Sperm Wars

by Robin Baker

  She on the other hand, almost as soon as he entered her, felt the first sensation that told her she might come. As he worked backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, she began to focus on her genitals, and it was working. Then came the fantasy. It was the dark-haired, wild-eyed woman from the supermarket queue. She was lying naked on top of her, black hair flying everywhere as she contorted her body, now to rub their genitals together, now to kiss her all over. With the combination of the sensations from her partner and her fantasy, the woman’s body wound itself up towards a climax. The noises in her throat were becoming more urgent, more rhythmic. Just a little more focus, just a little longer . . .

  By now, the man realised his partner was heading towards an orgasm. Her sounds were becoming more intense. He responded with his own sounds. The overwhelming wetness of her vagina had now gone, and he was beginning to get the sensations on his penis that he needed. But he still wasn’t certain he was going to ejaculate. He worked on a fantasy. It wasn’t his partner underneath him but the flirtatious seventeen-year-old from work. She was staring into his eyes and massaging her breasts with her hands. Between the guttural and rhythmic sounds from her throat she was telling him how wonderful he felt and how he mustn’t stop. That did it, and only just in time – his partner was climaxing. As she did so, he briefly lost his focus, but still managed to ejaculate in the next half-minute.

  For her, the climax was satisfying and just what she wanted. For him, their combined climax had given a sense of achievement and satisfaction. She didn’t often come with him inside her and he wanted to make the most of the occasion. But he didn’t. Almost within seconds of their expressing surprise and pleasure at the episode, they were both asleep.

  At first glance, the couple in this scene have behaved very strangely. Why did they both feel like intercourse again so soon? Why did the woman now feel like intercourse and not foreplay? Why did she feel like an orgasm during intercourse now, when only half an hour earlier she had felt no such inclination? Could each person’s behaviour really have been part of a strategy that over enough occasions would enhance their reproductive success?

  As we know, a woman does not need to climax during intercourse for sperm to enter her cervix. Even without a climax, the inseminate collects at the top of her vagina to form a pool, her cervix hangs into the pool, and sperm leave to escape into her cervical mucus (Scene 3). Nevertheless, a climax does make a difference to how many sperm enter her cervix. Usually, a climax during intercourse weakens her cervical filter greatly, allowing many more sperm to leave the seminal pool, penetrate the cervical mucus, and hence be retained. Such a climax therefore means fewer sperm are ejected in the flowback. A multiple orgasm (in which a woman has two – or even more – climaxes without ‘coming down’ in between) has an even greater effect on sperm retention. Essentially, this influence of the orgasm, whether single or multiple, is achieved in four ways.

  First, when a woman climaxes during intercourse, her cervix gapes in just the same way as it does during masturbation (Scene 22). As we saw then, this gaping stretches the cervical mucus sideways, widening existing mucus channels and creating new ones by splitting the mucus, and thereby opening up many more pathways for many more sperm. Any blocked channels in her cervix are effectively bypassed and rendered ineffectual. Secondly, as she climaxes during intercourse her cervix dips up and down as well as gapes – again, just as it does during masturbation. Now, however, it is dipping up and down in seminal fluid, thereby mixing the pool. This mixing helps more sperm, particularly older, less mobile ones, to contact and penetrate the cervical mucus.

  Thirdly, the climactic contraction and rippling of muscles in the womb and vagina during orgasm generate pressure changes in the womb and cervix. These changes effectively ‘suck’ the usual fingers of semen (Scene 3) much further into the channels of cervical mucus. This stronger upsuck of semen into channels that are already increased in number and enlarged by the orgasm does two things. It helps to neutralise any acidity of the lower part of the mucus glacier, making it easier for sperm to escape the seminal pool into the cervix; and it increases the volume of semen in contact with the mucus, again allowing many more sperm to escape.

