Victimization of Women in a Male Dominated and Male Defined World :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

The brutality and ruthless insidiousness of the male dominated scientific regime can be seen in stark silhouette when one comes to understand how even theories constructed for no purpose other than to entrench male privilege and power fall victim to the ram-rod assault of Linear Progress. For example, the belief that the entire human organism in miniature form -- the homunculus -- was contained in the spermatozoa, was predicated on the assumption that the male is normative and active -- ejaculating its will and its likeness out into a passive female world. The female, in this view, served only as a nutritive field -- a convenient cuntainer in which the male-generated miniature man could grow. In some versions of the story, the father's right testicle was thought to produce male offspring, while the left [1] testicle was thought to suffer from insufficient blood flow, resulting in defective spermatozoa, producing a substandard, or female homunculus. The fact that the scientific perspective [2] has shifted on the subject of human reproduction in no way exonerates science from its male bias. The entire scientific enterprise is at its root an expression of the universal male lust to apprehend and gain control over external reality. The masculine need to project maleness ever further out into the world hints at the motivations behind the overthrow of the homunculus as the active instrument of procreation: plausible deniability. By seeming to involve the woman as an "equal participant" and a contributor of substance to the procreative process, the universal Male Agendum (rape) can be masked behind the veil of necessary female complicity. By this diabolical shift away from unabashed male aggressiveness, toward the illusion of sexual equality, through the subterfuge of sperm-meets-egg, Western, maledominated Science has simultaneously placated women and given men a license to rape. Given the notion that women are equal participants in the programme of heterosexual intercourse, men are free to absolve themselves of full culpability. Further, by giving women a role in the generative process that is seen (presumably at least by the men who propound the sperm-meets-egg theory) to be more invested than being merely fertile soil for sowing by men, Science has preempted the deconstruction of homunculus theory and the development of feminist and wymynyst counterparts. penelope ann has suggested the beginnings of just such a theory in chapter 7 of her book Fixing Our Fathers [3]. ann has postulated the honuncula as the mostly-formed, diminutive proto-woman that exists within the so-called ovum.