Analysis Of ' The Egg And The Sperm ' By Emily Martin

Our gender has an effect on every aspect of our lives, varying from how we view ourselves and other people to how we interact in social and civic life. It also impacts the way we set our goals in opportunity areas such as education, work, and recreation. Gender socialization starts at birth then manifests through family, education, peer groups, and mass media. Gender norms are automatically placed on us, where women should learn how to be nurturing, sensitive, emotional, passive, and always hold a man’s position higher than hers. On the other hand men should be overly confident, aggressive, dominant, and view women beneath them. This paper uses various readings to show how these gender norms are supported and challenged in today’s society.

Martin investigates how cultural stereotypes of the two sexes are subtly incorporated into descriptions of the egg and sperm in scientific papers. She expresses that giving stereotypical roles to the egg and sperm has the “power to naturalize our social conventions about gender” (501). By associating the egg with feminine traits and the sperm with masculine traits, scientists make these

In the 1991 article “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles”, by anthropologist Emily Martin approaches scientific literature from the perspective of an anthropologist. Emily Martin explores cultural gender stereotypes and the effects they had on the diction used to describe egg and sperm interactions in numerous biology books and research reports. She focuses on theories made in fertilization with the roles that the egg and sperm and where the women look weak and less important than men.

As time has progressed and colonization has evolved, gender in the United States has been constructed in a manner that is unknown in other countries. Our society has made different stereotypes for certain sexes. It is socially impossible to not make a collation between sex and gender in the United States. Women are viewed the same in the professional world and in the home life perspective. All roles played by women are considered to be inadequate or insignificant compared to men. Gender characteristics, such as masculinity and femininity, has become a cultural construct. Gender is a social construct that was designed to confine people to a certain title and cultural agenda.

Gender is a social construct that consists of a set of social arrangements that are built around sex. Gender roles are sets of behavioral norms assumed to accompany one’s status as a male or female. According to Lorber, Gender is a social institution because these gender roles are being changed over time. Moreover, she defines gender roles as process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities. As a process, gender creates the social differences that define "woman" and "man." In social interaction throughout their lives, individuals learn what is expected, see what is expected, act and react in expected ways, and thus simultaneously construct and maintain the gender order. In this paper, I will discuss how the article untiled “"Night to His Day": The Social Construction of Gender helps clarify how gender roles is a social constitution.

Emily Martin analyzes the way the egg and sperm are described in biology. Most scientists continue to perpetuate the stereotypical relationship between the egg and sperm. Martin points out that textbooks describe sperm as the noble knight who is there to rescue the damsel in distress. The egg is always a subordinate and never an active participant. This description is disturbing because it does not represent the actual process that occurs between the egg and sperm. Most modern accounts allude to a mutual relationship between the two but continue to push the sperm dominant description. While science is often thought to be factual and free of bias, the description of reproduction reveals that the dominant epistemology is that of the male scientist.

Gender stereotypes have existed since the beginning of modern man. We've all heard them before; male dominance and female weakness, a controlled male and a flustered female, aggression and passion, and many others that all basically boil down to the same thing. Emily Martin, in her essay entitled The Egg and the Sperm, takes this problem of gender stereotype to a new and much more serious level. As an anthropologist, Martin is concerned with the socio-cultural impacts on many different aspects of everyday life, including biology. In doing her research for this article, Martin was trying to uncover suspicions she had about socio-cultural gender stereotypes, and the affects they had on the diction used to describe egg and sperm

Rich’s experiential background in education leads her to assert that neither “the university curriculum [nor] the high school curriculum… provide the kind of knowledge for women, the knowledge of Womankind, whose experience has been so profoundly different from that of Mankind.” (Rich 213) This, she insists, is evident through the use of “He-Man grammar” (Rich 314) within lecture and the instructional culture itself. The harmful and ever present nature of this specific male-centric education is epitomized in Emily Martin’s The Egg and Sperm which examines how “scientific accounts of reproductive biology rely on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female…

