With all that’s going on in the world right now, I am here for a little knitting related controversy, and luckily the universe delivered in the form of a SciShow episode from Hank Green about knitting and physics.
The very beginning of the video is likely to rile some knitters because he’s talking about the “oldest knitting object,” an 800-year-old sock. A producer for the show clarified that they were talking about this particular remnant of a sock, which is knit, but what’s commonly thought of as the oldest “knit” item, is not really knit at all. The technique used for those Egyptian socks was actually nålbindning, a process that makes loops with a single needle. Without an image of the sock in question there was confusion as to which sock fragment he was talking about.
He also calls it simple to knit a sock, which, whether its nålbindning or not, isn’t actually simple, as anyone who has ever read the instructions for turning a heel will tell you. And the sample they were talking about is worked in two colors with two different stitch patterns, so it’s not like that’s a beginner project even without also turning a heel.
Leaving that aside, the video talks about the ubiquity of knit fabric in the world while showing woven garments, labels a fabric of reverse stockinette stitch as stockinette and says knitting is “kind of like programming” when really that’s exactly what it is, and that’s just in the first two minutes of a ten minute video.
It’s after that when he says why knit fabric behaves the way it does is “mostly of a mystery” really feels like they just didn’t ask knitters. Maybe we wouldn’t say that knit stitches have force fields that work toward being held under the least tension, but there are definitely knitters down through the ages who understand how knitting works and how to manipulate it to make the kinds of fabrics we want.
Knitters the Internet over have stepped in to correct, clarify and call in Green and his producers, saying the show amounts to mansplaining knitting and does a disservice to the topic by saying that knitters have learned what we have about our craft mostly through trial and error and intuition, and only just now that scientists are using it to develop better packaging and soundproofing we’re seeing “there might be something useful here.”
Because all those knit fabrics that have kept people warm through the centuries aren’t useful?
Producer Jenn left a long comment on the video responding to knitters who are rightly upset both by errors in fact and implications that knitting is simple or frivolous. As a knitter herself, she acknowledges the errors as technical mistakes made by non-knitters who worked on the video and attempts to simplify language (using words like knots and string).
She also notes the video was a test to see if it attracted knitters to the show (it did) or if a more general population would be interested in topics like this. But it sounds like they really weren’t trying to get knitters to watch or they would have taken the time to make it more factual and not sound like they’re discounting the whole history of knitting as being some kind of happy accident.
She writes:
The experienced knitter in me can see how that line leaves out the mathematical complexity and skill that knitting can employ. The hobbyist knitter in me is grateful that knitting doesn’t have to be complex to be worthwhile. The SciComm producer in me knows that intuition, practice, trial, and error are exactly the way science happens, and it really can be as simple as that.
Of course this is a little thing with so much going on in the world, but it also feels like just another way men “discover” something that women have known about for centuries and decide it’s interesting when they can make it about science and not about “women’s work.”
Did you watch the video? (It’s linked at the top.) What do you think about this “controversy?” I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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