NOBODY SAID YOU COULDN’T

NOBODY SAID YOU COULDN’T

Patriarchy , unspoken expectations and what it actually means to be a woman who wants things.

Some few days ago I read a paper, it was interesting to say the least. It was a paper written by Emily Martin in 1991 and it was titled the Egg and the Sperm. It was a 16 paged paper and she set out to question the terminologies that scientists were using to refer to the whole process of fertilisation. At first she references several papers that were written on the process of fertilisation. In a nutshell, fertilisation is the process that occurs when the sperm( from the male) and the ovum which is the egg ( from the female) fuse. In that whole process, the sperm was made to have a mission of moving through the female tract in quest of the ovum and is the active member and while the egg is described as the large passive damsel in distress waiting for the sperm to come and find it. Does that sound familiar? YES, it does, the sperm is hinted as masculine while the egg as feminine. Now, this was debunked a few years later whereby it was found out that the sperm doesn’t thrust forward but mostly back and forth and doesn’t have the penetrative power to burrow through the egg. The outer layer of the ovum was described to contain an adhesive molecule that will bind to the sperm and thereby making it less hard for the sperm to burrow the ovum. Now here comes the most interesting thing, the ovum moved from being passive to now being the one that ‘captures’ the sperm and was now referred to being aggressive in the papers. Interesting use of language don’t you think? It is not wrong for us to equate the sperm to the male and the ovum to the females. Language, specifically the scientific language is/was being used to set a system up. The egg being referred to as passive, the sperm the active, then the egg being the one that aggressively captures the sperm. Why is it so hard to describe a process like fertilisation, something that occurs mutually in both systems as that? Why does it have to be that one gender has the upper hand while the other one being made out to be the passive partner in all this? If you have noticed, the biology did change, but the lens through which the egg was viewed didn’t. If it wasn’t being passive it was aggressive. Scientists were describing an objective process like fertilisation using bias. No matter how much the research supported that the egg was an active contributor to the process it was never referred to as that, when activeness of the egg came to light, the playing ground was changed, it was now referred to as being aggressive and capturing the sperm. Mind you, correct term is bind, the outer layer of the ovum had a molecule that the sperm could recognise and bind to but what was described was far beyond that. That language created bias and it was not accidental at all, that was patriarchy being communicated via science.

I had a dilemma some few months back and I was interested in pursuing surgery as my residency program but there was something that was putting me off, I couldn’t explain what it was until I voiced it out. I told my mom that I wanted to pursue surgery. She asked me how long it would take and I told her it was a minimum of 6 years depending on the program that I would be interested in. There was a silence, and it was a really uncomfortable one.

I was stuck filling in the silence with conversations of how I was just considering it, I might not even do it or that I might change my mind once I graduate. Well I finally know what that silence was. The unspoken expectation that I shouldn’t venture into academics so much that I miss out on what life holds for me. Care to ask what else life held for me apparently , marriage and a family of my own. Don’t get me wrong, I want that for myself but I don’t want it at the expense of my ambition. Nobody told me I couldn’t go to school and pursue whatever higher degrees that I need, I wasn’t raised in a society and a community that was loud about women being homemakers or choosing to raise families over their education and maybe that was the problem. It was always silent and worse EXPECTATIONS. I was expected to go to school, study, be the best as long as it didn’t come between my natural designated role as a woman. Surgery is too long, it is too busy. They were all responding as if it was common sense that I shouldn’t be pursuing something that long.

The other thing that has been mind boggling is telling my family that I don’t see myself being a full stay at home wife. I genuinely never even used to know why it was a conversation or why men would be looking for traditional wives, what did they mean by traditional wives? Why is that even a thing? By traditional women, what do they imply? Women who fit a mould that was NEVER announced but was always quietly an expectation? When a woman chooses to work after marriage why does it generate conversation or even worse a debate? There is an expectation that women should get married and stay at home and when a woman chooses not to do that, she is made to be an outlier, and nobody can articulate why she is an outlier because deep down the expectation was never spoken aloud.

Let’s actually talk about why a man choosing NOT to be a provider is equally shocking. Both reveal the same system that has been operating in both directions.

The scientists didn’t hate the egg, they were describing it in a way that they thought was objective. Nobody hates my ambition of being a surgeon, nobody is telling me I cannot do it because of A or B. Why is there even an outrage when a woman decides that she wants to work after marriage? It is because deep down there is an expectation that I shouldn’t be too ambitious especially if it is going to interfere with my designated role as a woman. Expectations only become visible when someone deviates from them and that is the patriarchy, the real enemy, the set expectations that have been there since time immemorial.

In today’s world misogyny has no place yet there is this suffocating feeling of being a woman with ambitions. Nobody is telling me that I shouldn’t be ambitious but the expectation that I shouldn’t be is the loudest. Patriarchy doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t need to. It operates through silences, through common sense, through the questions people ask and the ones they don’t. The egg was never just passive. I was never just expected to step aside. But something said otherwise, the same thing that turns out builds the world we live in.