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 specifica- tion, 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,” “dy- ing,” “losing,” “denuding,” “e~pell ing.”~
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 transforma- tion from spermatid to mature sperm remain uncertain. . . . Perhaps the most amazing characteristic of spermatogenesis is its sheer mag- nitude: 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, productiveldes- tructive 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).5 The
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.
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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 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 spermato- genesis, 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 ~ r g a n . ” ~
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 (Decem-
ber 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 por- tray 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, so that at birth only two million eggs remain in the ovaries. Degeneration continues throughout a woman’s life: by puberty 300,000 eggs remain, and only a few are present by menopause. “Dur- ing 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 .~%ssuming 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
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 Sci- ence, 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 BodyIPol- itics, ed , Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990), 155-56.
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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? A look at language-in this case, scientific language-provides the first clue. Take the egg and the sperm.13 It is remarkable how “femininely” the egg behaves and how “masculinely” the sperm.14 The egg is seen as large and passive.15 It does not move or journey, but passively “is transported,” “is swept,”16 or even “drifts”17 along 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.m Their tails are “strong” and efficiently powered.21 Together with the forces of ejaculation, they can “propel the semen into the deepest recesses of the vagina.”22 For this they need “energy,” “fuel,”23 so that with a “whiplashlike motion and strong lurches”24 they can “burrow through the egg coat”25 and “penetrate” it.%
l3 The sources I used for this article provide compelling information on interac- tions 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.”