Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (16 page)

Almost all the sperm donors described their first few visits to the bank as extremely awkward, but as they became acquainted with staff and developed familiarity with the procedures, donation became a routine part of their daily lives. Isaac, a twenty-two-year-old college student in a small Southeastern town, summarized transitioning from the “nerve-racking” first visit to getting “a little more comfortable with it.”

Coming back to actually donate and not just fill out paperwork was a little nerve-racking, because you got all these faces around that know exactly what you’re about to do: walk in this bathroom and deposit into a plastic cup. It’s a little unnerving. If you’re not a very open or confident person, you could get easily embarrassed and scared out of it. My first couple times, I would always look in the parking lot, and thankfully there were no other donators coming in, so I knew it was just gonna be me. I’d do my thing, drop it off, and go. Nobody would see me except for [the program staff]. You think they won’t be able to make eye contact, but it wasn’t like that at all. This is what they do for a living. Basically, I guess it would be like your first day at a new job, except a little bit more uncomfortable. Even now when I’m in a rush, I feel like an idiot going in there, ten minutes later popping out, and dropping off my deposit. [The lab technician] once said to me, “Wow, Speedy Gonzales!” I’m like, “Yeah, well, I’m on a schedule.” The impression they get of you sometimes can make you feel not as manly I suppose. I mean, it’s gotten easier just to face everybody and go through it.

In describing his first deposit as akin to starting a “new job,” except more “uncomfortable,” Isaac is reflecting the sperm bank’s framing of donation as a job as well as the cultural stigma around masturbation.

For some, the discomfort stemmed from religious beliefs. Manuel, a twenty-seven-year-old Christian living on the West Coast, was so embarrassed about donating that he did not tell his girlfriend for several months, even though they were living together. Here, he details a “transition” not unlike Isaac’s, but for Manuel, his “upbringing” plays a role.

Manuel: There are just these booths, and it’s not too much between your own privacy and what’s on the outside, just that 1.5-inch piece of plywood.
¹⁶
In retrospect, it’s not a big deal. It’s just, coming from a Christian upbringing, it’s like forbidden and taboo. This is doing
something that would always have been just very—it felt bad! And I hate that feeling. Something is looking down and judging me for what I’m choosing to do. That’s what I kind of felt at first. I didn’t present that when I’m there. I’m nice, calm, cool. I’m in. I’m out. Take care of my business. No problem. No big deal. But in my mind, I’m thinking I’ve never done anything like this before. It’s not like I’m a little kid, either. You’d think at a certain point I’d be more comfortable with it, but it wasn’t that much easier. So if I tried it at like eighteen or nineteen, when I think they officially start to allow prospects, then it might have been even more uncomfortable.

Rene: So over the full year and a half [you donated], are you saying it never got any easier?

Manuel: It got easier. After maybe a few times, say three or four, it was just routine, because they were so accommodating, so nice, so receptive. At a certain point, I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all. I think that was the whole point. In a way, we’re doing a service, so they’re going to want to make things as hospitable as they can, and they succeed very well, in my opinion. I don’t know how it would be otherwise if it was very formal and impersonal. But it didn’t feel like that, for the most part.

Rene: What would be “for the most part”? What was uncomfortable about it?

Manuel: Only if [the donor manager] wasn’t there. When there’s not a familiar face, that’s when it would be a little different, sort of variation in the routine, but not to the point that it actually affected anything.

Rene: So how does [the donor manager] do that, take something that people find uncomfortable and turn it into this routine?

Manuel: She has a good personality. She has a good, sincere smile to her and a warm sort of nurturing mother feeling. That’s how I felt with her. That might be looking too far into things. At the time, when I’m going through this, I’m not thinking all these things. I’m just doing it. She was always personable and asked me how I’m doing. It was one of those things where you develop a rapport with someone and that comes in time, of course, but she was like that from the beginning. I was probably the one who needed to make that transition more than
her. She’s familiar with this. She’s seen
how
many donors come and go? For me, it’s not like I go to various sperm banks. It’s not a routine for me. That was my transition.