  Fourthly, a woman’s climax during intercourse voids many of her cervical crypts of old sperm. Although these ejected sperm may eventually block some of the newly formed channels in the same way as they do after a masturbatory orgasm, sperm newly arrived from the seminal pool still find that they have many more crypts all to themselves. Effectively, therefore, an intercourse orgasm creates more storage space for sperm to occupy.

  This combined gaping, dipping and sucking of a woman’s cervix during an intercourse orgasm permits her to retain far more sperm than if she had no orgasm during intercourse. As a rough guide, she retains 50-90 per cent of sperm if she has a climax during intercourse compared with 0-50 per cent if she does not. Indeed, so effective is a climax during intercourse at helping sperm out of the seminal pool that, no matter how strong the filter a woman prepares in advance, such a climax negates it. In effect, then, when she feels like climaxing during intercourse, her body is saying to her: ‘We have made a mistake in our preparation for this intercourse. Circumstances have changed, and our cervical filter is too strong. We need many more of the sperm that are on their way than we shall get if we don’t do something. Bypass the filter. That way we shall let in more sperm and eject fewer in the flowback.’

  Of course, for an orgasm during intercourse to have the consequences just described, there needs to be a seminal pool in the vagina. We should expect, therefore, that an orgasm during intercourse will be effective at bypassing the filter only if it occurs after the man has ejaculated. This turns out to be true, but the situation is not quite as simple as we might expect – because a woman’s subjective climax during orgasm is not actually the critical event as far as sperm retention is concerned.

  Even if she climaxes about a minute (two minutes at the most) before the man ejaculates, the orgasm will still permit large numbers of sperm to bypass her cervical filter. How can this be? It is because the moment she subjectively identifies to be her climax is only the beginning of a series of events in her womb and cervix which she cannot feel but which may continue for several minutes. The peak of the cervical activity that affects sperm retention actually occurs one to two minutes after her subjective climax. By the time her cervix reaches this peak, she is already beginning to relax. As long as the seminal pool is in place before her cervical activity peaks, her filter will be bypassed. In fact, as long as it is still in place, a climax even as long as an hour after ejaculation will allow her filter to be bypassed. There is no need for the man’s penis to be in her vagina, and it makes no difference whether it is he who stimulates her to orgasm during this post-coital phase or whether she stimulates herself via masturbation. So even if a woman avoids climax while the penis is in her vagina, her body still has up to an hour to change its mind.

  We can now discuss why, in Scenes 24 to 25, as the night progressed the woman’s needs changed as far as orgasms were concerned. The word ‘episode’ will be used here to mean the whole time from the beginning of foreplay to the ejection of the flowback.

  On the night in question we followed the woman and her partner through two sexual episodes. At the beginning of the first (Scene 24), her body’s main requirement from intercourse at that stage of her menstrual cycle was to retain small numbers of sperm that were as young as possible. She also needed to minimise the risk of infection. To fulfil this requirement she needed to strengthen her cervical filter before her partner had any chance to inseminate. This would both improve her resistance to infection and make life difficult for the older, least motile sperm in his ejaculate. The right filter for her needs could have been produced a day or so in advance via a nocturnal or masturbatory orgasm, but her body had failed in this.

  Even so, it was not too late. Her motivation and behaviour during the first episode were just what they needed to be, because
although she failed to engineer an orgasm during foreplay, she did the next best thing and avoided climaxing during intercourse.

  At the beginning of the second sexual episode (Scene 25), the woman’s needs were still the same – small numbers of young sperm at minimum risk of disease – but the circumstances had changed. Most importantly, her partner was now offering to give her a small inseminate rich in very young sperm – younger than any in his previous inseminate. This was just what she had wanted all along, and it was this offer that made her body interested in a second insemination. However, the first insemination had left her with two problems.

