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 worldpicture.
. . .The theory of the human body is always a part of
a fantasy. [JAMES The Myth of Analysis]'HILLMAN,
As an anthropologist, I am intrigued by the possibility that culture
shapes how biological scientists describe what they discover about
the natural world. If this were so, we would be learning about more
than the natural world in high school biology class; we would be
learning about cultural beliefs and practices as if they were part of
nature. In the course of my research I realized that the picture of
egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of
reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural
definitions of male and female. The stereotypes imply not only that
Portions of this article were presented as the 1987 Becker Lecture, Cornell
University. I am grateful for the many suggestions and ideas I received on this
occasion. For especially pertinent help with my arguments and data I thank Richard
Cone, Kevin Whaley, Sharon Stephens, Barbara Duden, Susanne Kuechler, Lorna
Rhodes, and Scott Gilbert. The article was strengthened and clarified by the
comments of the anonymous Signs reviewers as well as the superb editorial skills of
Amy Gage.
I James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1972), 220.
[Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1991, vol. 16, no. 31
0 1991 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-974019111603-0003$01.00
Martin 1 EGG AND THE SPERM
female biological processes are less worthy than their male counterparts
but also that women are less worthy than men. Part ofmy goal in
writing this article is to shine a bright light on the gender stereotypes
hidden within the scientific language of biology. Exposed in such a
light, I hope they will lose much of their power to harm us.
Egg and sperm: A scientific fairy tale
At a fundamental level, all major scientific textbooks depict male
and female reproductive organs as systems for the production of
valuable substances, such as eggs and sperm.2 In the case of
women, the monthly cycle is described as being designed to
produce eggs and prepare a suitable place for them to be,fertilized
and grown-all to the end of making babies. But 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," "e~pelling."~
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."4 In the classic text Medical Physiology,
edited by Vernon Mountcastle, the malelfemale, productiveldestructive
comparison is more explicit: "Whereas the female sheds
only a single gamete each month, the seminiferous tubules produce
hundreds of millions of sperm each day" (emphasis mine).5The
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.
Arthur C. Guyton, Physiology of the Human Body, 6th ed. (Philadelphia:
Saunders College Publishing, 1984),624.
Arthur J.Vander,James H. Sherman, and Dorothy S. Luciano, Human Physiology:
The Mechanisms of Body Function, 3d ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1980),483-84.
Vernon B. Mountcastle, Medical Physiology, 14th ed. (London: Mosby, 1980),
2:1624.
Spr~ng1991 i SIGNS
female author of anothertext 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 a c ~ o m ~ l i s h e d ? " ~None ofthese 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 ~ a l u a b l e . ~
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.
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 from ripening eggs every month, even
though the woman herself is still relatively young: "When you look
through a laparoscope . . . at an ovary that has been through
hundreds of cycles, even in a superbly healthy American female,
you see a scarred, battered ~rgan."~
To 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
Eldra Pearl Solomon, Human Anatomy and Physiology (New York: CBS
College Publishing, 1983), 678.
'For elaboration, see Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural
Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 27-53.
Vander, Sherman, and Luciano, 568.
Melvin Konner, "Childbearing and Age," New York Times Magazine (December
27, 1987), 22-23, esp. 22.
Martin 1 EGG AND THE SPERM
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 wa~teful.'~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, sothat at birth only two million eggs remain in the ovaries.
Degeneration continues throughout a woman's life: by puberty
300,000eggs remain, 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 authors write. "All the rest will have
degenerated. It is still a mystery why so many eggs are formed only to
die in the ovaries.""
The real mystery is why the male's vast production of sperm is
not seen as ~asteful.~%ssumingthat a man "produces" 100million
(10') sperm per day (a conservative estimate) during an average
reproductive life of sixty years, he would produce well over two
lo 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," Scientijc American 229, no. 1[July 19731:
53). Thanks to a Signs reviewer for bringing this reference to my attention.
I' Bruce Alberts et a]., Molecular Biology of the Cell (New York: Garland, 1983),
795.
' q n her essay "Have Only Men Evolved?" (in Discovering Reality: Feminist
Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science,
ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka [Dordrecht: Reidel, 19831,45-69,
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 questions
whether it "really takes 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 BodyIPolitics,
ed, Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 155-56.
