What Biological Stories are Americans Telling About the Egg and the Sperm? A Study Inspired by Emily Martin 30 Years Later

Abstract

Emily Martin’s landmark article— “The Egg and the Sperm” —demonstrated that cultural beliefs about masculinity and femininity led scientists to construct a “fairy tale” romance between active sperm and passive eggs, a biological metaphor that influenced the process of research in scientific labs and descriptions of fertilization in textbooks. In the decades since, there have been significant shifts in cultural beliefs about sex, gender, and sexuality, including challenges to the conceptualization of sex as a binary category, growing social acceptance of a wide variety of gender identities and sexualities, and an increasing proportion of people who subscribe to gender-egalitarian views. While Martin’s focus was on the scientists producing knowledge, here I pivot to individuals recruited from the general public in a northeastern American city, using a sociology of culture approach to ask whether shifting beliefs about gender and sexuality are associated with different biological metaphors about fertilization. Through qualitative interviews (N = 47), I find that the traditional metaphor of active sperm penetrating passive egg is still commonly used, but that another metaphor is also circulating, one that positions gametes as more similar than different, as two halves of a whole. I conclude by discussing the implications for debates about the relationship between biological stories and social beliefs.