The thing that I found most interesting about the readings was that all the scientific references about male and female sexuality and gender are things that I have been taught but had never thought of in that way until I read these articles. In Lynne Segal's Body Matters: Cultural Inscriptions, she talks about the passive verses active description of the masculinity and femininity even in the description of the reproductive organs. It didn't surprise me that the majority of descriptions about males show them as active, powerful and more aggressive because that's something that is found all over society. I did however find it surprising that these same descriptions can be found in science. In every biology and sexual education class I've been in, I've never heard a description other than the sperm swimming and fighting through the hostile environment to find the floating egg. The more I thought about the way that reproduction was taught, the more examples of this I found. It had never even crossed my mind that it might not be this way and that it's simply the wording that was chosen. We've become so accustomed to hearing these types of descriptions that one would never think twice about them unless it was brought to their attention. The fact that they’re “science” makes people even less likely to question the information and wording.
Similarly, in the Schiebinger article, Taxonomy For Human Beings, a lot of time is spent discussing and breaking down the word "mammal" and figuring out why it was chosen as factor that ties humans with animals. Until this reading I never would have thought that there was a connotation either positive or negative connected with the classification Mammalia. The more I continue to think about it, the stranger it seems that a trait (nursing young) characteristic to such a limited number of the population (some adult females) would be the preferred factor in description. These articles effectively introduce the reader to a new idea, a new way of looking at things that isn't often considered.