Spring 1991 1 SIGNS
trillion sperm in his lifetime. Assuming that a woman "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?
Alookat language-in this case, scientificlanguage-provides the first
clue. Take the egg and the sperm.13It is remarkable how "femininely"
the egg behaves and how "masculinely" the sperm.14The egg is seen
as large and passive.15It does not move orjourney, but passively "is
transported," "is swept,"16or even "drifts"17along the fallopian tube. In
utter contrast, sperm are small, "streamlined," l8 and 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.mTheir tails are "strong" and efficiently powered.21Together
with the forces of ejaculation, they can "propel the semen into the
deepest recesses of the vagina."22For this they need "energy," "fuel,"23
so that with a "whiplashlike motion and strong lurches"24they can
"burrow through the egg coat"25and "penetrate" it.%
l3 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, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968),3- 13.
" 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.
l5 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.
l6 Guyton (n. 3 above), 619; and Mountcastle (n. 5 above), 1609.
l7 Jonathan Miller and David Pelham, The Facts of Life (New York: Viking
Penguin, 1984),5.
l8 Alberts et al., 796.
l9 Ibid., 796.
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.
Guyton, 615.
Solomon (n. 6 above), 683.
"Vander, Sherman, and Luciano (n. 4 above), 4th ed. (1985), 580.
25 Alberts et al., 796.
All biology texts quoted above use the word "penetrate."
Martin 1 EGG AND THE SPERM
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 "~orona,"'~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,"30which is to "move through the female genital tract in
quest of the ovum."31One 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.03' 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."33 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 inde"Solomon,
700.
7~ 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.
"Alberts et al., 796.
3' Guyton (n. 3 above), 613.
32 Miller and Pelham (n. 17 above), 7.
"Alberts et al. (n. 11 above), 804.
"Ibid.. 801.
Spring 1991 1 SIGNS
pendent 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.%
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 swim to an egg
and there acquire the ability to effect membrane fusion."36Is this a
"
corporate manager's version of the sperm's activities- executing
decisions" while fraught with dismay over difficult options that
bring with them very high risk?
There is another way that sperm, despite their small size, can be
made to loom in importance over the egg. In a collection of
scientific papers, an electron micrograph of an enormous egg and
tiny sperm is titled "A Portrait of the Sperm."37This is a little like
showing a photo of a dog and calling it a picture of the fleas.
Granted, microscopic sperm are harder to photograph than eggs,
which are just large enough to see with the naked eye. But surely
the use of the term "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 inside 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 sacred 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 always be constructed
in cultural terms, I would argue that in this case they are. The
35 Ruth Herschberger, Adam's Rib (New York: Pelligrini & Cudaby, 1948), esp.
84. I am indebted to Ruth Hubbard for telling me about Herschberger's work,
although at a point when this paper was already in draft form.
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
Spermatozoan, ed. Bjorn A. Afzelius (New York: Pergamon, 1975), 79-82.
Martin !EGG AND THE SPERM
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 sperm 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 ~ t y l e . " ~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 Hopkins Universitytransforming
the egg from the passive to the active party.39
Prior to this research, it was thought that the zona, the inner
vestments of 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
Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientijic Fact, ed. Thaddeus J.
Trenn and Robert K. Merton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979),38.
39 Jay M. Baltz carried out the research I describe when he was a graduate student
in the Thomas C. Jenkins Department of Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University.
Spring 1991 1 SIGNS
sperm are forceful penetrators.*ORather 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 zonaprovided
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.41Not 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
* 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.
" Jay Baltz and Richard A. Cone, "What Force Is Needed to Tether a Sperm?"
(abstractfor Society for the Study of Reproduction, 1985),and "Flagellar Torque on
the Head Determines the Force Needed to Tethera Sperm" (abstractfor Biophysical
Society, 1986).
