My last encounter with religion was as a young adult in college. I took a Bible as Literature class, which ended as a victory against an attempted hostile takeover of my soul than as a class discussing literary elements within a classic text. It was a sixteen week battle, but I don’t fault the instructor for the theological dominance over the academic; he tried his best to keep the religious rhetoric to a minimum. It’s just that some agendas are more forceful than others.
I’ve given this context so that those in the audience understand my relationship with western scripture is “limited” in that I don’t respond with automatic reverence. I know common parables from the Bible, but I’d never claim the label scholar or expert of the text. However, what I will claim, what I will own is that I’ve come to understand that I’ve instead internalized the oversimplified versions of the most retold patriarchal narratives of our American culture. And as such, these myths, along with my experiences, have shaped the way I think about myself and my gender.
But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want to leave men out. We need their sperm. We need it because our DNA sequencing matches. This natural balance created within human design is irrefutable. We need each other for that reason and it is fact. Once we’ve established this as our shared foundation, we can move forward to identify the driving force behind the perpetuation of the patriarchal narratives in our American culture concerning procreation and subjugation. As a woman, the narratives don’t celebrate my Godliness.
One example of the patriarchal narrative in our western American culture is the
story we continue to repeat in elementary curricula regarding reproduction. The myth of the strongest, fastest, warrior sperm fertilizing the passive, damsel-in-distress egg was disproved almost three decades ago. But how many Americans know this? Back in 1987, biophysicists at Johns Hopkins University discovered that sperm are much more worried about escaping organs than penetrating eggs. What they found is sperm are not propelled so much by the whipping of the tails, but more by the friction from the wiggling of their rounded heads. This matters because as sperm travel for days up to and through the fallopian tubes they are bouncing around and against other organs. If sperm’s whipping tails generated their energy, the sperm would bore through the other organs. The wiggling
rounded heads allows them to bounce off (for lack of a better term) those other organs and continue moving closer to the egg.