Like Isaac, Manuel relies on the rhetoric of the workplace in that he “takes care of business” and defines potential donors as “prospects.” This description also points to the importance of bank staff in shaping donors’ experiences and establishing donation as routine. In fact, in my interview with the donor manager at Western Sperm Bank, she noted that when she took a vacation, she would often return to find that her “regulars” had stopped coming in. She would have to call them to get them back on schedule.

Once men do get in to a routine, donating sperm becomes just one more thing on the to-do list. Nathan, a thirty-eight-year-old who had started donating in his early twenties, explained how “you get into a rhythm, and you just think, oh it’s Wednesday, I got to go down to Gametes Inc. Sometimes you forget. Two weeks go by. You have your lulls, or it just doesn’t happen. You just find yourself putting it into your weekly schedule like getting groceries.” Similarly, Greg, a college student, said that he might not make it to the bank if he had a test or if his motorcycle broke down. In general, though, he has “a schedule to come here. In my head I have to work it out. It’s normally either on the way to or from school. So then I just try to figure out what I have to do today, how long I got to get it done, and then when I can fit this in.”

Pleasure and Control

Upon arrival at most of the banks, men are buzzed in through secure doors, which is greater security than is in place at egg agencies. Sperm donors sign in and fill out a form with their donor number and answer questions about when they last ejaculated and whether they have had unprotected sex. Gametes Inc. had a new computerized check-in system that would automatically alert men when it was time to provide a urine sample or have their blood drawn. This needed to happen every few months so that the sperm samples could be released from quarantine
and posted on the website for sale to recipients. Several men said that they did not look forward to blood draw day.

The donation rooms in each bank had slightly different décors. At CryoCorp, the founder proudly showed off what he called “masturbatoriums,” small rooms with erotic pictures on the walls and flat-screen televisions for watching pornographic movies. Western Sperm Bank, a nonprofit, offered larger rooms with a small bed and chair but only provided magazines. Most of the sperm banks had several rooms so that more than one person could donate at a time, but University Fertility Services had a much smaller program, so men were simply directed to the clinic’s bathroom, where there was a small stash of magazines in the drawer under the sink. Ethan, a thirty-nine-year-old who had just finished an eighteen-month stint at Western Sperm Bank, gave the most detailed description of the donation room and his routine.

You go in a room, and they have a chair and a bed. It’s comfortable, and they change the sheets, kind of like hospital linen. Even though it may not be clean, it always seemed to be smoothed out. And there’s a big wicker basket full of sperm cups with a twist cap, and they’re all individually hermetically sealed. A lot of times, they’ll pick up one of those and set it in the middle of bed so it looks like no one’s been there. It’s like this nice hotel touch. First thing in the morning, it’s always set up, but if they’re really moving through people, especially later in the day, the pillow might be whatever, so you gotta kind of fluff the pillow. Or there might be a pubic hair on the bed. Sometimes I did masturbate thinking about my wife, but it wasn’t the same. So I usually just grabbed a magazine to be sure that I would get aroused quick and get out of there. But in the beginning, it was kind of experimental and kind of fun. It was fun all the way through, actually. It became part of my day I enjoyed. It was like a stress release, and I got to look at really beautiful women without my wife going “I’m not letting you have a subscription to
Penthouse
!” [
laughs
] Guys were tearing—my favorite pictures would be gone some days, or your favorite magazine would disappear. You got used to your favorite room, because the rooms were decorated a little bit differently. I would get two magazines, especially if I knew them. This girl’s really great, and this girl’s really great, too. So I would lie down, and I would start masturbating. Then, at some point, you had to make a decision about how you were going to do this clinically. You have to sit up. I would have the cup sitting there, with the cap off and open, because if you were just about to ejaculate and the cap wasn’t off, you had to fumble. You could come all over yourself, and that’s $50, a mess. I mean, it could be very embarrassing. It never happened to me. So you have to be conscious of that. It’s not this free-flowing sexual activity.

