Semen! It comes spurting out of your cock every time you jack off, making a mess on your shorts and your sheets. But what exactly is it?
The production of semen marks the beginning of puberty for boys. The body begins to grow and develop rapidly and you will no doubt recall, you start to ejaculate at the age of 12 or 13.
Semen, or cum as it’s more often referred to, also ejects “sperm” (spermatozoa) but in fact this is only about 10% of the payload. Packed into that 10% is anything from 200 million to 500 million sperm cells. That figure can be even higher in a younger guys cum because the testosterone is firing on all cylinders at puberty to enable growth of body hair and the lowering of the voice.
And get this, it takes only one sperm cell to fertilize an egg and make a baby – that’s one very significant reason why there are so many teenage pregnancies. As a horny adolescent you are loaded with sperm cells and shooting heavy duty live rounds with your itchy trigger finger.
The remaining 90% of your cum is known as seminal plasma. The definition of plasma is a fluid that carries a suspended solid, whether it’s blood “fluid” carrying blood cells, or semen carrying sperm.
It’s ironic that we call the sensation of shooting semen as ‘cumming’, because in reality it is a whole lot of good stuff ‘going’ out of your body each and every time you ejaculate. A breakdown of sperm includes all of these elements:
- ascorbic acid (vitamin C, for tissue maintenance)
- blood-group antigens (from immune system)
- calcium (mineral)
- chlorine (oxidizing agent)
- cholesterol (steroid alcohol present in body fluids)
- choline (base, part of the vitamin B complex)
- citric acid (occurs during cellular metabolism)
- creatine (nitrogenous substance found in muscle)
- deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
- fructose (sugar used for energy)
- glutathione (peptide amino acid)
- hyaluronidase (enzyme)
- inositol (sugar found in muscles)
- lactic acid (byproduct of muscle use)
- magnesium (mineral)
- nitrogen (gas found in all living tissue)
- phosporus (mineral)
- potassium (mineral)
- purine (compound of uric acid)
- pyrimidine (organic base)
- pyruvic acid (formed from either glucose or glycogen)
- sodium (salt)
- sorbitol (body alcohol)
- spermidine (catalytic enzyme)
- spermine (ammonia compound found in sperm)
- urea (from urine)
- uric acid (from urine)
- vitamin B12 (for proper function of nervous system and metabolism)
- zinc (mineral)
In fact ‘cumming’ could have derived from a time when the British Secret Intelligence discovered that semen makes excellent invisible ink: Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming noted of his agents that “Every man is his own stylo.”
Ingeniously, when you have sex, the way those tiny little sperm cells survive when being shot from your cock into your lover’s pussy is by the prostate gland producing a thin, milky, alkaline fluid that helps the sperm to live when exposed to the vagina’s acidic lining. It’s just as well nature thinks of these things; can you imagine if scientists had to sit down and figure out what was going wrong, and then find a way to protect sperm cells from arriving DOA, when they are small enough to fit by the hundreds of millions on top of a pin head? The human race would perish.
Genetics plays an important part in how much you cum. You typically release about one teaspoon of semen, but then some medications can affect the quantity. You’ve also no doubt noticed that if you jerk off more than once a day, you start shooting less and less of it.
Additionally, the more aroused you get and the longer you take to ejaculate, the more semen your body will produce. You can produce more semen or pre-cum with artful foreplay.
In a mature male, cum is usually a milky or pearly-white color. If it’s colored with red streaks it may signify blood. If you occasionally see a bit of blood it’s not necessarily a cause for alarm, but if you see a lot and the condition persists, consult a doctor. The same goes for any other drastic color changes, which could indicate some kind of infection.
