Mia of the interesting and, I think, fairly new Sexpertise website addresses a fascinating question: should vegetarians swallow semen?

...semen is a product of an animal (like an egg), but not the flesh of an animal (like meat) and not a substance whose production causes cruelty to animals (unlike the miserable dairy cows in PETA commercials, I have a feeling your semen was harvested with your enthusiastic consent). It contains glandular fluid and single cells, also known as sperm. Depending on your girlfriend’s reasons for being vegetarian, it is possible that she could logically conclude that semen is off-limits. Or, maybe she just doesn’t like it.

Read the quote in context here.

The question was asked by a young man who seems to be clear that some people don’t like to swallow, and doesn’t mind that his partner doesn’t swallow his. He’s just intrigued by the reason.

I know I’m hopelessly out of date on the, er, ins and outs of vegetarianism but in addition to the ethical-vegetarian reasons Mia reminds us of there are, among other major schools of though, health-minded vegetarians who are wary of eating animals because, being higher on the food chain, they can carry higher loads of accumulated metals and other toxins plus they can be exposed to artificial hormones, environmental hormone precursors, and anti-biotics.

In other words she could be declining to swallow not so much because she’s a vegetarian per se but because he, like pretty much every other human being on the planet any more, isn’t organic.

Something to think about.

Lest this sound silly or esoteric (ok, worrying that a partner’s semen isn’t vegetarian/organic is least a little silly) there’s considerable concern about metals and other toxins in breast milk.

Also lest the question sound silly Mia wisely closes on a serious note:

Since it doesn’t sound as if the actual act of swallowing is a big deal to you, I would suggest getting yourself out of this semantic black hole. Communicate to your girlfriend that you understand and respect her right to decide what goes into her body, whether you agree with her rationale or not. I don’t know if your girlfriend is making excuses, as you say, but if for some reason she feels that simply saying she doesn’t like swallowing isn’t good enough, then you have a communication problem. You can remedy this by showing her that you appreciate her right to make her own choices in the bedroom, and that you care about her enjoyment and comfort more than you care about this disagreement.

Sound advice in all events.

Teresa Strasser of MomLogic says

If you’re thinking about conceiving, or certainly if you are already pregnant, there is some pretty convincing evidence that instead of just swallowing, say, folic acid, you might want to swallow something else.

Let me be delicate about this, if I can.

As far as I can tell, not only should you be having lots of oral sex with the father of your baby — even up to a year before conceiving — you should also make sure to ingest his seminal fluid. Listen to what I’m telling you: the international medical community is giving you an Rx for oral. Sure, they say frequent intercourse is good, too, but oral is better. So, if you care about having a healthy baby and not potentially unleashing what scientists call a “destructive attack on the foreign tissues” of your fetus, if you want to avoid immunological disorders during pregnancy, and I’m sure you do, get to work. Or to pleasure, depending on how you feel about it.

Basically, the research says you need to be able to tolerate your baby’s foreign, paternal DNA; in other words, you need to get your body accustomed to the stuff, need to cozy up to some daddy double helix for a while so your body doesn’t reject it.

She said it here.

Further down in the same post, though, Dr. Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, also of MomLogic says that’s true if and only if a single, very small study by a non-specialist counts as “the international medical community.”

Maybe I have not been attending grand rounds enough and am out of date — but I NEVER learned about this benefit of oral sex in medical school or residency, or at any of those fancy continuing medical education conferences!

So while my search was far from exhaustive, I checked out a few of the wiki sources named in Teresa’s blog. The one academic paper that seems to support this supposed “immune maladaption theory of preeclampsia” is in fact published in one of our most esteemed peer-reviewed journals, but it is a small study and, no offense, was authored by a resident … and the bigger, better controlled study with more than 2,000 subjects published in another peer-reviewed journal concludes otherwise. So, if you like, swallow, and if you do not … please do whatever it is that you do with undesired contents of the oral cavity

Care to guess which way most of the comments on the post go? Suddenly being skeptical about a very dubious study makes Gilbert-Lenz a prude? Or “a feminist,” as if that was a bad thing?

I think fellatio feels very nice, and I agree that it’s lovely when a partner swallows. I also think there’s no, zero, none chance the study demonstrates that “gastrointestinal absorption of semen” is the best way to establish immunological tolerance. Or anything of the sort.

