I Tried to Become A Professional Sperm Donor

Even in the midst of a quality sperm shortage, swimmers aren’t worth much

When I was between gigs not that long ago, a friend joked that I should donate my sperm. I assumed this idea to be about as successful as the joke about it was — I didn’t laugh — but a continued lack of career opportunities, the Illinois state budget crisis and a savage curiosity led me to get screened for potential donation. My friend’s joke also evoked an image of abundant progeny, with countless Mini Me’s running through the world, doing countless Mini Me things — a thought that, in retrospect, stresses me out so much that I may begin to wear a condom even when I pee.

This, obviously, isn’t a lot of money. So little, in fact, that one can quickly conclude that it isn’t a vocational path. And not only does sperm donation not pay well, but it also requires a thankless monastic streak most virile males wouldn’t care to accept. Or better put, a lot of the semen that exits men isn’t concentrated enough to create human life, so donors are typically required to wait long periods of time between ejaculations to ensure the richness of their jism — 24 hours at baseline, though for some a 36-to 48-hour wait is necessary. “Most of our donors aren’t in relationships,” Joanne told me, not without laughter.

Though I wasn’t in one myself at the time, I was sexually active here and there, but not exactly constantly, amounting to a frequency of bedroom time that was sparse enough to make sperm donation logistically feasible, but only in a vacuum; spontaneity and various emotional variables were at play in these unpredictable activities, which, though not life-defining, were more important to me than anything the sperm bank had to offer.

This began to crystallize for me as I filled out a thick packet of pre-cum paperwork. These pages involved my recent drug history, which involved more drinking than drugging; my exercise habits, a paltry weekly basketball game and daily bike usage; my allergies (none) and/or medical conditions — a mild scoliosis that, as I age, appears to increase in consequence, though I’m medically uninsured and can’t afford to visit a professional to confirm my speculation. (In truth, a large part of my motivation to visit the sperm bank was the hope that I might get a free medical consultation in the screening process, though I never did.) I also was required to fill out my educational and vocational history — a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree, a bunch of writing bylines and a glut of adjunct professorial experience.

All of this — and more — to be considered for the role of having to wait longer between sexual releases. Such waiting between ejaculations can hardly be framed as akin to the pleasurable act of “edging” to make cumming more enjoyable. Something you couldn’t do during the act either. In fact, at the bank, I was instructed, by a slew of women, to provide my sample in a quarantined room of the building’s basement.

Despite the pornographic DVDs stacked loosely next to the TV in this room, the berber carpeting, the leather couch with a ripped cushion, wall art that looked straight from Target’s “serene moods” section and a pile of Playboys with a mention of Father John Misty on the cover of the top issue, this room wasn’t a sexually appealing space. I was instructed, to boot, to deposit my life goo into a plastic jar about an inch wide, a target much more precise than I’m used to in the field of autonomous orgasm. The methodology of men dealing with their self-created seed is an under-reported, kaleidoscopic zone of humanity, but I’m confident that no one has ever chosen to discard of theirs in this way unless they had to.

When I transcended the arguably anti-sex vibe of the room for long enough to do my job, independently of any of the proffered materials thank you, I put a lid on the jar and put the jar in a brown paper bag. Then, I washed my hands multiple times. I walked upstairs into the fluorescent-lit medical facility and handed the bag of my sex fluid to a team of nurses, an exchange I thought would make for Seinfeldian awkwardness, but which the nurses appeared quite familiar with.

Next, Joanne led me out of the facility, to a house on the other side of the bank’s parking lot. There was a big backyard. This house, she explained to me, was also owned by the Midwest Sperm Bank. It, she said, was where “the guys” typically went once they got signed into the program and acclimated. The room that I’d just provided my sample in — the room that strove in vain to be chill — was merely there as a preliminary fertility screening zone. I hadn’t earned the privilege of masturbating in the real deposit room.

The satellite house also contained some office space on the first floor where two women managed the bank’s finances, next to a small incubator. While I stood there with three women asking me which famous person I looked like — this question, they said, was part of an important census given to accepted donors — one of “the guys” walked up from the basement and quietly dropped a cup into the incubator before leaving without saying a word.

No, the overwhelming majority of hetero recipients are looking for a solution to male infertility.