Emily Martin, an anthropology professor at New York University, explores gender related indifferences males and females face through scientific research in her article, “The Egg and Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male – Female Roles”. Throughout her findings, she attempts to explain the scientific language of our biology. Martin argues that traditionally texts and findings define eggs and sperm as feminine and masculine characteristics. By ways of contrast, Martin approaches the sperm and the egg argument in context related to societal beliefs, which suggests that stereotypes in terms of cultural aspects define masculine and feminine roles. She disputes the argument of the sperm being seen as the “aggressor and powerful one,” as opposed to the egg, which is seen as “weak and in distress” (Martin, 2013, p. 119). Despite all the women’s movements and fights for equal rights women have been continuously oppressed based on physical characteristics. Martin provides numerous

Drawing on the definition of gender provided by Butler, I will analyze the three key ways in which, preconceived notions of gender essentially bombard society; the portrayal of men and women in the media, the importance placed on social conventions and the subliminal teaching of a “natural” heterosexual role through family.

Over an extensive period of time, the issue concerning gender has “consistently occupy the media and the public mind.” (Correll 20). It has established beliefs about the roles of men and women as a whole. “A man is expected always to be strong, impervious to pain, and especially to emotional stress, dominant in the role of lord and master; a woman is expected to be docile, submissive, passive, fulfilled in the role of subordinate.” (Fremon 129). It has been concluded for the longest time that women are the inferior gender, biologically, psychologically and socially. For many people, it is normal for women to be gender typed and never realize the prejudices underlying into it. They are judged with

Gender roles are social constructs that determine how men and women are viewed, categorized, and stereotyped. In theory, gender roles seem benign: they are, after all, simply relics of cultural tradition; in practice however, they have proved malignant, and are the root of many obstacles women and men face in the United States today, confining individuals through archaic, sexist assumptions and stereotypes. At the heart of this stereotyping is the idea that true women are sensitive, nurturing, and submissive to the more aggressive, dominant men (Carlton). Gender roles and associated sexism are the glue that binds gender to societal expectations about personality characteristics, jobs, and colors. Despite the astounding progress women have made, equality between men and women has yet to be achieved, and it is no question that gender roles are present in today’s society, contributing to the inequality women face. The impacts of gender roles are not limited to restrictive societal roles and pressures, but also contribute to health-related, economic and political inequality. Gender roles encourage the dominance of men and restrict the freedom of women. Awareness of gender roles and their detrimental effects is absolutely necessary in order for women to achieve true social and political equality in the United States.

Women and female bodied individuals in America have had issues with inequality in school and their place of work for centuries. While in school young girls are taught that they are not as special as their male peers and experience many limitations. In Judith Lorber 's "The Social Construction of Gender" (1991) we learn how the differences among girls and boys are what society uses to shape gender roles. Young girls learn that their education is not as important as a man 's they learn that their roles as mothers and looking attractive is more important even if they grow up to have the same positions as men. The differences that women and men face are a part of the process in which gender is socially constructed. Lorber states, "As a process, gender creates the social differences that define "woman" and "man". In social interaction throughout their lives, individuals learn what is expected, act and react in expected ways...." (Lorber, Kirk & Okazawa-Rey, 1991, p.67).

Gender is important to Western society, and fittingly, it is deeply woven into the infrastructure of the United States. Whether it comes from the media, school, work, or church, people are fed innumerable amounts of messages everyday instructing them how he or she should look and behave based on their sex, and there is no escaping it. While these gender values have been challenged more frequently and intensely in recent years, one, growing up in a culture that places so much important on gender performance (based on sex), cannot help but be exposed and influenced by it to some degree. At this point, it is crucial to differentiate between the words “sex” and “gender,” which tend to be used interchangeably, an issue that leads to much

There are many unspoken rules in society, most of which are so deeply ingrained in our culture that they do not even seem odd or restrictive; however, when compared to the way other societies function, we are able to view our societal rules in a more critical way. One aspect of our cultural views that is particularly restrictive is our understanding of gender roles, and how sex and gender are not mutually exclusive.