3.5
the egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a Romance based on stereotypical male-female roles

Emily Martin
The theory of the human body is always a part of a world-picture. ... The theory of the human body is always a part of a fantasy. (James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis)
an anthropologist, I am intrigued by the possibility that culture shapes how 'ogical scientists describe what they discover about the natural world. If this
so, we would be learning about more than the natural world in high ool biology class; we would be learning about cultural beliefs and practices jf they were part of nature. In the course of my research I realized that the
re of egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of 'e and female. The stereotypes imply not only that female biological 'esses are less worthy than their male counterparts but also that women less worthy than men. Part of my goal in writing this article is to shine a
t light on the gender stereotypes hidden within the scientific language of >gy. Exposed in such a light, I hope they will lose much of their power to
us.
Egg and Sperm: A Scientific Fairy Tale
a fundamental level, all major scientific textbooks depict male and female
productive organs as systems for the production of valuable substances, such
eggs and sperm.2 In the case of women, the monthly cycle is described as
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (31): 485-501, 1991


Emily Martin
being designed to produce eggs and prepare a suitable place for them to be fertilized and grown - all to the end of making babies. Hut the enthusiasm ends there. By extolling the female cycle as a productive enterprise, menstruation must necessarily be viewed as a failure. 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. An illustration in a widely used medical text shows menstruation as a chaotic disintegration of form, complementing the many texts that describe it as 'ceasing', 'dying', losing', 'denuding', 'expelling'.
Male reproductive physiology is evaluated quite differently. One of the texts that sees menstruation as failed production employs a sort of breathless prose when it describes the maturation of sperm: 'The mechanisms which guide the remarkable cellular transformation from spermatid to mature sperm remain uncertain.... Perhaps the most amazing characteristic of spermatogenesis is its sheer magnitude: the normal human male may manufacture several hundred million sperm per day.' In the classic text Medical Physiology, edited by Vernon Mountcastle, the male/female, productive/destructive comparison is more explicit: 'Whereas the female sheds only a single gamete each month, the seminiferous tubules produce hundreds of millions of sperm each day1 (emphasis mine).5 The female author of another text marvels at the length of the microscopic seminiferous tubules, which, if-uncoiled and placed end to end, 'would span almost one-third of a mile!' She writes, 'In an adult male these structures produce millions of sperm cells each day.' Later she asks, 'How is this feat accomplished?'6 None of these texts expresses such intense enthusiasm for any female processes. It is surely no accident that the 'remarkable' process of making sperm involves precisely what, in the medical view, menstruation does not: production of something deemed valuable.7
One could argue that menstruation and spermatogenesis are not analogous processes and, therefore, should not be expected to elicit the same kind of response. The proper female analogy to spermatogenesis, biologically, is ovulation. Yet ovulation does not merit enthusiasm in these texts either. Textbook descriptions stress that all of the ovarian follicles containing ova are already present at birth. Far from being produced, as sperm are, they merely sit on the shelf, slowly degenerating and aging like overstocked inventory: 'At birth, normal human ovaries contain an estimated one million follicles |each], and no new ones appear after birth. Thus, in marked contrast to the male, the newborn female already has all the germ cells she will ever have. Only a few, perhaps 400, are destined to reach full maturity during her active productive life. All the others degenerate at some point in their development so that few, if any, remain by the time she reaches menopause at approximately 50 years of age.'* Note the 'marked contrast' that this description sets up between male and female: the male, who continuously produces fresh germ cells, and the female, who has stockpiled germ cells by birth and is faced with their degeneration.
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Nor are the female organs spared such vivid descriptions. One scientist [writes in a newspaper article that a woman's ovaries become old and worn out Írom ripening eggs every month, even though the woman herself is still jrelatively young: 'When you look through a laparoscope ... at an ovary that Iks been through hundreds of cycles, even in a superbly healthy American female, you see a scarred, battered organ.'9
iTo avoid the negative connotations that some people associate with the female reproductive system, scientists could begin to describe male and female processes as homologous. They might credit females with 'producing' mature ova one at a time, as they're needed each month, and describe males as having to face problems of degenerating germ cells. This degeneration would occur [throughout life among spermatogonia, the undifferentiated germ cells in the testes that are the long-lived, dormant precursors of sperm.
