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"Killer in Drag" and "Death of a Transvestite"
The hopelessly inept transvestite filmmaker was also, it turns out, a hopelessly inept transvestite novelist.
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"Love Is Where It Falls"
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By Daniel Reitz
[06/21/99]

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"In these sagas of conception," writes science historian Londa Schiebinger, "the spermatic hero actively pursues the egg, surviving the hostile environment of the vagina and defeating his many rivals." Like Sleeping Beauty, the egg drifts unconsciously in the fallopian tube, waiting to be awakened by the valiant, vital sperm. It is an archetypal story of female passivity enlivened by male energy -- a story as old as Aristotle, and as replete with patronizing overtones.

Since the late 1970s, however, a new generation of biologists has begun to peek behind this suspect veil and, using fresh analyses, to reveal quite a different story, one summed up by the title of a seminal paper, "The Energetic Egg." In this new account the egg, no longer a slumbering princess, becomes an active agent, directing the growth of microvilli (small finger-like projections on its surface) to capture and tether the sperm. Here the egg and sperm are partners, co-activators in the process of conception.

Check out books by Margaret Wertheim at BARNES & NOBLE

What is particularly noteworthy is that while the egg's cone of microvilli was discovered in the 1890s, it was not thought worthy of serious scientific attention until 80 years later -- a time when women's roles in society were themselves being reconceived.

But before we cheer too loudly for this liberation of a core biological function from the rhetorical trappings of millennia-old sexism, it is worth stopping to reflect that the new tale itself is rife with gendered cultural overtones. As Schiebinger notes, in this new account the egg and sperm have come to resemble nothing so much as the high-powered dual-career couple of the '80s and '90s.

Next page | Can science ever be purely objective?