REPRODUCTION and the BODY

 Emily Martin: the Sperm and the Egg

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 female biological processes are less worthy than their male counterparts but also that women are less worthy than men. 
• there are gender stereotypes hidden within the scientific language of biology

Female Biology of Reproduction

• 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. 

Male Reproductive Biology

• 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 day"
• 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?" 
• None of these texts expresses such intense enthusiasm for any female processes. 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."
• 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 organ
• 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.
• "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 wasteful.

LANGUAGE

• EGG and SPERM
• The egg is seen as large and passive.15 It does not move or journey, but passively "is transported," "is swept,"'6 or even "drifts"'7 along the fallopian tube= FEMININE
• The sperm are small, "streamlined," and invariably active. They "deliver" their genes to the egg, "activate the developmental program of the egg," and have a "velocity" that is often remarked upon. Their tails are "strong" and efficiently powered. Together with the forces of ejaculation, they can "propel the semen into the deepest recesses of the vagina." For this they need "energy," "fuel," so that with a "whiplashlike motion and strong lurches" they can "burrow through the egg coat" and "penetrate" it=MASCULINE
• Religious qualities
• 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," 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.
• Egg is dependent and sperm independent
• the sperm makes 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." 
• Is 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."

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 sperm all point to this conclusion. 

• NEW RESEARCH
• The egg is actually active attracting the sperm and allowing it to penetrate the cell wall
• 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.They discovered, to their great surprise, that the forward thrust of sperm is extremely weak, which contradicts the assumption that sperm are forceful penetrators.
• 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. 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 imagery of sperm as aggressor is particularly startling --the main discovery being reported is isolation of a particular molecule on the egg coat that plays an important role in fertilization! But still the egg is described in gendered terms as passive and the sperm as active.

One clear feminist challenge is to wake up sleeping metaphors in science, particularly those involved in descriptions of the egg and the sperm. 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. 

Black Surrogate Mothers

Does gestational surrogacy by Black women simply puts a new face on an old problem: whites owning Black women's wombs

• Do Affluent white women's infertility, sterility, preferences and power threaten to tum poor Black women, already understood to be a servant class, 13 into a "surrogate class.?
• Throughout history, Black women and mulatto women have been hired or enslaved to play a number of important de facto "mothering" roles in American families. 
• Black women who marry white men have sometimes wound up "mothering" white step-children. 
• Blacks are not supposed to have white children. Blacks are not supposed to want to have white children of their own-not in the adoption context and not, therefore, in the surrogacy context.
• He analogized Johnson to a "foster parent providing care, protection and nurture during the period of time that the natural mother
• He compared surrogate gestatory to "wet-nurses." As recently as the last century it was common for affluent European and American families to pay women to breast-feed and tend their infants and small children. 
• It was also for the sake of satisfying the public preference for genetic parentage. 
• the judge did not mention the race issue

Men and Masculinities: Reproduction

• Masculinity is threatened, despite diversity, by the physical Inability to penetrate and reproduce
• manhood as a fragile status enacted through repeated public displays of masculinity (middle East and Spain)
• penetrate
• reproduce
• fight
• drink 
• carouse
• be emotionally closed
• The way men create social bonds is through sex- why men in these cultures are promiscuous
• erectile disfunction drugs are not just about biology, but about maintaining status and social relationships inside and outside of the family, and to maintain a sense of manhood (esteem)
• Machismo and ED
• men tended to reject ED drugs if they considered themselves to inhabit bodies that were post machismo (older)
• men tend to have women who are "needy" as mistresses, further perpetuating their macho status
• gains emotional support from the women in their lives
• feels valuable like a provider
• Middle Eastern Masculinity
• infertility and ED have been medicalized and led to an increase in men who seek treatment
• the sexual act and reproduction are foundations of virile and fertile (IVF, drugs for ED)
• Accessing such treatments has served to redefine embodied masculinity and make masculinity a MORE CONSCIOUS ENACTMENT

LABORING NOW

• Two models: medical and midwife
• Everything we saw in the film
• medical based on pathology
• pathology requires monitoring and intervention
• pregnancy as disease
• agency and responsibility with dr
• fetus is real and mother is ephemeral
• surgery is what is known
• drug interventions
• increasing PERSONHOOD of the fetus
• Midwife model
• pregnancy as natural process for mother
• personhood of mother and her changing body and development
• education rather than screening
• agency and responsibility to mother
• mother is real "expecting" a baby
• avoid intervention in natural process

Rea l Time Fetus

• Through an analysis of videotaped interactions between healthcare professionals and pregnant women during ultrasound prenatal examinations in Japan
• The ultrasound demonstration of the fetal condition is an intrinsically interactional and distributed achievement. 
• The ultrasound fetus is constructed as a real-time object in a particular technological environment; in this environment, the participants’ orientations to spatially separated operational fields, that is, the monitor screen and the woman’s abdomen, are exhibited and integrated in the actual course of interaction. 
• In conclusion, the fundamental relation between organizational lived work in a technological environment and the observable features of technology will be suggested.
• the real-time fetus is a locally organized interactional object. 
• it is CREATED during the process of interaction between the pregnant woman and the technician, midwife or doctor