"The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles"
I have never noticed gender stereotypes in the language of biology until I read "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles," by Emily Martin. In a text that the author examined, the egg is described as being "passive, which means it must depend on sperm for rescue" (Martin 490). I disagree with that statement because an egg and a sperm will die if one does not meet the other; therefore, if someone were to say an egg is dependent on the sperm to survive, the same would apply for the survival of the sperm. Egg and sperm are equally important in the process of reproduction, so one should not be seen as more "valuable" than the other.
I was struck at the fact that there are "seven million...egg germ cells, in the female embryo" but "only 400 to 500 eggs will have been released" for the use of reproduction (Martin 488). However, I was even more surprised when the author stated "for every baby a man produces, he wastes more than one trillion sperm" because I did not have a clue on how much eggs and sperms male and female have (Martin 489).