Amaan Syed Week 1

 Gender and Society Assignment

Emily Martin’s “The Egg and the Sperm” and Emily W Kane’s “The Gender Trap” are talking about the indifference between males and females. The first article talks about the difference from a biological perspective and the misconceptions regarding the sperm playing the ‘dominant’ part in the reproductive process, which by social implication showed men as active and as a warrior and the egg as a ‘damsel in distress’. The new perspective, in contrast, showed that both the egg and the sperm equally play a part in the process. The article also highlights menstruation as a ‘wastage’ while in reality the sperms are wasted a lot more in the same ratio. Kane’s Gender Trap also talks about how society perceives a woman as a weak, powerless human and a male as hardworking and strong. The society for too long has adopted this model of portrayal that it has become hard for people to get out of it. Parents who try to keep their children away inevitably fail to fall in the gender specified roles aka “The Gender Trap”. Both articles basically state that society conceives the female to be less important than the male which in contrast is not the case and females are equally capable of doing the same tasks as efficiently as a male. The view of males being stronger than females is a harsh truth but much of the Indian society still perceives this notion.