Review of Articles About Gender Stereotypes

Bobel, C., & Kissling, E. A. (2011). Menstruation Matters: Introduction to representations of the menstrual cycle. Women's Studies, 40(2), 121-126.

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From this article, Bobel and Kissling (2011) demonstrate science as a metaphor that vastly describes the activities of both the sperms and eggs very gender biased thus making it guilty of biological entities in accordance to personhood, making the article relevant to the research question. The article explains that a womans reproductive system with most of them portraying that despite a healthy female body her organs are old and battered. While scientists should be on the front line of fighting against gender inequality, they are partial creditors of femininity in a biological view. Some of the ideas that the article poses are that both spermatogenesis and menstruation are not similar processes and should not be expected to respond in the same way. The authors stress that scientists should avoid negative descriptions that are associated with reproductive systems of women by first describing this processes homologous. Insisting that the female process should be merited but instead, biology keeps dodging that women are the lesser gender and both their reproductive organs and processes are weaker. Casting the female reproductive system and process negatively and inferior explaining that production of ovaries ends at birth. With this kind of explanation, the female gender is placed as unproductive and wasteful. Also, the female reproductive system is posed as fragile and dependent especially in the process of fertilization. However, the male system should be the one that is accounted for wastefulness considering that in a day it produces up to 100 million sperms estimating to over 2 trillion sperms in a mans average lifetime. Therefore, the question arises of who is more wasteful between the two if a woman can only produce about 200 eggs for each baby a man wastes about one trillion of sperm for each baby. Moreover, in the process of making a baby a womans body is portrayed negatively with the womans egg behaving femininely and he sperm behaving masculine.

Green, K. K., & Madjidian, J. A. (2011). Active males, reactive females: stereotypic sex roles in sexual conflict research?. Animal Behaviour, 81(5), 901-907.

Green and Madjidian (2011) explain that although people think that this feminism is dead in reality, it is hidden in the scientific contexts. By waking up these metaphors, the article helps to eliminate the cultural contexts endowed with it. Culture significantly shapes biology with the natural world. They explain that gender stereotypes consequently exhibit that scientific language goes beyond biology. Additionally, the reproductive science concurrently supports femininity and masculinity by posting the female gender as less worthy than males, both in the process and in real life. They analyse the traditional fairy tale in all the science textbooks explaining the importance of both the female and male reproductive organs as producers of valuable elements the sperm and the egg consecutively. From a female perspective, menstruation is the essential element that shows the fertility of a woman. However, menstruation is discredited for being a mechanism failure. According to the article, menstruation is described as the product of the death of tissues. On the other hand, the male reproductive system is described as a mechanism that poses incredible magnitude. Further science is unable to ascertain this process because of its complexity. Femininity is expressed by comparing the powerful ability to manufacture millions of sperms every day while the female organs can only produce and shed a single ovum every month. From this analysis, it is clear that science acts as one of the primary sources of gender stereotype and even starts before birth. The body functioning and parts are determined by gender, a process that starts before birth. Therefore, from this article, it is clear that science directly acts as an agent of gender stereotype.

Sharp, Gwen. (2008). The Social Construction of Sperm - Sociological Images. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/08/26/the-frightened-sperm/

Gwen (2008) explains that science should be challenged for supporting feminism especially concerning the descriptions of both the sperm and the ovum. As a result, feminism is highlighted from the feminist point of view. Science in its quest to promote femininity insists that the female reproductive system is biologically interdependent, unlike their male organs that are autonomous because they operate in isolation and independently. Nonetheless, the sperm is overly dependent too, but biology maintains that the egg is more dependent than the male productive system. On a critical approach, the sperm is also dependent on many related processes from shutting down the bladder, secretion that cleans up the urethra, and many muscular types of propulsion. Also, new researches are being conducted to straighten up these misinterpretations. By so doing, both the egg and sperm are still being represented stereotypically. Scientists are still expressing gender imagery in an entirely different form. Researchers explain that despite the claim that the sperms decide whether it should penetrate the egg, a different explanation is offered that the ovum has an impenetrable barrier, which the sperm has to burrow mechanically. The zona layer ensures that the sperm holds on to the surface of the ovum without escaping. Otherwise, the sperm would never reach and be attached to the egg to complete the process of fertilization. The article brings out the evidence that science should be considered as the causative agents of gender stereotypes.