  First, her cervical filter was now stronger than before because of the influx of blockers from the first insemination. If she delegated sperm retention to her now over-strong cervical filter, she would lose more of the young sperm in the second inseminate than she would like. Secondly, she still had the seminal pool from the first insemination at the top of her vagina. If she had an orgasm during foreplay now, she would bypass her filter with large numbers of older sperm from the first inseminate – just what she had gone out of her way to avoid during the first episode.

  Her solution to these two problems was straightforward. What she needed was to get rid of the first seminal pool, then to use an intercourse orgasm to bypass her cervical filter. That way she would retain a large proportion of the very young and desirable sperm from the second seminal pool. So how could she get rid of the old pool, given that it probably hadn’t yet decoagulated enough for her to eject it as a flowback? Her best option was to encourage the man to remove it with his thrusting penis (as described in other circumstances in Scene 21) before introducing his second ejaculate. Her body generated the necessary urges. First, she no longer felt like foreplay, but wanted a penis inside her as soon as possible. Secondly, she felt like an orgasm during intercourse. Once intercourse had begun, her body then timed its build-up so that she didn’t climax until the old seminal pool had been removed and her partner was nearly ready to ejaculate.

  In this discussion we have, inevitably, considered only one specific sequence of events – the sequence relating to the woman in Scenes 24 and 25. And although we cannot, obviously, discuss every combination of circumstances and responses, there are some general principles worth noting.

  First, a woman prepares for her next anticipated intercourse by having a nocturnal or masturbatory orgasm – or by not having a nocturnal or masturbatory orgasm – whichever is appropriate, as explained above. Secondly, if she has anticipated correctly, she should let the entire sexual episode proceed without orgasm and leave her filter to do its job. On the other hand, if she has not anticipated correctly, she should aim to correct her mistake by having an orgasm at some time during the episode.

  In the latter situation she has two options, depending on what type of mistake she has made. The fact that orgasms during foreplay are more frequent than orgasms during intercourse suggests that a woman is more likely to err on the side of having too weak a filter than too strong. This could be strategic. It is easier to encourage a man to help her climax during foreplay (strengthening her filter) than to help her climax during intercourse (weakening her filter). Once she allows him to insert his penis into her vagina, she loses much of her control over what he does and when he does it. Even then, however, she has a fall-back strategy: orgasms after the man has withdrawn are a substitute for intercourse orgasms, permitting her to bypass her filter whenever she needs or wants to (again, as just described).

  The best moment for a woman to climax (or not) during a sexual episode thus varies considerably from occasion to occasion. The best moment for her to climax as far as the man is concerned, though, varies much less. As we have already seen (Scenes 12 and 14), he also will have anticipated the intercourse and tailored his ejaculate accordingly. He will have masturbated or not, as appropriate, to suit his body’s own best interests. Most often he will be best served by a woman climaxing during intercourse, because only by this means will his carefully prepared inseminate succeed in having as many of its sperm retained as possible.

  But there is a limit to how much time and effort it is worth him putting into getting a woman to climax during intercourse. First, if her body is not interested in an intercourse orgasm, he cannot force her to climax, no matter how hard he tries. Secondly, the cervical sperm filter which he can sometimes try so hard to bypass may on some occasions not actually exist. If the woman has retained very few sperm from her previous insemination, if she has neither masturbated nor had a nocturnal since that insemination, and if any even older sperm or menstrual debris have been cleared, the filter in her cervix will be as weak as it can be anyway. In this case, the man gains little if anything from making a great effort to encourage her to climax during intercourse.

  All of this leaves him with a very difficult, if not impossible, series of decisions to make during sex. First, he has to judge whether the woman has a filter that is worth bypassing. If not, he has no need for her to climax during intercourse. If she has a significant filter, his best option is for her to have an orgasm during their sexual episode. Even an orgasm during foreplay will do, as long as he manages to inseminate her within the minute or so afterwards. If he opts instead to try to get her to climax during intercourse, he may have trouble succeeding, and if so he will have to decide how long it is worth carrying on thrusting. He could opt instead to ejaculate first and then see if he can stimulate her to climax afterwards, before she ejects the flowback. Or he can just abandon all attempts to bypass her filter and hope that this is an occasion when there is no real filter to bypass.

