MRA: Sperm is superior to ovaries because sperms have to swim while the lazy ovaries just lie there eating bon bons

So the Men’s Rights activists on Reddit are having a big discussion of how unfair it is that male sexuality is demonized while female sexuality is glorified. (Try telling that to any girl who was labeled a “slut” in high school.)

The discussion has taken a strange turn, as many discussions among MRAs do.

Spencer goes on to point out that, genetically speaking, the sperm and the egg contribute equally to human offspring.

OP Ignatz returns to assure his MRA colleagues that he’s not trying to say the sperm is superior, but … *cue Ancient Aliens guy.*

As are, Ignatz thinks, men:

When Spencer points out once again that “conception is dependent on all parties equally,” Ignatz concedes that, and then basically un-concedes.

Ignatz then suggests that pregnancy is also passive.

The 17th century called, they want their “science” back.

As I was writing this post, I began to feel a sense of deja vu, as if I had written all of this before. And, it turns out, I sort of have — the last time I ran across a Reddit misogynist suggesting that ovaries are just lazy lumps compared with the highly athletic sperm.

‘Scuse me while while I cut and paste what I wrote them:

At the tail end of the 17th century, after the invention of microscopes allowed scientists to see those little swimming spermies for the first time, the smart set of the day decided that these vigorous little fellows just had to be the real source of life on earth.

I quoted biologist Robert D Martin writing in an article in Aeon,

[P]hilosophers and some students of reproduction [held that] the egg was merely a passive receptacle waiting for vigorous sperm to arrive to trigger development. And sperm? The head of each contained a tiny preformed human being – a homunculus, to be exact. The Dutch mathematician and physicist Nicolaas Hartsoeker, inventor of the screw-barrel microscope, drew his image of the homunculus when sperm became visible for the first time in 1695. He did not actually see a homunculus in the sperm head, Hartsoeker conceded at the time, but he convinced himself that it was there.

Luckily, we know better now. Or at least some of us do.

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