But the texts have an almost dogged insistence on casting female processes in a negative light. The texts celebrate sperm production because it is continuous from puberty to senescence, while they portray egg production as inferior because it is finished at birth. This makes the female seem unproductive, but (some texts will also insist that it is she who is wasteful.10 In a section heading for Molecular Biology of the Cell, a best-selling text, we are told that ['Oogenesis is wasteful.' The text goes on to emphasize that of the seven million oogonia, or egg germ cells, in the female embryo, most degenerate in the ovary. Of those that do go on to become oocytes, or eggs, many also degenerate, so that at birth only nvo^million eggs remain in the ovaries. Degeneration continues throughout a woman's life: by puberty 300 000 eggs femain, and only a few are present by menopause. 'During the 40 or so years of a woman's reproductive life, only 400 to 500 eggs will have been released', the jauthors write. 'All the rest will have degenerated. It is still a mystery why so many eggs are formed only to die in the ovaries.'11
The real mystery is why the male's vast production of sperm is not seen as [wasteful.1 Assuming that a man 'produces' 100 million (10 ) sperm per day (a conservative estimate) during an average reproductive life of sixty years, he would produce well over two trillion sperm in his lifetime. Assuming that a Iwoman 'ripens' one egg per lunar month, or thirteen per year, over the course of her forty-year reproductive life, she would total five hundred eggs in her lifetime. But the word 'waste' implies an excess, too much produced. Assuming two or three offspring, for every baby a woman produces, she wastes only around two hundred eggs. For every baby a man produces, he wastes more than one trillion (1012) sperm.
How is it that positive images are denied to the bodies of women? A look at language - in this case, scientific language - provides the first clue. Take the egg and the sperm. It is remarkable how 'femininely' the egg behaves and how 'masculinely' the sperm. The egg is seen as large and passive.11 It does not move or journey, but passively 'is transported', 'is swept',16 or even 'drifts'1' along the fallopian tube. In utter contrast, sperm are small, 'streamlined',1 s and
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invariably active. They 'deliver' their genes to the egg, 'activate the developmental program of the egg',19 and have a 'velocity' that is often remarked upon. Their tails are 'strong1 and efficiently powered.21 Together with the forces of ejaculation, they can 'propel the semen into the deepest recesses of the vagina'. " For this they need 'energy', 'fuel',23 so that with a 'whiplashlike motion and strong lurches' 4 they can 'burrow through the egg coat'25 and 'penetrate' it.26
At its extreme, the age-old relationship of the egg and the sperm takes on a royal or religious patina. The egg coat, its protective barrier, is sometimes called its 'vestments', a term usually reserved for sacred, religious dress. The egg is said to have a 'corona', 7 a crown, and to be accompanied by 'attendant cells'. It is holy, set apart and above, the queen to the sperm's king. The egg is also passive, which means it must depend on sperm for rescue. Gerald Schatten and Helen Schatten liken the egg's role to that of Sleeping Beauty: 'a dormant bride awaiting her mate's magic kiss, which instills the spirit that brings her to life'." Sperm, by contrast, have a 'mission'," which is to 'move through the female genital tract in quest of the ovum'. ' One popular account has it that the sperm carry out a 'perilous journey' into the 'warm darkness', where some fall away 'exhausted'. 'Survivors' 'assault' the egg, the successful candidates 'surrounding the prize'.' Part of the urgency of this journey, in more scientific terms, is that 'once released from the supportive environment of the ovary, an egg will die within hours unless rescued by a sperm'. The wording stresses the fragility and dependency of the egg, even though the same text acknowledges elsewhere that sperm also live for only a few hours.34
In 1948, in a book remarkable for its early insights into these matters, Ruth Herschberger argued that female reproductive organs are seen as biologically interdependent, while male organs are viewed as autonomous, operating independently and in isolation:
At present the functional is stressed only in connection with women: it is in them that ovaries, tubes, uterus, and vagina have endless interdependence. In the male, reproduction would seem to involve 'organs* only. Yet the sperm, just as much as the egg, is dependent on a great many related processes. There are secretions which mitigate the urine in the urethra before ejaculation, to protect the sperm. There is the reflex shutting off of the bladder connection, the provision of prostatic secretions, and various types of muscular propulsion. The sperm is no more independent of its milieu than the egg, and yet from a wish that it were, biologists have lent their support to the notion that the human female, beginning with the egg, is congenitally more dependent than the male.35
Bringing out another aspect of the sperm's autonomy, an article in the journal Cell has the sperm making an 'existential decision' to penetrate the egg: 'Sperm are cells with a limited behavioral repertoire, one that is directed toward fertilizing eggs. To execute the decision to abandon the haploid state, sperm
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The Egg and the Sperm
"into an egg and there acquire the ability to effect membrane fusion.' 6 Is k a corporate managers version or the sperm's activities - 'executing 'sions' while fraught with dismay over difficult options that bring with m very high risk?
