Apparently some media outlets in the UK are up in arms about the fact that fertility clinics give porn mags to men who have to provide sperm samples.
Well, duh. They’re probably not going to get those lovely, sticky samples any other way. And the plain fact is, to get the sperm, the guy has to whack off. That in itself probably has the conservatives gripping their rosaries in horror.
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(I’d like to take a moment to point out that Senator Stephen Conroy – he who wants to install a mandatory internet filter on we Aussies – partook of IVF treatment a while back. Which means he probably had to whack off in one of those fertility clinics, most likely using porn. How did he escape with his morality and Christianity intact?)
What’s interesting about this particular anti-porn crusade is that they’re using all the usual arguments (e.g. it’s “addictive” and “adultery of the mind”) but in this case, the use of porn is very clearly necessary and important.
And if it’s necessary in fertility clinics and doesn’t create any scientifically recognised harm… it can easily be argued that using porn recreationally isn’t a problem either. So naturally, the anti-porn brigade now feels they need to cleanse the fertility clinics of the world to save the rest of us.
This article takes a different approach, providing examples from animal husbandry that shows that sperm are more fertile if the male is stimulated properly. I also liked the final paragraph:
All I’m saying is, when there is a reasonable evidence base that pornography helps people attain what for them are very important goals – ie not being childless – when they’re going through the very strange and unpleasant experience of masturbating alone in a clinic room, with everyone outside knowing what they’re doing and quite possibly some kind of queue, then research showing that pornography works is the sort of thing you might want to take into account, proportionately.
By the way, there’s some classic comments underneath that article:
“So they’re buying, what, about 6 magazines a year? And they have about 6 clinics in their area? With, what, I guess about 5-10 visitors a day? So that’s one magazine being used by around 1,500 men over a year? Ewwwww. That makes the one that got shared round my school sound positively hygienic.”
“Is that the Sun complaining about porn? The same Sun that’s been putting naked women on page 3 for decades now?”
“One quibble — don’t they use a cattle prod to the prostate with bulls? Why no mention of this?”
“But finally, bang on the question at hand, Yamamoto and colleagues in 2000 studied 19 men masturbating into a jar.
They’d need very large jar. Wouldn’t it have been simpler to have them use separate jars at different times?”“Makes me believe that somewhere out there there’s got to be a perfect configuration of erotic potential that would result in the ejaculation of pure rocket fuel.”