That’s a good thing, too. Because from the look of it the cluster of related papers all say the immunological effect seems to be related to substances in semen, not sperm. Which would suggest another, even more reliable way to avoid preeclampsia would be to altogether avoid contact with semen, period. So.

Quick question for anyone hoping Dr. Gilberg-Lenz is a spoilsport: would you be as credulous about a similarly small, obscure study claiming preeclampsia could be avoided through total lifetime abstinence except specifically for procreation? No? Good call.

I mean, it sounds like a good call. She says clearly, if a bit medically, “so, if you like, swallow, and if you do not … please do whatever it is that you do with undesired contents of the oral cavity.” Do it if you already like to, otherwise don’t force yourself is feminist advice, sure, but it’s pretty good advice period.

For instance what if an “international medical community” of one claimed that “gastrointestinal absorption of semen” was the best way for men to avoid prostate cancer instead? How many straight-oriented men do you think would start swallowing semen? Even if their wives emailed them the links? Even if their wives reminded them that prostate cancer leads all other forms in men? Are those crickets chirping? I thought so.

If you look at this (or, obviously any other sex-related recommendation) from an it-could-happen-to-me perspective “swallow if you want to but don’t let anyone force you if you don’t” starts sounding pretty good for everybody. Feminism’s good for everybody.

—-

Finally, despite admonitions about not looking gift horses in the mouth and all I think it would be weird to find out one’s partner’s suddenly interest in oral sex turned out to be about her enjoyment, or her interest in my enjoyment, but because she was thinking about its medicinal properties.

I mean, yeah, inside the fantasyland where “men just need a place to have sex, women need a reason“ womanly/maternal/feminine concern for health is great “leverage” for sex. But… first of all eww, and second of all I’m really, really tired of the Two Rules of Desire where men are incapable of being desired, and women of desiring them… and where it’s inconceivable that a man might receive a blowjob because a woman wanted to give him one.

Update:

Me? As much fun as it is for you when someone lovingly kisses his way down your body… from your lips to your neck to your shoulders and breasts… gingerly across your belly and then down further, lingering longer and longer while your eyelids flutter and your breath quickens and… Ahem, where was I? Oh yeah, as much fun as it might be for you, one of the pleasures of eating you for your partner is that he gets to be the reason for your… well… flutters and sighs. And that he enjoys the way you look, the way you taste, the way you feel against and in his mouth… the way her legs flex… and quiver… rise… and squeeze or thump his shoulders.

And so much as I enjoy the same trail of kisses down to my naughty bits, and don’t notice my curled-toenail marks further kisses bring, it’s hard to believe the common belief that being the source of my murmers and sighs and shortened breath might not be just as enjoyable for a partner… or that she wouldn’t enjoy the way I look, the way I taste, the way I feel against and in her mouth, and the way my legs stretch out… the way my muscles tense… the way my hips roll and surge up against palms of her hands.

I mean… in the broadest terms could one gender really get less enjoyment from that than another? Could it be that the only motivation for one might be it’s possible medicinal value?

Ok, this isn’t really a post about semiotics of semen, at least not in Saussure’s sense of signs deconstructed into signifier and signified. Although I’m sure if I’d just taken that dang course back in 1984 or so, instead of just backyard seminaring with a bunch of roommates who did, I’d be able to take a pretty good crack at the real thing.

Instead I just liked the alliteration in “semiotics of semen.” :-)

But seriously. I keep getting reminded of semen because any time I try to look at pretty much any kind of pornography involving heterosexuality then sooner or later semen’s going to show up. Which people have been remarking upon for going on two decades now.

Not that semen isn’t a perfectly laudable substance but the way it’s presented in pornography is kind of odd. I mean, for one thing it is presented. Placed. Precipitously. In plain sight. (If I may again alliterate.) And that’s the thing. Most of the time if you’re having sex with someone you don’t put semen where everyone can see it because it doesn’t feel as nice.

