Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid (review)

In Sperm Counts, Lisa Jean Moore explores how Western culture has made sense of sperm, examining the abundant oppositional constructions of “man’s most precious fluid” as creator/destroyer, hero/villain, erotic/toxic, and powerful/disempowering. Using varied sources for information, Moore argues that cultural meanings of sperm reveal important information about men, masculinity, and related social issues.

Moore bases her analysis on fifteen years of research. She relays information obtained through working on the board of a sperm bank and from interviews with sex workers. She also analyzes the content of forensics and criminal texts, children’s facts-of-life books, pornographic film and the industry’s news review, crime drama television shows, and DNA sleuth sites. This impressive collection of information illustrates sperm’s social manifestations within family, law, science, media, and commercial sex arenas. In this investigation, Moore links cultural understandings of sperm to more complicated notions of manhood and masculinity. Throughout the book, she is reflexive in her role as a researcher and peppers her account with interesting personal stories. She employs a straight-forward writing style that makes the book accessible to both academic and popular audiences.

Moore begins her study of sperm by contextualizing it historically, tracing its evolution as a cellular identity able to be studied. She reviews the Western origin of sperm in religious and scientific discourse and relays how these accounts mirrored notions of masculinity. She describes how sperm-competition theories situated men as wholly responsible for sexual reproduction. She then examines how anthropomorphic and heroic depictions of sperm in children’s facts-of-life books carefully instill normative values in children. The book includes vivid illustrations that exemplify how these story lines indoctrinate stereotypical gender in children’s socialization.

The most fascinating chapter in Sperm Counts is Moore’s examination of sperm in the adult entertainment industry. Moore juxtaposes the glorification of sperm in pornography with the intense management of semen in prostitution. She interrogates the significance of the revered “money shot” in pornography and posits compelling explanations for the idolization of ejaculation. She considers how heterosexual men incorporate this cinematic feature into their erotic repertoires, arguing that the glamorization of ejaculation is a marketable feature that responds to cultural depictions of semen as dangerous, disgusting, and taboo and that men are assuaged through depictions of women who cherish it. Moore analyzes another, contrasting aspect of commercial sex by reviewing the ways sex workers treat semen as hazardous yet also employ creative strategies to avoid compromising their customers’ masculinity in the process. She then shifts her analysis to a different economic aspect of semen—the sperm-banking industry. Here, Moore argues that sperm banks reify hegemonic masculinity by imbuing disembodied sperm with desirable characteristics. She discusses how the selling of “technosemen” (107) to single-mothers-by-choice has inspired fatherhood rights groups to reassert men’s roles in the reproductive process—a contemporary response to a masculinity in crisis.

The final analysis examines traces of semen identified through DNA-testing technology. With sophisticated theoretical grounding, Moore demonstrates the ways sperm and the men who leak it are constructed negatively. She contrasts fictional representations of sperm on crime television dramas with real-life DNA sleuthing sites. She convincingly argues that the clinical authority of DNA testing laboratories functions to individualize and rank sperm, subjecting the male body to increased surveillance. Matching sperm to criminal or “bad” men serves to subordinate the masculinities of sexually dysfunctional men. Moore concludes that “sperm is at the same time more interesting, complicated, and specialized, and yet more accessible, programmable, deployable, and predictable than ever before” (147). Finally, she imagines future problems and possibilities with advances in sperm technology and how these might affect masculinity.

While the book is comprehensive in many ways, including Moore’s in-depth analyses of sperm within numerous cultural forms, some questions remain unanswered. Moore acknowledges that her account does not examine “what sperm means to men” (162). She presents a wealth of...