I’m not sure how she found it but Jess McCabe of The F-Word Blog points to an archived interview of cultural anthropologist Emily Martin from Discover Magazine back in 1992 that suggests the no-sex class paradigm where sex only happens to passive women goes all the way down to ideas about sperm, eggs, and fertilization.
Take this bit from the article’s introduction that turns the standard narrative on its head.
Ah, fertilization—that miraculous process to which we all owe our existence. Let’s review: First, a wastefully huge swarm of sperm weakly flops along, its members bumping into walls and flailing aimlessly through thick strands of mucus. Eventually, through sheer odds of pinball-like bouncing more than anything else, a few sperm end up close to an egg. As they mill around, the egg selects one and reels it in, pinning it down in spite of its efforts to escape. It’s no contest, really. The gigantic, hardy egg yanks this tiny sperm inside, distills out the chromosomes, and sets out to become an embryo.
Or would you have put it differently? Until very recently, so would most biologists.
And it’s not that a “sperm make it all happen” model is without consequences
Martin doesn’t suggest that these researchers willfully distorted their imagery. In fact, she notes that one of the investigators at Johns Hopkins was her politically correct husband, Richard Cone. What’s more, Martin concedes that she herself was slow to recognize the disparity between the discoveries at Johns Hopkins and the way the findings were written up. It didn’t strike me for a few years, she says. But innocent or not, she adds, the cultural conditioning these biologists had absorbed early in their careers influenced more than their writing: it skewed their research. I believe, and my husband believes, and the lab believes, that they would have seen these results sooner if they hadn’t had these male-oriented images of sperm.
My guess that neither model — the bumbling sperm nor the passive egg — are accurate. With a system going back a very long time (while many plants use pollen for fertilization some plants, including ginkos, have something that looks and acts a heck of a lot like sperm) it’s much more likely the interaction between both sperm and egg are subtle, discriminating, well adapted, and very sophisticated.
What really comes out in the article is just how thoroughly our gendered metaphors affect our perceptions.
