Textbook descriptions of the reproductive system are remarkable for the
way they give meaning to bodily processes in ways the status of textbook
would normally deny. Emily Martin has shown how the process of menstruation
has, for many years, been described in terms of failure using words such
as degenerate, decline, lack, and deteriorate. She compares this to the language
used to describe male reproductive physiology in a popular textbook:
“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. This kind of
language of achievement is extended into what was, until recently, the dominant
way of thinking about human fertilization—the act of a mobile sperm
cell penetrating an immobile egg. Th e mobility of the sperm cell was equated
with agency. Martin reports the way physiology texts described the way the
egg “drift s” and “is transported,” while the sperm “deliver” their genes to
the egg aft er a journey of considerable “velocity” propelled by “strong” tails.
Ejaculation “propels the semen into the deepest recesses of the vagina” where
the sperm are aided by “energy” so that with a “whiplashlike movement and
strong lurches” they finally “burrow through the egg coat,” and “penetrate”
it. The egg, in other words, is passive and the sperm is active. The sperm does
things and the egg has things done to it. It is only recently that the language
has changed and the active role of the egg in selecting a sperm has been
acknowledged. Or, as Gerald and Helen Schatten, wrote in 1983,