By David Futrelle
I found this lovely example of sex miseducation in the BadWomensAnatomy subreddit, a repository of amazing anatomical nonsense collected from around the web. I couldn’t figure out where this came from (it may have originated from a now-deleted tweet from this Twitter account, but I’m not sure). But whatever its origin it’s pretty … original.
On top of the whole death and sadness thing, there’s the unexpected revelation that testes are eggs. Who knew? Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure that the runny stuff that comes out of the penis is not egg white, and should not be used to make omelettes.
LOL, however made that meme has been reading too much Aristotle. And only the parts in which he acts as a raging misogynist, apparently.
Virgin Mary:
Well, since they didn’t know about DNA, they wouldn’t expect each little homunculus to be identical to the father. There was some question about how the Manly-Male fathers produced wimpy little girls, and how it was sometimes apparent that children had traits from the female side of the family, but they just assumed the woman’s juices were somehow interfering with the vital essence of the little homunculi. It’s amazing how twisted your thinking has to get to justify your sexist predisposition.
That’s actually not a middle-ages theory, though, as it had to wait until after microscopes had discovered sperm to be current. (Unless I’m misremembering, which is a possibility, always.) In the middle ages, the peak of Western thought on the subject was that every woman contained every child she could ever have already formed, in miniature, in her ovaries. Inside those mini-children that were female were mini-ovaries containing even minier children, that contained ovaries and every smaller children in turn. You see, Eve was created with miniature versions of every human that ever would live stacked like russian dolls inside of increasingly tiny ovaries. Thus, future generations were revealed by this arrangement, metaphorically, as if a scroll was being unrolled and read one line at a time. The word for unrolling a scroll? “Evolution”. Which is why Darwin initially opposed using the word to describe his theory since it referred to a very silly old medieval idea that was quite the opposite of his idea!
God, of course, knew who a woman was going to sleep with beforehand, so all those Russian doll mini-children could be given traits from the appropriate men ahead of time. Predestination, for the win!
In Spanish and Portuguese we say “mis huevos” and “meus ovos”(equivalents to “my eggs”) to talk about “the balls”. Probably the author of the meme is Latin
@monica
Not sure if you’ll see this, but are you a member of SEA (Secular Eclectic Academic Homeschoolers) on FB? It’s a secular homeschool forum. Maybe you could find people in your area on there?
Wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess. Is GOD . . . the man?
I knew it!
@Brazilian Sigma:
In modern Hebrew we use “eggs” as a colloquial name for the testicles, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got that from Spanish, via Ladino.
Also, re homunculi: I highly recommend Ted Chiang’s story “72 Letters”, which is a sort of thriller that takes place in a world where the homunculus hypothesis is actually true (along with other aspects of medieval science and Kabbalah, it’s weird), and the kind of science and engineering that exists there. It’s incredible. But then, so are most if not all of Chiang’s stories.
(Quick correction: this is not actually medieval science, of course, but renaissance / early modern science. The rest still holds.)
Now I need to come up with a nickname for MY womb that rivals “Death and Sadness”!
I am in SEA! There are some a couple hours from us last time I checked but not exactly local, especially with high school aged kids. Luckily although school is a bit lonely the friends he still has from public school are super awesome and real understanding about his health problems
My womb is occasionally a place of pain and sadness, but only for like, a few days each month.
I’m trying to remember – wasn’t there one of the republicans that said that every time you took birth control, you wound up with a tiny dead fetus embeded in the womb? One of their more spectacular bits of un-science. Anyway, maybe that’s where the “death and sadness” bit comes from. Spectaculary mangled science from a politician, further mangled by a some plonker on Twitter.
That’s great. I wish mine had friends from school, but they’ve never been. My eldest’s issues kept him from going and one of those issues is severe social anxiety so….yeah. I need to help him make at least one friend this year. Somehow. My 13 year old wants to go to high school though, so I guess we’ll see what happens there.
Him and C have been friends since Kindergarten. I have Cs old nebulizer at my house; his mom has doses of all J’s migraine meds. They are as close as brothers, and makes sure everyone includes him and doesn’t forget him. Good luck for going back to high school
this description makes me hate dicks. so gross
@Some Guy
I would hope that these people don’t get all of their knowledge about women and their anatomy from M rated video games, but I just know there are men out there who think that there is a direct passageway from the vagina to the heart. (Not to mention that It Lives looks nothing like a real fetus)
I just…
MANatomy. That should be included in this.
@Penny Psmith:
Also, re homunculi: I highly recommend Ted Chiang’s story “72 Letters”, which is a sort of thriller that takes place in a world where the homunculus hypothesis is actually true (along with other aspects of medieval science and Kabbalah, it’s weird), and the kind of science and engineering that exists there. It’s incredible. But then, so are most if not all of Chiang’s stories.
Headed me off at the pass–and then there’s the matter of how the story’s reality subsequently shifts, snatching power to define and perpetuate humanity from those who would monopolize it.
What a fucking idiot. News flash: sperm alone can’t create life. If you ejaculate on the floor what you end up with is a puddle, not a human being. Ovum and sperm are both living cells in their own right, and you need both to create life. Just because the ovum doesn’t have a flagellum does not negate the fact that it’s a living cell. Jesus Christ, if any MRA asshole wants proof that men are not superior well just take a look at this moron right here.
HAHAHAHA joke’s on them! Pregnancy is pain and struggle and hell! No part of the female reproductive system is a party (other than the clitoris) and their tallywhackers don’t suddenly make my uterus into Xanadu, ya know? Though I’m 37 weeks pregnant with gestational diabetes, IBS and endometriosis so my POV is probably exceedingly negative at this point in time. But go on, God-men with the magic seed, let’s see you make babies with your abdominal cavity, I’ll wait.