Accusations fly from the political right as conservatives try to abash Supreme Court Justice Nominee, New York district judge, Sonia Sotomayor. The criticism that she is an “activist judge” stem from a speech that she made in 2001 at the commencement ceremony of the University of California Law School. In her speech, Sotomayor said that “a wise Latina woman” would, more often than not, reach a “better conclusion” than that of a white male. She also said: “Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see…
I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.” While some Republican senators have claimed that they will offer her a fair confirmation hearing, on an online posting dominant republican figure Newt Gingrich has called her a “racist”.
In defense of Sotomayor, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that Sotomayor was “simply making the point that personal experiences are relevant to the process of judging, that your personal experiences have a tendency to make you more aware of certain facts in certain cases, that your experiences affect your understanding.”[i] The judgments that people arrive upon, even judgments that were approached “scientifically” always are seen through a filter that is colored by past experience, knowledge, and explanation. We are conditioned by culture to impetrate what is placed before us in certain ways.
This was much the case in anatomical studies conducted in the Renaissance. While it may seem silly, even beyond our current day comprehension to think of the human species not as two, but one sex, that was the dominant theory of the day. Scientific inquiry reported in Latin transcripts, compendia, and Arabic Intermediaries prior to and during the sixteenth centaury had failed to accurately include the female body in the scientific investigation of human anatomy. “There was still in the sixteenth centaury, as there had been in the classical antiquity, only one canonical body and that body was male.”[ii]
Between the years of 1493 and 1658, nine times out of fourteen, the subjects of dissection in books published on anatomy were male.[iii] When anatonomists finally began to include the feminine form with more frequency, the more they were convinced that the female body was simply another version of the male anatomy.[iv] 
With a scientific “truth” in mind, it seemed only natural that subsequent scientific investigations produced the same findings putting a physical body of knowledge into circulation amongst physicians and lay people. With time, “a whole world view makes the vagina look like a penis to a Renaissance observer.”[v]
In the Renaissance medical text Frabrica
, anatomical drawings of female genitalia are not wrong, “[their] proportions are roughly those of ‘accurate’ nineteenth-century engravings and illustrations from modern text, though these of course were not drawn to illustrate the isomorphism between male and female organs.”[vi] These drawings are advertisings for their own truth[vii] which function to further perpetuate the idea that females are inverted males.[viii] An artistic eye interprets the culturally constructed scientific reality, even in the case of scientific illustration.
No artist, judge, or scientist exists in a vacuum. 
Each individual comes to the table with different experiences, desires, and a culturally interpreted set of knowledge that will influence the representation of their findings. For example, in addition to being revered as a true Renaissance man, Michelangelo has been criticized for his inability to depict the female form. Any art historian will tell you that Michelangelo was a homosexual. His inconsistency in mastery is due to his personal disconnect in finding beauty in the female subject. If it was suggested to an art historian that Michelangelo’s inability to render the female form was not because he was a homosexual, but because he was indoctrinated in Renaissance one-sex theories the informant would be meet with opposition. Such suggestions are irrelevant to an individual who believes in something else. The art historian will most likely will never see the one-sex theory as the underlying cause of Michelangelo’s poor depiction of the female form because they know the truth, even if they are presented with sound “fact”.[ix] Simply enlightening someone to “truth” will always be met with opposition when they have been immersed in a different cultural reality.
The fact that female sex organs did not have their own set of vocabulary worked in similar ways that artistic representations of female organs did in perpetuating the one-sex theory. Modern terms of: vagina, uterus, or fallopian tubes have no Renaissance equivalent.[x] “The language simply did not exist, or need to exist, for distinguishing male and female organs.”[xi] With this in mind, it seems only natural that when Renaldus Columbus “discovered” the clitoris in 1559 “…he felt himself entitled to name what he found in nature: a female penis.”[xii] Culture develops new words only when the need arises. According to Renaissance science, there was no female reproductive anatomy, only a marked, lesser version of the male anatomy.
The scope of reality is heavily influenced by our exposure to individual bodies of knowledge. It may seems bizarre to current society that in a time that deeply impacted contemporary western views of the world, prominent theory could be so far removed from our current reality. This cycle of truth and falsehood of fact is bound to repeat over and over again. Every generation conceives of itself as modern, better informed and equipped than the one before. But what will our grandchildren think of our “modern” practices.
Patients who undergo chemotherapy are pumped so full of lethal drugs with the hope that the cancer will be killed before the patient. While in many cases this practice has seen positive results, will it accompany the now backwards practices of bloodletting or shock therapy in the future?
History has shown that despite our current notions of out societies empowerment by technology and human rights, in the not so distant future some practices and ideas are destined to become ignorant, abusive, or blind. Even in “unbiased” science we create or own reality through the use of language and visual presentation. 
Are we experiencing global warming or climate change?
While they both describe the same occurrence, choice of words or graphics carry very different meanings.
Can science exist free of Culture?
[i] Chuck Todd and Alex Johnson, “Obama Calls Criticism to Sotomayor ‘Nonsense’”, MSNBC, (May 29, 2009), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31004091//.
[ii] Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 63.
[iii] Laqueur, 74.
[iv] Laqueur, 70.
[v] Laqueur, 82.
[vi] Laqueur, 85.
[vii] Laqueur, 75.
[viii] Laqueur, 70.
[ix] Laqueur, 90.
[x] Laqueur, 96.
[xi] Laqueur, 97.
[xii] Laqueur, 64.
Images Cited:
http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/cranach/lucas_e/1/01adam_e.html
http://www.vimooz.com/blog/category/people/
http://hotfile.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/newt-in-2012/
http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/human-rights-cartoon-122-justice-after-genocide/
http://cyborgmommy.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_archive.html
http://reminiscence.wordpress.com/
http://www.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body/femalebodypages/penis.gif
http://www.lazydork.com/movies/bubbleboy.jpg
http://adventuresofbrookeandvan.blogspot.com/2008/12/italy-day-11-florence.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/21/chemotherapy-cancer-chemobrain?TB_iframe=true&height=650&width=850
http://www.stampedeblue.com/2008/10/31/651082/need-help-and-advice-for-a
http://www.sundaysenergy.org/catalog/1/poster-prints/global-warming
http://www.topnews.in/regions/united-nations?page=3
http://southasia.oneworld.net/ShowCategory?b_start:int=10&type=Article&id=66
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