There is another way that sperm, despite their small size, can be made to nm in importance over the egg. In a collection of scientific papers, an electron xrograph of an enormous egg and tiny sperm is titled 'A Portrait of the Sn\37 This is a little like showing a photo of a dog and calling it a picture of fleas. Granted, microscopic sperm are harder to photograph than eggs, ^hich are just large enough to see with the naked eye. But surely the use of the ^erm 'portrait', a word associated with the powerful and wealthy, is significant. Eggs have only micrographs or pictures, not portraits.
One depiction of sperm as weak and timid, instead of strong and powerful -the only such representation in western civilization, so far as I know - occurs in Woody Allen's movie Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* 'But Were Afraid to Ask. Allen, playing the part of an apprehensive sperm nside a man's testicles, is scared of the man's approaching orgasm. He is reluctant to launch himself into the darkness, afraid of contraceptive devices, afraid of winding up on the ceiling if the man masturbates.
The more common picture - egg as damsel in distress, shielded only by her
iacred garments; sperm as heroic warrior to the^rescue - cannot be proved to be
dictated by the biology of these events. While the 'facts' of biology may not
\dways be constructed in cultural terms, I would argue that in this case they are.
The degree of metaphorical content in these descriptions, the extent to which
| differences between egg and sperm are emphasized, and the parallels between
cultural stereotypes of male and female behavior, and the character of egg and
jsperm all point to this conclusion.
New Research, Old Imagery
!As new understandings of egg and sperm emerge, textbook gender imagery is being revised. But the new research, far from escaping the stereotypical representations of egg and sperm, simply replicates elements of textbook gender imagery in a different form. The persistence of this imagery calls to mind what Ludwik Fleck termed 'the self-contained' nature of scientific thought. As he described it, 'the interaction between what is already known, what remains to be learned, and those who are to apprehend it, go to ensure harmony within the system. But at the same time they also preserve the harmony of illusions, which is quite secure within the confines of a given thought style.'38 We need to understand the way in which the cultural content in scientific descriptions changes as biological discoveries unfold, and whether that cultural content is solidly entrenched or easily changed.
In all of the texts quoted above, sperm are described as penetrating the egg, and specific substances on a sperm's head are described as binding to the egg. Recently, this description of events was rewritten in a biophysics lab at Johns
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Hopkins University - transforming the egg from the passive to the active
PanT
Prior to this research, it was thought that the zona, the inner vestments or the egg, formed an impenetrable barrier. Sperm overcame the barrier by mechanically burrowing through, thrashing their tails and slowly working their way along. Later research showed that the sperm released digestive enzymes that chemically broke down the zona; thus, scientists presumed that the sperm used mechanical and chemical means to get through to the egg.
