In Shining Armor: Representations of Sperm in Children's Books  

When I was around 6 or 7, my mother sat me down on our "entertaining" sofa in the living room, not the ratty family-room couch. The sofa, a forbidden place for me and ordinarily covered with a slick and shiny plastic wrapper, was plush and inviting. My mother seemed giddy, smiling at me enthusiastically as we opened the pages of a new book. From How Babies Are Made (1968), I learned that "the sperm from the father's testicles are sent into the mother through his penis" and that "a sperm from your father joined with an egg from your mother."

My mother said I could read the book whenever I wanted and put it in a special place for me near the couch. It was a new treasure, and to this day I can still conjure up images of white eel-shaped sperm inside drawings of dogs, chickens, and humans."

Such children's books about human reproduction attempt to explain physiological processes to a young audience. The authors and illustrators rely on the fields of biology, anatomy, gynecology, and urology to label and narrate reproductive processes. They use terminology such as "sperm," "egg," "ovum," and "conception." The scientific basis of these books makes their messages seem objective and truthful. But behind this pretense of scientific objectivity lies a remarkable homogeneity of social messages.

Looking deeper into this tendency, I interpreted eighteen children's fact-of-life books. Read by millions of youngsters over the years, these books communicate a similar viewpoint: that life, from its very beginnings, consists of hierarchy, active male competition for passive females, and exclusively heterosexual, reproductive sexuality.

Swimming to Action: Images of Conception

For the purpose of my analysis, I selected books based on the following criteria: written in English; contained representation of sperm through narrative or visual images; was hard copy and text based; and was intended for children age 4-10.

While my sample was not exhaustive, I worked to incorporate a range of books that varied in terms of publication date (1968 to 2001), gender of author, type of illustration, and stated ideology (four were religious-based and fourteen were secular-based). I, alone, read and analyzed each book to ensure consistency in the analysis. All the books' sperm representations and narratives about sperm were assigned categories (for example, scientific, humorous, religious), and dimensions (for example anthropomorphized, non-human/speaking, non-speaking, personhood).

What I found is that like research scientists and health care providers who sanitize and sterilize their medical instruments, these authors scrub, wash, massage, and homogenize knowledge about human reproduction. Purposefully or not, they assume their readers are "perfect children" - naive, heterosexual, and gendered. Authors only depict sperm and eggs in relation to a baby. There are no deformed sperm even though misshapen sperm is prevalent in real life. There are no renegade sperm even though sperm is not solely released during penis-vagina, monogamous, reproductive, non-contracepting sex.

Indeed, the books may play a part in keeping alive the interpretation of sperm's centrality. The historical claims of sperm's necessary and even exclusive role in human reproduction have been well documented and analyzed. Many of the earliest sperm scientists (predominately men) envisioned semen as the key to reproduction; sperm embodied the pre-formed individual. These scientist marveled at the sperm cells' powerful agency and self-contained role in reproduction.

Similarly, many fact-of-life books portray sperm as powerful entities, as having consciousness and the ability to communicate with each other. They present sperm as happy and willing to do what they are programmed to do. At the same time, the sperm cells in these books have a purposeful goal and intentional action/agency. Other than primping and batting their eyes to attract the sperm, eggs typically are passive."

Some of the most salient examples of these images include sperm swimming toward the sunlight-like glow of an egg in Where do Babies Come From? A Series for the Christian Family; a jedi-knight appearing sperm speeding toward the death star in Mommy Laid an Egg: Or Where Do Babies Come From?; and sperm racing to a finish line, where an egg with a heart above her is waiting in First Comes Love: All About the Birds and the Bees, and Alligators, Possums and People, Too. Authors highlight the active agency of sperm by using exclamations, active verbs, and masculine terms: “swims,” “digs,” “wagging,” “wow,” and “yahoo,” versus passive voice and feminine terms for eggs: “waits,” “travels,” “beautiful,” and “is released.”

In addition to emphasizing that sperm feel and act purposefully, many of the authors stress that only one sperm gets to fertilize the egg. This implies that not all sperm are created equal. Cartoon illustrations show smiling, competitive, or befuddled sperm talking to one another and presumably the audience. These sperm evaluate themselves and others based on their ability to follow directions, swim quickly, navigate the difficult terrain, and ultimately, merge with the egg. The authors represent naturalized hierarchies among men by naturalizing competitions based on physical strength, endurance, and speed. They present competition as the natural—and adaptive—way to figure out hierarchies among boys and men.

Even those authors who do not give their sperm human characteristics highlight the superiority of the sperm that is able to swim and fertilize the egg; out of the millions of sperm that exist, the one that actually joins with the egg is the most important. Moreover, secular books suggest that sperm have a sense of entitlement, unfairness, and empowerment. Almost universally, the authors depict sperm as the bringer of life, and neglect to mention that sperm has also been construed as the bringer of death.

Children are socialized according to existing norms, values, and taboos through the stories we tell them. Since we live in a male-dominated, capitalistic culture, with a family system that favors heterosexual relationships, unsurprisingly, our cultural productions—such as children’s books—depict male domination, competition, and heterosexuality as normal and correct.

Perhaps “May the best sperm win” is not the message we should be giving to children.

*Lisa Jean Moore, Ph.D., MPH, is an associate professor in sociology at The Graduate School and The College of Staten Island/CUNY. The co-author of Gender and the Social Construction of Illness ( Altamira), she is currently completing Sperm Tales (Routledge). A more in-depth version of this article is available on her website: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/~sasw/moore.htm