You know what feels really, really nice? To be locked in a passionate embrace with your partner, sometimes after barely enough time to rip each other’s clothes just loose enough, but preferably after what at least seems like hours of increasingly steamy, turgid, creamy, dreamy kisses and caresses, till your partner’s breath is hot and short against your cheek or ear and at least one of her hands is locked in your hair, pulling your face into the crook of her neck where you’ve been ravishing her throat with lips and tongue and teeth, your own hands less coordinated, yes, but still purposefully able to ruck her hem up to her hips, to crook them under her knees and pull them up and wide somewhere between your hips and her shoulders (a process that she’s perfectly capable of, of course, but you might both enjoy), and then perhaps with her hand, perhaps with yours, she glides your cock deep inside her not in one quick gulp but in sweet, increasingly slickery, increasingly deep sips. And then as your hips surge down into her and hers rise up to meet yours, and you feel her aiming her blood-hard clitoris to bump, bump, bump against your pubis, and her ankles cross against your lower back with one heel in the cleft of your ass pulling you tight, tight into her and the base of your rocks and grinds against her and her inner rings of muscle milk, milk, milk the length of your cock, and as both your pants break down into near-confused oh, oh, oh’s and she bites down hard on the muscles high above your collarbone and from your belly to the cheeks of your ass you feel deep wrenching, clenching squeezing of familiar but no less mysterious for it muscles pumping once, twice, in rhythms older than our species before you first collapse against each other, breath slower but far, far deeper, confused fingers unclenching as self-consciously as they earlier had clenched unconsciously, aftershock quivers against your bellies, murmured mmm’s, and woah’s and the sort of solemnity-breaking giggles that follow before one or the other of you leaps or reaches for a cloth (if there’s upholstery to be rescued) or maybe just wet, splishy wiggles (if there’s still room for two somewhere else on the bed.)

That? That feels great! Really great! As you can imagine. As you might not even need to imagine because, after all, that’s so often how things work out.

Or work out in life…

...but not in porn.

In porn, if you’re a man, you can get maybe to where your partner begins to dip and slip you inside, to where you and your partner begin to badminton your cock back and forth between you, until you and… who knows… maybe even she is on the verge of something warm and close and wet and wonderful happening and… in porn…

you stop! And then, in porn, you remove yourself from where you were and, usually, wait while the camera zooms and refocuses before… using, usually, your own hands you ejaculate. A “money shot,” to be sure, but an orgasm? Meh… and while the camera’s attention is elsewhere your face can reflect your true feelings your partner, her face usually very close to the camera, must continue looking pleased, even eager, for… however long it takes you to do by hand what you’d almost surely rather do some… any... other way.

Yes, indeed one might wonder why, and many, including me, have speculated endlessly.

Here’s a new possibility I hadn’t considered: most hetero porn and quite a lot of gay and/or lesbian porn is made for men, right? And mostly what men do with it is watch while they masturbate, right?

Which brings up an interesting bridge for men between masturbation and porn.

There’s certainly a story about (heterosexual) men’s distaste for looking at other men’s cocks but, unlike women who ordinarily don’t see their own vulvas, or even the vulvas of other women, at at least some points in their lives most men, certainly most American men, see cocks in abundance in lockerrooms if nowhere else and, of course, whenever they masturbate or even pee, see their own cocks, soft and hard, easily a dozen times a day. And when we masturbate, and when we ejaculate, we very often see it spring forth from our bodies whether in dribbles or jets.

And so, perhaps contrary to expectation, I think maybe the appeal of the “money shot” for porn viewers isn’t so much a demonstration that it’s “the real thing” but that one sees in images the reminder, the cue, the proxy for their own masturbation which, being masturbation, must inevitably fall without rather than within.

Maybe so. Or maybe no.

What I do know, though, is that being aware of the agency of actors in porn no less, obviously, than the actresses, is that however much such aerial ejaculations might encourage, or inspire, or comfort, or (if my thesis is mistaken) merely entertain the average customer the leave something to be desired for the actors themselves and thus only distract me with how little I’d like to do that.

Again that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy masturbating for a partner, of showing her even as, perhaps, she showed me. And if instead it’s she who’s plying me with hands or mouth or other parts of herself then it’s obviously her prerogative to direct my expression wherever she will. But neither of those special circumstances carry with them the relentless inevitability of male orgasm ejaculation semen production in porn.