In this recent investigation, the researchers began to ask questions about the mechanical force of the sperm's tail. (The lab's goal was to develop a contraceptive that worked topically on sperm.) They discovered, to their great surprise, that the forward thrust of sperm is extremely weak, which contradicts the assumption that sperm are forceful penetrators.40 Rather than thrusting forward, the sperm's head was now seen to move mostly back and forth. The sideways motion of the sperm's tail makes the head move sideways with a force that is ten times stronger than its forward movement. So even if the overall force of the sperm were strong enough to mechanically break the zona, most of its force would be directed sideways rather than forward. In fact, its strongest tendency, by tenfold, is to escape by attempting to pry itself off the egg. Sperm, then, must be exceptionally efficient at escaping from any cell surface they contact. And the surface of the egg must be designed to trap the sperm and prevent their escape. Otherwise, few if any sperm would reach the egg.
The researchers at Johns Hopkins concluded that the sperm and egg stick together because of adhesive molecules on the surfaces of each. The egg traps the sperm and adheres to it so tightly that the sperm's head is forced to lie flat against the surface of the zona, a little bit, they told me, 'like Br'er Rabbit getting more and more stuck to tar baby the more he wriggles.' The trapped sperm continues to wiggle ineffectually side to side. The mechanical force of its tail is so weak that a sperm cannot break even one chemical bond. This is where the digestive enzymes released by the sperm come in. If they start to soften the zona just at the tip of the sperm and the sides remain stuck, then the weak, flailing sperm can get oriented in the right direction and make it through the zona - provided that its bonds to the zona dissolve as it moves in.
Although this new version of the saga of the egg and the sperm broke through cultural expectations, the researchers who made the discovery continued to write papers and abstracts as if the sperm were the active party who attacks, binds, penetrates, and enters the egg. The only difference was that sperm were now seen as performing these actions weakly.41 Not until August 1987, more than three years after the findings described above, did these researchers reconceptualize the process to give the egg a more active role. They began to describe the zona as an aggressive sperm catcher, covered with adhesive molecules that can capture a sperm with a single bond and clasp it to the zona's surface.42 In the words of their published account: The innermost vestment, the zona pellucida, is a glycoprotein shell, which captures and tethers
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The Egg and the Sperm
the sperm before they penetrate it. ... The sperm is captured at the initial contact between the sperm tip and the zona.... Since the thrust |of the sperm) is much smaller than the force needed to break a single affinity bond, the first bond made upon the tip-first meeting of the sperm and zona can result in the capture of the sperm.'
Social Implications: Thinking Beyond
These revisionist accounts of egg and sperm cannot seem to escape the hierarchical imagery of older accounts. Even though each new account gives the egg a larger and more active role, taken together they bring into play another cultural stereotype: woman as a dangerous and aggressive threat. In the Johns Hopkins lab's revised model, the egg ends up as the female aggressor who 'captures and tethers' the sperm with her sticky zona, rather like a spider lying in wait in her Web.44 The Schatten lab has the egg's nucleus 'interrupt' the sperm's dive with a 'sudden and swift' rush by which she 'clasps the sperm and guides its nucleus to the center.' Wassarman's description of the surface of the egg 'covered with thousands of plasma membrane-bound projections, called microvilli' that reach out and clasp the sperm adds to the spiderlike imagery.46
These images grant the egg an active role but at the cost of appearing disturbingly aggressive. Images of woman as dangerous and aggressive, the femme fatale who victimizes men, are widespread in Western literature and culture.47 More specific is the connection of spider imagery with the idea of an engulfing, devouring mother.48 New data did not lead scientists to eliminate gender stereotypes in their descriptions of egg and sperm. Instead, scientists simply began to describe egg and sperm in different, but no less damaging, terms. Can we envision a less stereotypical view? Biology itself provides another model that could be applied to the egg and the sperm. The cybernetic model -with its feedback loops, flexible adaptation to change, coordination of the parts within a whole, evolution over time, and changing response to the environment - is common in genetics, endocrinology, and ecology and has a growing influence in medicine in general.49 This model has the potential to shift our imagery from the negative, in which the female reproductive system is castigated both for not producing eggs after birth and for producing (and thus wasting) too many eggs overall, to something more positive. The female reproductive system could be seen as responding to the environment (pregnancy or menopause), adjusting to monthly changes (menstruation), and flexibly changing from reproductivity after puberty to nonreproductivity later in life. The sperm and egg's interaction could also be described in cybernetic terms. J. F. Hartman's research in reproductive biology demonstrated fifteen years ago that if an egg is killed by being pricked with a needle, live sperm cannot get through the zona.5 Clearly, this evidence shows that the egg and sperm do interact on more mutual terms, making biology's refusal to portray them that way all the more disturbing.
