I found The Egg and the Sperm to be a very interesting article. However, there are some questions I have with Emily Martin's implications and proposals. On page 495, she mentions, "It has been more than a century since Hermann....peered into his microscope and became the first person to see a sperm penetrate an egg, fertilize it and form the first cell of a new embryo." Surrounding this fact, she discusses how this scientific language, puts the male sperm into the active state and the female egg as the "damsile in distress", also compared to as sleeping beauty. I feel like her bringing up this fact implies that because a man first discovered or saw this biological event, that that is the reason why the male's sperm is considered as the active, aggressive, dominant part of the fertilization process. My question is, what if a woman first discovered this? If this was the case, I doubt she'd describe the egg as active. She wouldn't think about the possible sexist implications but rather just would describe the process as she saw it.
My other questions deals with the last sentence. Emily says that by "waking up such metaphors, by becoming aware of their implications" we will "improve our ability to investigate and understand nature" and thus "rob them( the metaphors) of their power to naturalize our social conventions about gender". However, she earlier gets upset when the egg was described as active because it was too active that it was aggressive and spider-like. [Which I couldn't help but compare to H. Clinton in that when she became active she was considered butch and aggressive] This quotation implies that is we change scientific writing to the egg being more active but less aggressive then it will change our stereotypes that are now social concentions that females are passive and males active. Would there then be arguments made by the men? More importantly, is this possible?