Scientific research has uncovered another fascinating reason why lovemaking can make a woman feel good. It appears that semen may have antidepressant qualities. A 2002 study at the State University of New York in Albany compared the moods of women who had sex without condoms, had sex with condoms and had no sex at all. No, I’m not kidding. Here are the details of the study, if you feel the urge to look it up and go through the full report. It would be perfect bedtime reading:
Gallup, G. G., Jr, Burch, R. L., Platek, S. M., “Does Semen have Antidepressant Properties?” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2002 Jun; 31(3): 289-93. If you don’t want to read this whole paper, you can find the abstract on PubMed.
The research demonstrated a significant reduction in the rate of depression in women not using condoms as compared to the two other groups. Semen contains substances such as endorphins, estrone, prolactin, oxytocin, thyrotropin-releasing hormone and serotonin, all of which can improve your mood.
I wonder how the researchers decided who would be in each group. Did the subjects have any say in the matter? I would not have chosen to participate in the no-sex group. Some might say it’s obvious that those ladies would have been grumpier and more depressed because they weren’t getting any loving rather than just not receiving any sperm. I’d like to know if those participants in the no-sex group were even more depressed than those who avoided getting semen by having sex with condoms. I would also add that it’s also much more pleasurable having sex au natural rather than feeling all the sensations through latex, so maybe that’s another reason why the sex-without-condom group came top in the no-depression hit parade. And what about oral sex? Would getting semen that way be equally effective? There’s definitely a need for more research on that.
No, I didn’t pore through numerous volumes of Archives of Sexual Behavior to find out about this fascinating study about the joyful properties of sperm. I read about the research in Mary Roach’s wonderful book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Highly recommended if you want to find out all kinds of obscure yet outrageous facts about bonking.
In Adulterer’s Wife: How to Thrive Whether You Stay or Not, I wrote that perhaps in the future doctors might prescribe semen pills instead of Prozac for people suffering from depression, or maybe they will send women off to a therapeutic bonking clinic. Now that fantasy of mine has become an actuality. Well, not the bonking clinic, but expect to see semen pills at your local pharmacy in the not-too-distant future. The pharmaceutical giant, Merck, has gained FDA approval to market a new anti-depressant called Seminol. Its active ingredient is derived from the ejaculate of bulls, and apparently in the drug trials it proved to be 73 percent more effective than a placebo in relieving clinical depression. I was wondering if that drug would have been even more effective had it been derived from human semen, but there is no doubt that it is easier to get the stuff in bulk from bulls than humans. I’ve heard that it can be difficult enough to get enough semen for sperm banks. As the New York Times reported in January 2021, Many people wanted a pandemic baby, but sperm banks could not meet the demand. So women were joining unregulated Facebook groups to find willing donors, no middleman required. At least for Seminol, those bulls don’t have to be willing partners.
Seminol has not yet arrived on the market, yet I was musing about what would be an appropriate color for the tablet or capsule, whatever it might be. I wonder if it will be a blue pill, since its function will be to beat the blues. Viagra is a blue tablet, and the activities it encourages are, at the very least, strongly connected to Seminol’s main ingredient. Indeed, if the latest Matrix movie, The Matrix Resurrections (2021), was any guide, like Neo’s anti-depressant prescription, those Seminol capsules just have to be blue.