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We would do well to be-aware, however, that cybernetic imagery is hardly neutral. In the pasts cybernetic models have played an important part in the impositioji--of^sociaI control. These models inherently provide a way of thinking about a 'field' of interacting components. Once the field can be seen, it can become the object of new forms of knowledge, which in turn can allow new forms of social control to be exerted over the components of the field. During the 1950s, for example, medicine began to recognize the psychosocial environment of the patient: the patient's family and its psychodynamics. Professions such as social work began to focus on this new environment, and the resulting knowledge became one way to further control the patient. Patients began to be seen not as isolated, individual bodies, but as psychosocial entities located in an 'ecological' system: management of 'the patient's psychology was a new entree to patient control.'51
The models that biologists use to describe their data can have important social effects. During the nineteenth century, the social and natural sciences strongly influenced each other: the social ideas of Malthus about how to avoid the natural increase of the poor inspired Darwin's Origin of Species. Once the Origin stood as a description of the natural world, complete with competition and market struggles, it could be reimported into social science as social Darwinism, in order to justify the social order of the time. What we are seeing now is similar: the importation of cultural ideas about passive females and heroic males into the 'personalities' of gametes. This amounts to the 'implanting of social imagery on representations of nature so as to lay a firm basis for reimporting exactly that same imagery as natural explanations of social phenomena.'53
Further research would show us exactly what social effects are being wrought from the biological imagery of egg and sperm. At the very least, the imagery keeps alive some of the hoariest old stereotypes about weak damsels in distress and their strong male rescuers. That these stereotypes are now being written in at the level of the cell constitutes a powerful move to make them seem so natural as to be beyond alteration.
The stereotypical imagery might also encourage people to imagine that what results from the interaction of egg and sperm - a fertilized egg - is the result of deliberate 'human' action at the cellular level. Whatever the intentions of the human couple, in this microscopic 'culture' a cellular 'bride' (or femme fatale) and a cellular 'groom* (her victim) make a cellular baby. Rosalind Petchesky points out that through visual representations such as sonograms, we are given 'images of younger and younger, and tinier and tinier, fetuses being "saved".' This leads to 'the point of visibility being "pushed back" indefinitely/54 Endowing egg and sperm with intentional action, a key aspect of personhood in our culture, lays the foundation for the point of viability being pushed back to the moment of fertilization. This will likely lead to greater acceptance of technological developments and new forms of scrutiny and manipulation, for the benefit of these inner 'persons': court-ordered restrictions on a pregnant
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The Egg and the Sperm
iroman's activities in order to protect her fetus,Jetal surgery, amniocentesis, ' d rescinding of abortion rights, to name but a few examples.J3 [Even if we succeed in substituting more egalitarian, interactive metaphors to [describe the activities of egg and sperm, and manage to avoid the pitfalls of [cybernetic models, we would still be guilty of endowing cellular entities with jpersonhood. More crucial, then, than what kinds of personalities we bestow on 'cells is the very fact that we are doing it at all. This process could ultimately kave the most disturbing social consequences.
1 One clear feminist challenge is to wake up sleeping metaphors in science, particularly those involved in descriptions of the egg and the sperm. Although the literary convention is to call such metaphors 'dead', they are not so much dead as sleeping, hidden within the scientific content of texts - and all the more powerful for it. Waking up such metaphors, by becoming aware of when we are projecting cultural imager)' onto what we study, will improve our ability to investigate and understand nature. Waking up such metaphors, by becoming aware of their implications, will rob them of their power to naturalize our social conventions about gender.
Notes
1. James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 220.
2.  The textbooks I consulted are the main ones used in classes for undergraduate premedical students or medical students (or those held on reserve in the library for these classes) during the past few years at Johns Hopkins University. These texts are widely used at other universities in the country as well.
