A post in another thread prompted this question. When you think back to the time you were being conceived (hopefully not often), do you envision yourself as the sperm or the egg? As a male, I would think of myself as a sperm? Do any of you ladies think of yourselves as the egg? Does anyone at all think of themselves as the egg? When responding, please include your gender.
As a kid, I always envisioned myself as a sperm amongst millions of my brothers and sisters all fighting and swimming vigorously to make our way to the egg first. I always joked that it was the only race I ever won: The human race. (Harr harr, sorry, I was young)
But now I know it’s all boloney. That was only half of me.
I’m a dude, FWIW.
Male. Sperm.
I tried thinking of myself as the egg, and it felt like I was being raped.
Male: Sperm
I don’t think it’s a male/female thing though. All the movies and jokes I’ve ever heard refer to the eventual person as the (fastest) sperm.
I wasn’t at that point, so neither. Male for what it’s worth.
It would never have occurred to me to consider I was one or the other. Even after you have posted the question I have to still say neither.
Same here. I’ve never had this fantasy and even now I don’t really see myself as either.
I just become aware as a fetus.
I dunno, this just smacks to me of the whole “life begins at conception” thing. I prefer to think of myself as a little of both.
My daughter, however, is mostly the sperm. She looks so much like her dad that I used to joke that he made her and I only carried her. She’s getting more of his attitude as she gets older, too. But she’s also beginning to look more like me.
Female. I do think of myself as the egg, actually.
I think it’s because of the Look Who’s Talking films.
I actually did think of that when I opened this. That was pretty much my first exposure to “I Get Around” (I saw the movie pretty young) so for a long time whenever I heard that song I thought of romping sperm.
Well, there’s all these millions of anonymous sperm. And then there’s this one egg, all specially prepared, waiting for this month’s pick of the guys. Sure, at the end you only get one sperm as well, but there’s a fajillion of these things. They’ve got no personality.
Egg. Female.
I think most people think of themselves as the sperm because it’s a fight. It feels like we won. The egg is much more passively selected.
Female. Sperm.
Egg. Male.
Biology was probably my worst subject in school, so I know I could have this all wrong, but I’ve always figured we’re in the egg waiting to be fertilized. That means I would have had the same mother no matter what happened, but not the same father no matter what happened, additional characteristics being fine-tuned based on who my father actually was. If a different man had gotten Mom preggers, I’d still have come out of her (assuming my particular egg was the one that still got fertilized) but looked somewhat different.
No?
Female here. I really don’t see either of them as “me”. I’ve taken biology classes and so when I think of an egg or sperm all I can think about is that it’s just a haploid cell that can’t do much of anything until it meets its other half.
I’ve always thought of myself as a drunken sperm boucing off the vaginal walls; on a mindless venture to who knows where when I somehow, unwittingly, crash into the egg and impregnate the poor woman.
No. You get, as far as we know, equal genetic input from both parents. Perfectly equal. The only greater influence your mother has is in the intrauterine environment. Now, that may not be a small influence, I grant you. The more we learn about the hormone washes and other influences in the womb, the more influential they seem to be, shaping everything from (perhaps) gender identity to (perhaps) sexual orientation to (perhaps) your taste in food. But still, if you consider two fraternal twins to be very different people, you must concede that their identical intrauterine environment did not make them the same person. And just to really bake your noodle, neither are identical twins who share an identical intrauterine environment! What makes them individuals, with sometimes very different tastes and personalities? Hell if we know. But we do know that you wouldn’t be you if another of your dad’s sperm had been first. You might have been a girl, for starters!
But, back to the OP. Generally, I think of myself as both and neither. But when I had my daughter (my second child) I was sitting there one day, watching her sleep, and I realized that she held ova in her ovaries already which came from an ovum inside me that existed, physically, in my mother’s womb. Fwuh. *That *was a humdinger of a realization. Suddenly I felt connected to the ages, no shit; this serpent of energy linking woman to woman and ovary to ovary, past, present and forevermore.
And they say science and mysticism are incompatible! Bah! 
Thanks. But would I still be I if a different man had fathered me? Would I still have come from that same egg, albeit with different tastes and inclinations? Does the sperm still largely act as the spark to animate what’s inside the egg, depositing half of the genetics along the way?
Or would I be a completely different I altogether, and those above who say “neither” are correct?
(Perhaps you can see why I did not do well in biology.)
I’m with you Sam. I never thought of it that way, but I completely agree with you. The egg is the person, waiting to be “jump started” by the sperm. Totally illogical, and yet I think you’re right!
The penetration by the first sperm triggers a cascade of events which do two things: they prevent another sperm from entering, and they cause the DNA packet from the sperm to move deeper into the ovum, where it joins with the DNA packet in the nucleus. From that point on, the DNA is you, unique (unless you are going to have an identical twin in a few days.). And that’s when that fully complete 2n set of chromosomes starts going to work. But as to which is “animating” which, it’s just a matter of how you describe it. I could just as easily (and accurately) say that the breach of the ovum wall triggers the ovum’s follicular cells to release ions which prevent another sperm from entering, and then the ovum draws the DNA packet of the sperm to its nucleus, where the chromosomes combine to for the newly unique you.
Both the sperm and the ovum are active, neither is required to animate the other, yet neither will live very long if fertilization doesn’t happen.
You would not be you. Unless you think you would have been you as a girl, or a red head or with one arm or a math genius. All of those are potential other kids your parents could have had with the combination of that month’s ovum and a different sperm, from your dad or someone else.
Of course, that also depends what you mean by I. If I is you apart from all your physical, mental and emotional characteristics, devoid of personality or preference, then you’re into metaphysical territory. I don’t know if your same soul, spirit, what have you, would have embodied that other person or not. But you wouldn’t be recognizable to anyone who knew the you of today.