Martin 1 EGG AND THE SPERM
with adhesive molecules that can capture a sperm with a single bond
and clasp it to the zona's surface." In the words of their published
account: "The innermost vestment, the zona pellucida, is a glycoprotein
shell, which captures and tethers 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 firstbond made upon the tip-first meeting of the sperm and zona
can result in the capture of the sperm."43
Experiments in another lab reveal similar patterns of data
interpretation. Gerald Schatten and Helen Schatten set out to show
that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the "egg is not merely a
large, yolk-filled sphere into which the sperm burrows to endow
new life. Rather, recent research suggests the almost heretical view
that sperm and egg are mutually active partners."44This sounds like
a departure from the stereotypical textbook view, but further
reading reveals Schatten and Schatten's conformity to the
aggressive-sperm metaphor. They describe how "the sperm and
egg first touch when, from the tip of the sperm's triangular head, a
long, thin filament shoots out and harpoons the egg." Then we learn
that "remarkably, the harpoon is not so much fired as assembled at
great speed, molecule by molecule, from a pool of protein stored in
a specialized region called the acrosome. The filament may grow as
much as twenty times longer than the sperm head itself before its
tip reaches the egg and sti~ks."~'Why not call this "making a
bridge" or "throwing out a line" rather than firing a harpoon?
Harpoons pierce prey and injure or kill them, while this filament
only sticks. And why not focus, as the Hopkins lab did, on the
stickiness of the egg, rather than the stickiness of the perm?“^ Later
"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.
" Schatten and Schatten (n. 29 above), 51.
45 Ibid., 52.
"Surprisingly, in an article intended for a general audience, the authors do not
point out that these are sea urchin sperm and note that human sperm do not shoot out
filaments at all.
Spr~ng1991 1 SIGNS
in the article, the Schattens replicate the common view of the
sperm's perilous journey into the warm darkness of the vagina, this
time for the purpose of explaining its journey into the egg itself:
"[The sperm] still has an arduous journey ahead. It must penetrate
farther into the egg's huge sphere of cytoplasm and somehow locate
the nucleus, so that the two cells' chromosomes can fuse. The
sperm dives down into the cytoplasm, its tail beating. But it is soon
interrupted by the sudden and swift migration of the egg nucleus,
which rushes toward the sperm with a velocity triple that of the
movement of chromosomes during cell division, crossing the entire
egg in about a min~te."~'
Like Schatten and Schatten and the biophysicists at Johns
Hopkins, another researcher has recently made discoveries that
seem to point to a more interactive view of the relationship of egg
and sperm. This work, which Paul Wassarman conducted on the
sperm and eggs of mice, focuses on identifying the specific molecules
in the egg coat (the zona pellucida) that are involved in
egg-sperm interaction. At first glance, his descriptions seem to fit
the model of an egalitarian relationship. Male and female gametes
"
recognize one another," and "interactions . . .take place between
sperm and egg."48But the article in Scientific American in which
those descriptions appear begins with a vignette that presages the
dominant motif of their presentation: "It has been more than a
century since Hermann Fol, a Swiss zoologist, peered into his
microscope and became the first person to see a sperm penetrate an
egg, fertilize it and form the first cell of a new embryo."49This
portrayal of the sperm as the active party-the one that penetrates
and fertilizes the egg and produces the embryo-is not cited as an
example of an earlier, now outmoded view. In fact, the author
reiterates the point later in the article: "Many sperm can bind to
and penetrate the zona pellucida, or outer coat, of an unfertilized
mouse egg, but only one sperm will eventually fuse with the thin
plasma membrane surrounding the egg proper (inner sphere),
fertilizing the egg and giving rise to a new e m b r y ~ . ' ' ~
The imagery of sperm as aggressor is particularly startling in this
case: the main discovery being reported is isolation of a particular
molecule on the egg coat that plays an important role in fertilization!
Wassarman's choice of language sustains the picture. He calls
the molecule that has been isolated, ZP3, a "sperm receptor." By
I' Schatten and Schatten, 53.
"Paul M. Wassarman, "Fertilization in Mammals," Scientijic American 259, no.
6 (December 1988): 78-84, esp. 78, 84.
" Ibid., 78.