[ 3. Arthur C. Guyton, Physiology of the Human Body, 6th ed. (Philadelphia: Saunders College Publishing, 1984), 624.
4.  Arthur J. Vander, James H. Sherman and Dorothy S. Luciano, Human Physiology: The Mechanisms of Body Function, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1980), 483-4.
5.  Vernon B. Mountcastle, Medical Physiology, 14th ed. {London: Mosby, 1980), 2: 1624.
6.  Eldra Pearl Solomon, Human Anatomy and Physiology (New York: CBS College Publishing, 1983), 678.
7.  For elaboration, see Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 27-53.
8.  Vander, Sherman, and Luciano, 568.
9.  Melvin Konner, 'Childbearing and Age', New York Times Magazine (December 27, 1987), 22-23, esp. 22.
10.  I have found but one exception to the opinion that the female is wasteful: 'Smallpox being the nasty disease it is, one might expect nature to have designed antibody molecules with combining sites that specifically recognize the epitopes on smallpox virus. Nature differs from technology, however: it thinks nothing of wastefulness. (For example, rather than improving the chance that a spermatozoon will meet an egg cell, nature finds it easier to produce millions of spermatozoa.' (Niels Kaj Jerne, 'The Immune System', Scientific American 229, no. 1 [July 1973): 53). Thanks to a Signs reviewer for bringing this reference to my attention.
11.  Bruce Alberts et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell (New York: Garland, 1983), 795.
12.  In her essay 'Have Only Men Evolved?' (in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sandra
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Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka [Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983], 45-69, esp. 60-61), Ruth Hubbard points out that sociobiologists have said the female invests more energy than the male in the production of her large gametes, claiming that this explains why the female provides parental care. Hubbard question?whether it 'really rakes more "energy" to generate the one or relatively few eggs than the large excess of sperms required to achieve fertilization'. For further critique of how the greater size of eggs is interpreted in sociobiology, see Donna Haraway, 'Investment Strategies for the Evolving Portfolio of Primate Females', in Body/Politics, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990), 155-6.
13.  The sources I used for this article provide compelling information on interactions among sperm. Lack of space prevents me from taking up this theme here, but the elements include competition, hierarchy, and sacrifice. For a newspaper report, see Malcolm W. Browne, 'Some Thoughts on Self Sacrifice', New York Times (July 5, 1988), C6. For a literary rendition, see John Barth, 'Night-Sea Journey', in his Lost in the Funhouse (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 3-13.
14.  See Carol Delaney, 'The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate', Man 21, no. 3 (September 1986): 494-513. She discusses the difference between this scientific view that women contribute genetic material to the fetus and the claim of long-standing Western folk theories that the origin and identity of the fetus comes from the male, as in the metaphor of planting a seed in soil.
15.  For a suggested direct link between human behavior and purportedly passive eggs and active sperm, see Erik H. Erikson, 'Inner and Outer Space: Reflections on Womanhood', Daedalus 93, no. 2 (Spring 1964): 582-606, esp. 591.
16.  Guyton (n. 3 above), 619; and Mountcastle (n. 5 above), 1609.
17.  Jonathan Miller and David Pelham, The Facts of Life (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984), 5.
18.  Alberts et al., 796.
19.  Ibid., 796.
20.  See, e.g., William F. Ganong, Review of Medical Physiology, 7th ed. (Los Altos, Calif.: Lange Medical Publications, 1975), 322.
21.  Alberts et al. (n. 11 above), 796.
22.  Guyton, 615.
23.  Solomon (n. 6 above), 683.
24.  Vander, Sherman, and Luciano (n. 4 above), 4th ed. (1985), 580.
25.  Alberts et al., 796.
26.  All biology texts quoted above use the word 'penetrate'.
27.  Solomon, 700.
28.  A. Beldecos et al., 'The Importance of Feminist Critique for Contemporary Cell Biology', Hypatia 3, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 61-76.
