Like everyone else, I thought that parts of the Martin article were far-fetched and ridiculous. She contradicts herself by first comparing an image of an active egg to a "femme fatale" and then, shortly after, voicing criticism towards the practice of"endowing cellular entities with personhood." The following excerpts especially caught my eye as places where we should critique her argument: "Although this description gives the egg an active role, that role is drawn in stereotypically feminine terms. The egg selects an appropriate mate, prepares him for fusion, and then protects the resulting offspring from harm. This is courtship and mating behavior as seen through the eyes of a sociobiologist: woman as the hard-to-get prize, who, following union with the chosen one, becomes woman as servant and mother." And the other one, "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...[they] imply that a system has gone awry, making products of no use, not to specification, unsalable, wasted, scrap." In the first passage she takes on the role of the sociobiologist, whatever that is, and creates a metaphor that doesn't even fit in with the biological "fact" she has just stated. The other quote is an interesting thought. If she said more to back up the claim that medical textbooks say menstruation is failure and implies a "system gone awry," could she convince us, or is she just reading too much into the word "waste"? (What about pooping? Would she say that's a "failure" of the digestive system since it too is "waste"?) And, if menstruation isn't waste, then what is it? Could the drawbacks of her article be a result of her trying to write outside of her field of expertise? If she didn't exaggerate and nit-pick so much, would be there be some validity in her argument or not?