THE SEMEN CURE

Tana Dineen, July 1,2002

"Living better pharmaceutically" has become the subliminal slogan of our designer-drugged society. Once there was Valium, the pill popped more often than aspirin by disenchanted women of the 1970's. It went quickly out of fashion as our chemical conjurers brought out newer, better varieties of anti-depressant fix-alls, with names like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil.

These were already accounting for over 10% of prescriptions when along came "Little Blue" Viagra, the pill that could make men stand erect while lying down - bringing satisfaction and pleasure to men and women alike.

What could be next?

Well, some sex researchers, it seems, might be inspiring an entirely new concept in psychopharmaceutical products, one that involves packaging semen. That's right the telltale evidence of coitus, the substance that almost brought Clinton to his political knees (some says to eye-level with Monica), that same stuff which Onan spilled leading to the Catholic ban on contraception.

While prescription semen is not yet available at the local drug store, it may not be as far fetched as it sounds. If taken seriously, research presented in the June issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, the Official Publication of the International Academy of Sex Research, could lead to the promotion of some semen based remedy. Psychologist, Gordon Gallup Jr. and his two colleagues at State University of New York at Albany, New York are getting a lot of attention these days after reporting that this male ejaculate may hold the cure for women's blues.

To arrive at this conclusion, these researchers canvassed 293 college women, asking them to rate their mood using a depression scale and to provide some intimate details about their sex lives. Specifically, they had to tell whether they had had sexual intercourse recently and if so, whether they had used a condom or had had sex au naturel, so to speak, thereby exposing themselves to semen.
What they found was that those women most exposed to semen because their partners never used condoms scored an average of 8 points out of a possible total of 63 while those who always used them scored 11.3 and women who weren't having sex at all scored 13.5.

The researchers and, thus far, everyone reporting on their findings have ignored the fact that none of these scores is high enough to justify talking about anybody, even those entirely semen deprived, as being depressed. (Any score under 20 points is too low to suggest even moderate depression).

They just go on as if the depression scores mean something, pointing out that the longer the period of time since intercourse, the more "depressed" the rubberized women became and imagining that these deprived women are going through some kind of semen withdrawal.

Who would have thought that the emotional suffering of modern women would ultimately be defined as a biologically based sex addiction? That in order to combat depression, women would have to become more demanding of unfettered sex? That what they need is a daily coital fix?

For many years now, men have been cast as over-sexed, prurient and aggressive boors who fail to consider women's needs. Radical feminists have called them dispensable and lesbian couples have wanted only their sperm - the sterile variety, sans the gooey stuff, that's stored in sperm banks.

After decades of listening to women complain about being viewed as sex objects, one wonders how men will adjust to their newly assigned role as mere therapeutic objects, there for curative, rather than orgasmic, effect. My bet is that they'll take it lying down.
But, if the pharmaceutical industry's history with antidepressants is any indication, women need not worry for long that they will have to hold, caress, and arouse their lovers and bind themselves in passionate sweaty embrace.

Already researchers are trying to figure out the active ingredients in semen that filter through the wall of the vagina supposedly affecting female moods. If they are successful, a bottled "non-sticky" cream may come to replace the real stuff and, borrowing Brylcreem's slogan, "a little dab 'll do you." Or perhaps they'll find that it can be taken orally and reduce it to pill form semen by mouth.
That, for some us, may be a difficult pill to swallow.