  Looked at in this way, a sexual episode is actually a contest between the man and the woman. Except on those rare occasions when the same outcome, bypassing the filter, suits them both, each is forever trying to manoeuvre the other into doing something that is against their body’s interests. Whether the man succeeds in what is his safest ploy – to ejaculate a few seconds after the woman has climaxed – inevitably depends more on the woman than on himself.

  A woman may insist on a foreplay orgasm, then cooperate or hinder as the man tries to inseminate her within a minute or so afterwards. If she curtails foreplay, several strategies are possible during intercourse itself. She may cooperate by waiting until he is about to ejaculate, then climaxing with him. Or she may not cooperate. She may climax so quickly that he is unable to ejaculate within the critical minute that follows. Or she may avoid climaxing and wait for him to give up and just go ahead and ejaculate – in which case intercourse becomes a war of attrition, each waiting for the other to climax. Once the man has ejaculated, the woman can either avoid climaxing before ejecting the flowback, or she can cooperate by helping him to give her a post-coital climax. Or, almost the ultimate cooperation, she can ‘finish herself off’ by masturbating to orgasm before ejecting the flowback.

  It might, at first, seem strange that, given the competitive nature of intercourse, men and women appear to make it easier for each other to judge how near they each are to their climax. Even to the objective observer, the sounds made by men and women during intercourse give a clear indication of how their levels of sexual excitement are changing (which is why the more exaggerated of such sounds are dubbed on to pornographic films). When climax comes, it is clear from the sounds, which would seem to indicate a cooperation between a man and woman that might belie our interpretation of intercourse as a contest. The sounds, however, have become part of the contest.

  Sometimes, of course, the sounds really do give an accurate indication of what is happening. On those occasions when a virtually simultaneous climax is in both people’s interests, they are the method used to achieve this mutual aim. But it is precisely because the sounds are sometimes honest that on occasion both men and women can use them to trick the partner. In surveys, over half of women admit to faking orgasms sometimes, and a quarter to doing so often. That they often succeed in fooling the partner is evident from another survey – which found that the man invariably re
ports a higher frequency of simultaneous orgasms than his partner. There are cases on record in which a man has reported that his partner always climaxes during intercourse whereas she herself has stated that she never does.

  The scene we have just witnessed was one of those relatively infrequent occasions when both the man and the woman had the same requirements from their intercourse, and cooperation was in their mutual interest. In the next scene, however, the needs of the woman we meet are very different from those of one of the men who inseminate her. The female orgasm is about to enter the arena of sperm warfare.

  SCENE 26

  Putting It All Together

  The woman lay back in her Friday-night bath and let the last waves of her orgasm subside. She had finished her period only a week ago and this was the second time since then. Both times the thought and the action had come out of the blue. A minute earlier she had been soaping and rinsing her breasts, with nothing more erotic on her mind than whether she should clean the bathroom this weekend or suggest her partner do it while she was away. Maybe it had been the touch of her soapy hand on her nipple, but the next second the thought was in her mind, the tingle was between her legs, and she knew she needed relief. Now, after five minutes of successful cooperation between her fantasies, her finger and her clitoris, her breathing was easing, her heart was slowing down, and she was wallowing in the combined warmth of bath water and post-climactic glow.

  To masturbate twice in five days was unusual for her; once a week or once a fortnight was more like it. She wondered if it was because she had given up the pill recently, having convinced her partner that she really wanted another child. However, she did not question her body too closely – she was enjoying this atypical burst of sexuality. She mused over the way that two nights ago, only a couple of hours after she had masturbated, she had then more or less insisted that her partner give her an orgasm during foreplay as well, gently resisting his attempts to penetrate until he complied. Three orgasms in a week. She was doing well.