Blog Post

I found Emily Martin’s “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” very enlightening and surprising. I had always objectively read my science textbooks and taken them as fact, not bothering to look at biases that the authors had operated under. After reading the piece, I thought more about why the authors had written the texts like they had. The first thing that I thought about was the idea that women were wasteful with their eggs. I agree with Martin, this idea came from the view of menstruation as “failed production.” Women are viewed as non-sexual objects in our culture so the only “acceptable reason” women in our culture have sex today is to produce life. That is why the textbooks were written with the idea that women are wasteful with their eggs. Every period is viewed as a missed opportunity to have created life. In reality, if any gender is wasteful it is the male with their sperm. I also thought it was interesting that female eggs were looked at as weak and passive while the sperm are aggressive and active, when in reality that might not be the case. If our social views can be brought into something as seemingly objective as science, what else are they affecting?