Free Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm by Rene Almeling

The male encounters problems when they do that. It’s not good. I start thinking about when I will give the sperm, and I feel uncomfortable.” Pointing to the clinic’s semen collection room, which had a door that opened into the small, crowded waiting room, this same man said it was “like a prison cell.” 13 In some cases, the anxiety results in failure to produce a sample, and the IVF cycle is for naught.
    Comparing the findings from Laumann et al.’s survey and Inhorn’s interviews raises the question of how sperm donors experience masturbation. In the United States, the physical act is stigmatized, though not to the degree it is in the Middle East. Moreover, sperm donors are not masturbating on demand for a spouse in the next room who is undergoing complicated and expensive fertility treatments, but donors’ payments are predicated on sperm count and semen volume. So do American men producing sperm for money experience masturbation more as paid pleasure or pressured performance?
    From Awkward to Routine
    Like the egg donors, the twenty sperm donors I interviewed were at various stages in the donation process, from those who had been making deposits for a few months to men who donated a decade before. Unlike the egg donors, none of the sperm donors mentioned being affiliated with more than one program, and all came from either Western Sperm Bank or Gametes Inc. 14 On average, men at Gametes Inc. had been producing samples for twenty-two months, compared to an average fifteen months at Western Sperm Bank (this comparison excludes one man at Gametes Inc. who had donated off and on for ten years, a very unusual length of time to be a donor). Most of the men—80%—were still actively donating. (More details about the interviews and the donors are available in the Introduction and appendixes.) 15
    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