29.  Gerald Schatten and Helen Schatten, 'The Energetic Egg', Medical World News 23 (January 23, 1984): 51-53, esp. 51.
30.  Alberts et al., 796.
31.  Guyton (n. 3 above), 613.
32.  Miller and Pelham (n. 17 above), 7.
33.  Alberts et al. (n. 11 above), 804.
34.  Ibid., 801.
35.  Ruth Herschberger, Adam's Rib (New York: Pelligrini & Cudaby, 1948), esp. 84.1 am indebted to Ruth Hubbard for telling me about Herschberger's work, although at a point when this paper was already in draft form.
36.  Bennett M. Shapiro. 'The Existential Decision of a Sperm', Cell 49, no. 3 (May 1987): 293-94, esp. 293.
37.  Lennart Nilsson, 'A Portrait of the Sperm', in The Functional Anatomy of the Spermatozoon, cd. Björn A. Afzelius (New York: Pergamon, 1975), 79-82.
38.   Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 3S.
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39. Jay M. Baltz carried out the research I describe when he was^agraduate student in the Thomas C. Jenkins Department of Biophysics at Johfrs Hopkins University.
40.  Far less is known about the physiology of sperm than comparable female substances, which some feminists claim is no accident. Greater scientific scrutiny of female reproduction has long enabled the burden of birth control to be placed on women. In this case, the researchers' discovery did not depend on development of any new technology. The experiments made use of glass pipettes, a manometer, and a simple microscope, all of which have been available for more than one hundred years.
41. Jay Baltz and Richard A. Cone, 'What Force Is Needed to Tether a Sperm?' (abstract for Society for the Study of Reproduction, 1985), and 'Flagellar Torque on the Head Determines the Force Needed to Tether a Sperm' (abstract for Biophysical Society, 1986).
42.  Jay M. Baltz, David F. Katz and Richard A. Cone, The Mechanics of the Sperm-Egg Interaction at the Zona Pellucida', Biophysical Journal 54, no. 4 (October 1988): 643-54. Lab members were somewhat familiar with work on metaphors in the biology of female reproduction. Richard Cone, who runs the lab, is my husband, and he talked with them about my earlier research on the subject from time to time. Even though my current research focuses on biological imagery and I heard about the lab's work from my husband every day, I myself did not recognize the role of imagery in the sperm research until many weeks after the period of research and writing I describe. Therefore, I assume that any awareness the lab members may have had about how underlying metaphor might be guiding this particular research was fairly inchoate.
43.  Ibid., 643, 650.
44.  Baltz, Katz, and Cone (n. 42 above), 643, 650.
45.  Schatten and Schatten, (n. 29 above), 53.
46.  Paul M. Wassarman, The Biology and Chemistry of Fertilization', Science 235, no. 4788 (January 30, 1987): 553-60, esp. 554.
47.  Mary Ellman, Thinking about Women (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 140; Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), esp. 186.
48.  Kenneth Alan Adams, 'Arachnophobia: Love American Style', Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology 4, no. 2 (1981): 157-97.
49.  William Ray Arney and Bernard Bergen, Medicine and the Management of Living (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
50. J. F. Hartman, R. B. Gwatkin and C. F. Hutchison, 'Early Contact Interactions between Mammalian Gametes //* Vitro*, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US) 69, no. 10 (1972): 2767-69.
51.  Arney and Bergen, 68.
52.  Ruth Hubbard, 'Have Only Men Evolved?' (n. 12 above), 51-52.
53.  David Harvey, personal communication, November 1989.
54.  Rosalind Petchesky, 'Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of 'Reproduction', Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 263-92, esp. 272.
55.  Rita Arditti, Renate Klein and Shelley Minden, Test-Tube Women (London: Pandora, 1984); Ellen Goodman, 'Whose Right to Life?' Baltimore Sun (November 17, 1987); Tamar Lewin, 'Courts Acting to Force Care of the Unborn', New York Times (November 23, 1987), Al and BIO; Susan Irwin and Brigitte Jordan, 'Knowedge, Practice, and Power: Court Ordered Cesarean Sections', Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1, no. 3 (September 1987): 319-34.
56.  Thanks to Elizabeth Fee and David Spain, who in February 1989 and April 1989, respectively, made points related to this.
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