50 Ibid., 79.
Martin 1 EGG AND THE SPERM
allocating the passive, waiting role to the egg, Wassarman can
continue to describe the sperm as the actor, the one that makes it all
happen: "The basic process begins when many sperm first attach
loosely and then bind tenaciously to receptors on the surface of the
egg's thick outer coat, the zona pellucida. Each sperm, which has a
large number of egg-binding proteins on its surface, binds to many
sperm receptors on the egg. More specifically, a site on each of the
egg-binding proteins fits a complementary site on a sperm receptor,
much as a key fits a lock."S1With the sperm designated as the "key"
and the egg the "lock," it is obvious which one acts and which one
is acted upon. Could this imagery not be reversed, letting the sperm
(the lock) wait until the egg produces the key? Or could we speak
of two halves of a locket matching, and regard the matching itself as
the action that initiates the fertilization?
It is as if Wassarman were determined to make the egg the
receiving partner. Usually in biological research, the protein member
of the pair of binding molecules is called the receptor, and
physically it has a pocket in it rather like a lock. As the diagrams
that illustrate Wassarman's article show, the molecules on the
sperm are proteins and have "pockets." The small, mobile molecules
that fit into these pockets are called ligands. As shown in the
diagrams, ZP3 on the egg is a polymer of "keys"; many small knobs
stick out. Typically, molecules on the sperm would be called
receptors and molecules on the egg would be called ligands. But
Wassarman chose to name ZP3 on the egg the receptor and to create
a new term, "the egg-binding protein," for the molecule on the
sperm that otherwise would have been called the receptor.''
Wassarman does credit the egg coat with having more functions
than those of a sperm receptor. While he notes that "the zona
pellucida has at times been viewed by investigators as a nuisance,
a barrier to sperm and hence an impediment to fertilization," his
new research reveals that the egg coat "serves as a sophisticated
biological security system that screens incoming sperm, selects
only those compatible with fertilization and development, prepares
sperm for fusion with the egg and later protects the resulting
embryo from polyspermy [a lethal condition caused by fusion of
more than one sperm with a single egg]."53Although this description
gives the egg an active role, that role is drawn in stereotypically
Ibid., 78.
52 Since receptor molecules are relatively immotile and the ligands that bind to
them relatively motile, one might imagine the egg being called the receptor and the
sperm the ligand. But the molecules in question on egg and sperm are immotile
molecules. It is the sperm as a cell that has motility, and the egg as a cell that has
relative immotility.
53 Wassarman, 78-79.
Spr~ng1991 I SIGNS
feminine terms. The egg selects an appropriate mate, prepares him
for fusion, and then protects the resulting offspring from harm. This
is courtship and mating behavior as seen through the eyes of a
sociobiologist: woman as the hard-to-get prize, who, following
union with the chosen one, becomes woman as servant and mother.
And Wassarman does not quit there. In a review article for
Science, he outlines the "chronology of fertilization."" Near the end
of the article are two subject headings. One is "Sperm Penetration,"
in which Wassarman describes how the chemical dissolving of the
zona pellucida combines with the "substantial propulsive force
generated by sperm." The next heading is "Sperm-Egg Fusion."
This section details what happens inside the zona after a sperm
"penetrates" it. Sperm "can make contact with, adhere to, and fuse
with (that is, fertilize) an egg."55Wassarman's word choice, again, is
astonishingly skewed in favor of the sperm's activity, for in the next
breath he says that sperm lose all motility upon fusion with the
egg's surface. In mouse and sea urchin eggs, the sperm enters at the
egg's volition, according to Wassarman's description: "Once fused
with egg plasma membrane [the surface of the egg], how does a
sperm enter the egg? The surface of both mouse and sea urchin
eggs is covered with thousands of plasma membrane-bound projections,
called microvilli [tiny "hairs"]. Evidence in sea urchins
suggests that, after membrane fusion, a group of elongated microvilli
cluster tightly around and interdigitate over the sperm
head. As these microvilli are resorbed, the sperm is drawn into the
egg. Therefore, sperm motility, which ceases at the time of fusion in
both sea urchins and mice, is not required for sperm entry."56The
section called "Sperm Penetration" more logically would be followed
by a section called "The Egg Envelops," rather than "SpermEgg
Fusion." This would give a parallel-and more accuratesense
that both the egg and the sperm initiate action.
