Fluid exchange

When most people hear the term "lesbian," they're more likely to think of things like folk music, Ellen DeGeneres, "The L Word" and tennis than they are to think of sperm. After all, lesbians are hardly the most likely suspects when it comes to sperm expertise. Lisa Jean Moore, however, did not let that deter her.
Moore – an associate professor of sociology and women's studies and coordinator of the "Gender Studies" program at Purchase College, State University of New York – says that her interest in sperm began when she was a grad student. She became fascinated looking at donor catalogs for various sperm banks. The sperm banks didn't market their wares as simply a biological substance, but rather, their materials seemed to be marketing actual men.
This got Moore wondering about how the ways sperm is dealt with, thought about and used in today's society were related to the issue of masculinity itself. She began to "analyze sperm as a social variable that has all these really rich meanings," she says.
Moore's new book, "Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man's Most Precious Fluid," is the fruit of her unrelenting obsession with sperm for the past 17 years. "I find the cultural preoccupation with this male body fluid fascinating," she writes.
In the book, she examines how sperm is seen through a variety of social lenses, including pornography, sperm banking, children's books on reproduction and criminal DNA evidence. Moore believes that there's a level of male hysteria surrounding sperm. That hysteria stems from a modern crisis of masculinity as the dominant position men have enjoyed for centuries is being encroached upon.
Reaction to the book has been intense. A July 17 interview published on Salon.com generated intensely fierce responses from readers, many of whom mistakenly believed Moore was advocating the elimination of males from the reproductive process.
"I don't think manless reproduction is going to get us out of the picture that easily," posted one reader. "For one thing, we wouldn't go down with out a fight."
"Only a woman-studies major could come up with this shit," posted another.
"I was getting increasingly freaked out as I read each letter," Moore told BTL from her home in New York City. "I didn't realize how freaked out people would be that I wrote this book."
Some Salon.com readers were supportive, however. One wrote, "The uniformly aggressive, anxious tone of many of the responses to this article indicates to me that maybe Moore is on to something about men feeling threatened. I was not concerned by the idea that a woman – a lesbian even (gasp!) – would be writing about this subject. Actually, I'm kind of touched that she would care so much."
In fact, Moore does care. "I think the book actually takes a very compassionate and empathic position" about the male hysteria around sperm, she says.
"A lot of it is about men fearing (that) I want to do away with men and I want to do away with fathers," she says of the negative reactions. "Where do they get that? They must get it from somewhere. What is that tapping into? And what a burden it must be to walk around feeling that threatened all the time."
However, she points out, homophobia also plays a role. "(People believe) that a lesbian shouldn't be writing about this," she says. "Maybe if a straight man took that on, maybe it would be more palatable to some people. But that would be a different book." Plus, she adds, "Men have been writing about women's bodies for years."
Doing away with fathers is not her goal. "I would not argue that children do not need fathers," she writes in the book. "Personally, I feel the more adults in a child's life who love and care for him or her, the better."
Moore acknowledges that her identity and her subject may seem at odds in the book. "It may see paradoxical to some that as a lesbian mother of two daughters and a feminist sociologist, I could find sustained interest in human sperm," she writes. However, she doesn't see it that way. One of her friends suggested that Moore is "the most objective person, actually, because I don't have an intimate relationship with semen in my life."
Not right now, anyway. However, her two daughters were conceived using donor sperm, which, whether it is done at home or in a doctor's office, certainly is an intimate experience.
In the book, she recalls her strong reaction upon receiving a phone call from the sperm bank asking if she wanted to buy the remaining vials of her donor's sperm, as he had stopped donating and the inventory was being sold off. Though she was not planning on any more children, her immediate impulse was to snatch them up.
"I was surprised by that," she says. It was as if saying "no" to buying the sperm was saying no to a piece of her daughter. "Here is this beautiful child who will no longer be able to have a biological sibling or, god forbid, an organ donor," she thought at the time. It made her feel guilty. It also made her see that she, too, invested more in sperm than its mere biological function.
To examine sperm, says Moore, is to examine masculinity and femininity in our culture. The closer she looked, the more connections she saw. "I'm part of a culture in which ejaculation is celebrated all the time," she says. So why not examine why that is? "I hope that I am able to do that in an empathetic way, even though I am never going to be someone who produces sperm."