In linking a spilled sample with $50, Ethan points to men’s ever-present awareness of the fact that they are paid piece-rate.

About a third of the sperm donors echoed Ethan in saying that donation was pleasurable or fun, as it entailed an approved moment of looking at pornography and having an orgasm. Nevertheless, several agreed that this pleasure was constrained by the need to “stop and pay attention to that cup.” Andrew, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student, noted how in the sperm bank, masturbation is “not as pleasurable as it would be otherwise, because you have a little beaker thing and need to do a little more aiming [
laughs
]. I mean, still everything comes out, but it’s not as good. You have to make sure everything’s in the right place, as opposed to just kind of forgetting about it and letting everything go.” He concluded by joking, “I get paid for it, so I make sacrifices.”

Eighty percent of the sperm donors I interviewed exceeded the bank’s minimum requirement of one deposit per week when they first started donating.
¹⁷
Most men need about forty-eight hours of abstinence to ensure a sperm count high enough to meet bank standards, so donating two or three times a week required refraining from sexual activity for four to six days out of every seven. Many of the men engaged in experiments to see how little abstinence they needed or, in the words of one donor, “how my body worked.” Manuel reported that he could pass samples with just thirty-six hours of abstinence. Dennis, who had been donating for eleven months and was weary of his commitment to the bank, used to donate once every three days but had cut back to just once a week and still only passed some of his samples.

In detailing his donation schedule, Isaac pointed out that the amount of time he spent
preparing
to donate was much greater than the actual amount of time he spent inside the bank.

I try to make three times a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Basically that means Monday, if I get here in the morning, then I have approximately six to twelve hours to enjoy life with my fiancée [
laughs
]. Then I have to be abstinent for the next day and a half, normally about thirty-eight to forty, thirty-six to forty-four hours, something like that to be prepared for Wednesday to deposit. Then Friday, I have a nice long day. Saturday about halfway through the day, I gotta be abstinent again. I mean really the biggest pain is probably the abstinence thing. Not because it’s lack of sex or anything. It’s just because this takes like fifteen, twenty minutes out of your day, not including time driving, probably thirty, forty minutes depending on where you live. It’s cool; you get paid a nice little chunk of money for basically three hours a week. But you’re actually working quote unquote like a whole forty-hour week because you have to abstain. You have to make sure you’re not doing anything wrong and especially trying to get enough sleep and all that and not getting too stressed, because that can affect the count.

Indeed, the issue of abstinence came up in almost all of my interviews with sperm donors, which probably reflects the need to regulate their sexual activity for such a long period of time. In contrast, very few egg donors mentioned it at all, even though women must refrain from sexual contact for several consecutive weeks because of the high risk of pregnancy associated with fertile women taking fertility drugs.
¹⁸

Many sperm donors echoed Isaac’s complaints, and it was especially those men in serious relationships who groused about having to “schedule” their sex lives. Scott, a thirty-two-year-old who is married with three children, said that “from a personal standpoint, you have to stay on a schedule, which at times is a little frustrating. There’s a lot of times when your body isn’t set up to, I mean you kind of go through moods, regardless of what that schedule is going to be. There are times when it’s: uhh I can’t, not tonight.”

Some men held firm to the schedule, but others would occasionally skip visits to the bank. Kyle, a twenty-two-year-old who lived with his girlfriend explained,

Every now and then, she has rolled over in the middle of the night. I know I have to come [to the sperm bank] the next day, and she wants to [make love], and I’m thinking to myself that’s $100. Sometimes I do, and I’m like, “Are you going to pay me $100 like they do?” Sometimes I don’t. I say, “Well, we have this to pay for.” But it’s not a stressful thing. I like it, too, because when we do make love, it’s once a week, probably twice a week, and it’s just on Friday and Saturday, so it makes it a little better because of the anticipation. She don’t complain, because she knows that if she wants that nice couch and the nice bedroom furniture and the nice place, I gotta keep coming here. But it doesn’t bother me at all.