Another way that Wassarman makes less of the egg's activity is
by describing components of the egg but referring to the sperm as
a whole entity. Deborah Gordon has described such an approach as
"
atomism" ("the part is independent of and primordial to the
whole") and identified it as one of the "tenacious assumptions" of
Western science and medi~ine.~'Wassarman employs atomism to
"Paul M.Wassarman,"The Biology and Chemistry of Fertilization,"Science 235,
no. 4788 (January30, 1987):553-60, esp. 554.
55 Ibid., 557.
56 Ibid., 557-58. This finding throws into question Schatten and Schatten's
description (n. 29 above) of the sperm, its tail beating, diving down into the egg.
''Deborah R. Gordon, "Tenacious Assumptions in Western Medicine," in Biomedicine
Examined, ed. Margaret Lock and Deborah Gordon (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1988), 19-56, esp. 26.
Martin 1 EGG AND THE SPERM
his advantage. When he refers to processes going on within sperm,
he consistently returns to descriptions that remind us from whence
these activities came: they are part of sperm that penetrate an egg
or generate propulsive force. When he refers to processes going on
within eggs, he stops there. As a result, any active role he grants
them appears to be assigned to the parts of the egg, and not to the
egg itself. In the quote above, it is the microvilli that actively
cluster around the sperm. In another example, "the driving force for
engulfment of a fused sperm comes from a region of cytoplasm just
beneath an egg's plasma membrane."58
Social implications: Thinking beyond
All three of 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." 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."'jOWassarman's description of the
surface of the egg "covered with thousands of plasma membranebound
projections, called microvilli" that reach out and clasp the
sperm adds to the spiderlike imagery.61
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." More specific is the
connection of spider imagery with the idea of an engulfing, devouring
m ~ t h e r . ~New data did not lead scientists to eliminate gender
stereotypes in their descriptions of egg and sperm. Instead, scien-
58 Wassarman, "The Biology and Chemistry of Fertilization," 558.
59 Baltz, Katz, and Cone (n. 42 above), 643, 650.
"Schatten and Schatten, 53.
61 Wassarman, "The Biology and Chemistry of Fertilization," 557.
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.
Kenneth Alan Adams, "Arachnophobia: Love American Style," Journal of
Psychoanalytic Anthropology 4, no. 2 (1981): 157-97.
Spr~ng1991 1 SIGNS
tists 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.64This 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.'j5Clearly,
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.
We would do well to be aware, however, that cybernetic imagery
is hardly neutral. In the past, cybernetic models have played an
important part in the imposition of social 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 contr01."~
William Ray Arney and Bernard Bergen, Medicine and the Management of
Living (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
J. F. Hartman,R. B. Gwatkin, and C. F. Hutchison, "Early Contact Interactions
between Mammalian Gametes In Vitro," Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences (U.S.)69, no. 10 (1972):2767-69.
66 Arney and Bergen, 68.
Martin 1 EGG AND THE SPERM
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 specie^.^' 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
tojustify the social order of the time.What we are seeingnow 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 representationsofnature soas to lay a firm
basis for reimporting exactly that same imagery as natural explanations
of social phen~mena."~
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
Petchesk~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."69Endowing 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 woman's activities in order
to protect her fetus, fetal surgery, amniocentesis, and rescinding of
abortion rights, to name but a few example^.'^
67 Ruth Hubbard, "Have Only Men Evolved?" (n. 12 above), 51-52.
David Harvey, personal communication, November 1989.
6Y 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.
Rita Arditti, Renate Klein, and Shelley Minden, Test-Tube Women (London:
Pandora, 1984);Ellen Goodman, "Whose Right to Life?" Baltimore Sun (November
Spr~ng1991 1 SIGNS
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 personhood. 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 have the
most disturbing social consequences.
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.'l Waking up such metaphors, by becoming aware of when we are
projecting cultural imagery 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.
Department of Anthropology
Johns Hopkins University
17, 1987); Tamar Lewin, "Courts Acting to Force Care of the Unborn," New York
Times (November 23, 1987),A1 and B10; Susan Irwin and Brigitte Jordan,"Knowledge,
Practice, and Power: Court Ordered Cesarean Sections," Medical Anthropology
Quarterly 1, no. 3 (September 1987): 319-34.
Thanks to Elizabeth Fee and David Spain, who in February 1989 and April
1989, respectively, made points related to this.