recently was determined to be female. In 1941 a body was found in a Viking grave near Birka, Sweden. It also had burial splendor, including weaponry, and was assumed male. In 2016 DNA showed it was female. Four women, ages perhaps 12 to 50, were found in a grave from 2500 years ago in Devitsa, Russia. Again the grave goods were magnificent and included a gold headdress worn by the eldest, plus arrowheads and knives. Chief excavator, Valerii Guliaev said that in Scythian culture women warriors were the norm with about one-third of women were buried with weapons and many sported war wounds. A grave in Finland from about 1100 included jewelry and an intact sword. Even in 2021 some archaeologists assumed the sword was added later or the tomb also included a man. Since DNA analysis of the body found XXY chromosomes some of the voices said, see, this one was only partly female. There is an assumed rule in archaeology:

if you are buried with fanfare, sacrificed helpmeets and mainly if your grave bristled with weapons, and if your remains were not sufficiently well preserved to say otherwise – you were a man.

That was especially true of children where skeletal remains did not show a difference between male and female, though recently developed tests can now reveal whether tooth enamel has male or female proteins, which also works on children. All this is slowly freeing ancient women from the patriarchy of the modern age.