Summary Of The Egg And The Sperm By Emily Martin

598 Words3 Pages
In her article entitled “The Egg and The Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,” Emily Martin presents the results that cultural influences have had on reproductive biology. She says that stereotypes of cultural definitions of male and female are the foundation for which the egg and sperm in popular, as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology rely on. For Example, she points out that women are stereotypically not seen as equal to men: “The stereotypes imply not only that female biological process are less worthy than their male counter-parts but also that women are less worthy than men.”(248) Next, Martin notes that “all major scientific textbooks depict male and female reproductive organs as systems for the production of valuable substances, such as eggs and sperm.”(248) In particular, she digs deeper and observes that these texts describe women as overproducers and wasteful because of their monthly menstruations: “By extolling the female cycle as a productive enterprise, menstruation must necessarily be viewed as a…show more content…
Medical texts describe menstruation as the "debris" of the uterine lining, the result of necrosis, or death of tissue. The descriptions imply that a system has gone awry, making products of no use, not to specification, unsalable, wasted, scrap.”(248) In contrary, the critic notes that these texts express intense enthusiasm for male reproductive physiology: “Perhaps the most amazing characteristic of spermatogenesis is its sheer magnitude: the normal human male may manufacture several hundred million sperm per day.”(249) Finally, Martin argues that men are more wasteful than females. For example, she states that for every child born, more sperm is wasted than eggs: “Assuming two or three offspring, for every baby a woman produces, she wastes only around two hundred
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    Critical Summary-“The Egg and the Sperm” by Emily Martin In the article “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” ,Emily Martin puts light on how culture shapes the description of the biological scientists on what they discover about the natural world, and how gender stereotypes are hidden in scientific language of biology. Through her study on representation of egg and sperm, Martin reports the marked illustrations from various biological

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