These findings point us to yet another chapter in the saga of men projecting their problems onto women. Couples with reproductive struggles have, historically, operated much too often with the assumption of a defective womb, sometimes calling for invasive surgery to correct ostensible issues with female reproductive organs. Female eggs, it should be noted, are a lot more expensive than even a huge amount of potent semen, always netting their donors a few thousand dollars at minimum — it’s also, of course, much more painful to extract an egg from a body than it is to extract a seed. Or more bluntly, no one has ever removed an egg from their body recreationally.

There are no significant conclusions to be drawn from the report, however, regarding why the decline in sperm concentration is happening. Stress and obesity (and thus, according to the law of syllogism, capitalism, the system that seeks profits from the problems it creates) are cited in the study as possible causes for the drop-off in sperm concentration, but no hard bottom line is stated. (When I mentioned this data to my uncle, he blamed cell phone radiation.)

That said, the decrease in fertility isn’t large enough — yet — to cause an actual macro-fertility crisis. People who want to make babies still generally can. If current trends hold, though, couples waiting longer to procreate — so that they can do so with a viable monetary cushion amidst the landscape of aforementioned capitalism — will find it more and more difficult. As such, they will rely more and more on sperm banks to solve their fertility challenges. But if even the sperm banks, flocked to by financially desperate but progressively impotent men, are running low on generative dick tadpoles, one can easily imagine a chaotic Mad Max-like society, in which tribal warfare isn’t over rare water or bullets, but the little useful jizz that’s left.

Upon reviewing this list, I felt an inexplicable need to be included amongst these mostly anonymous men. Even if becoming a donor was a raw deal I wasn’t going to take, I wanted to have the option to belong with them — the Polish firefighter who likes watersports; the Black-Indian soccer and basketball coach; the artist/bartender with an interest in sculpting; the German retail manager who fixes cars for fun. Who could I possibly be, what could my worth be, if I weren’t at least as fertile as the executive level recruiter, a Methodist, who likes rock climbing and jiu-jitsu?

Since the few pages of paperwork I had filled out — the first of more than 40 I’d need to complete, if I ended up submitting myself to the milk farm — asked me to-the-minute when my last ejaculation had been, I was nervous to get my results. I’m a fan of orgasms, both the indie and collaborative kind, and sometimes even rely on them nightly as an aid to my chronic sleeping difficulty. My trip to the bank was early in the morning, however; therefore, it had been less than 12 hours since my last ejaculation.

That’s why I figured it was unlikely that my sample would come out the other end of the incubator with the sperm motility (a fancy word for “speed of swimming motion”) that Joanne needed to see from it. But the dumbest part of my socialization desired a positive reading anyway. I wanted my sample to be so virile that all of my ejaculant, however stressed, strained and pressure-cooked, was robust enough to spur new life.

To be incredibly fertile is obviously not even practical — I would like to be in a zero-risk situation, pregnancy-wise, every time I have sex until I (maybe) decide to have a child. Having less fertile semen is compatible with this vision. But I was socialized within a strain of Irish Catholicism that’s granted me in excess of 30 cousins and 24 aunts and uncles. There’s programming that, no matter how much I disagree with it, is in me. Dispersing my seed as much as possible, even if in defiance of overpopulation, is what I was taught a man is to do. No fooling, as a teenager I was once told by a man in my family — who wasn’t my father, to be clear — to “plant a lot of seeds.”

As it turned out, I learned that I may have to plant more than one, if I ever choose to be a father. Joanne left me a voicemail, delivering the message of my unusable sample in a gentle it-happens-to-lots-of-guys tone. She said I should consider returning with more time between sperm ejections, but only if I really wanted to. Though I had no nearing want to create children, I did want badly enough to know whether I could, and decided to hold off on ejaculation for a long weekend before returning the next Monday. This process was a bit painful, and it affected the way I interacted with at least one person of the opposite sex, giving me a small glimpse into the unrewarding frustrations of a dedicated donor.

When I returned, re-provided and left the bank, I got a call from Joanne the following evening. My sample, this time, was usable. She laughed somewhat gleefully when she noted how long (72 hours) I’d waited between ejaculations to provide the new sample. It’s likely that a smaller window would’ve done, but “most of our guys can’t wait very long,” she said. She reminded me that most of them aren’t in relationships, either. This again caused her to laugh.

I had stressed myself to prove that I could join them, and that I could have orgasms that might matter in the evolutionary sense. But Joanne’s laughter, more than anything, delivered to me the message of how far apart man’s sense of his orgasm’s import is from its increasingly inert reality.

John Wilmes is a writer based in Chicago. This is his first piece for MEL.

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