Here's One: Who Or What Is "A Man?"

Let’s not bury the lede here. I did a semen sample on Tuesday. At the time, I guess I had been sober for about 52 days. I think a “full regeneration” of sperm takes about 90 days if you were an excessive drinker. I’m also 42, which is a bit older than, say, a 29 year-old guy going through this stuff. I definitely was an excessive drinker.

OK, so on the results front, pretty sub-par. I think we’re looking at:

• About 7 million sperm per unit in my sample. At one point in ’21, when I was still boozing pretty hard, I had this at 28M. So that’s weird.
• 10.3% motility. I think that needs to be 45–50% or higher to be successful “in the conventional sense.”
• 1.5% fast motility, which basically means my sperm bump into each other and look like lazy old dudes.

This whole thing has been “driving my car” in life since about late 2020. It’s an absolutely miserable process to go through as a guy. I am not chasing trauma or victimhood here, because I fully realize I did a lot of this to myself. I drank like a fish for most of my late 20s and 30s. I am a fat fuck most of the time. These results were earned. It’s not a “woe is me” situation. I get it. So please, if you read this and scoff “Look at this victim,” no. That’s not it.

Here is what goes through your head in these arcs:

• Am I a real man?
• What is a man?
• Am I holding back my partner and her desires for life?
• Am I less than some of these guys I know in some way?
• What is one’s legacy as a dude?

These are hard questions to go through. Because a lot of guys don’t necessarily have to go through them, they don’t really think about it, and they often don’t feel comfortable discussing it, or they don’t know what to say, or they just avoid you as a result, so you deal with a lot of it by yourself. There are some online groups about male infertility issues, but mostly it is just people complaining or offering a few ideas about turmeric shots, so there’s some value, but not much.

I cannot answer all the questions above. These days, when you say “What is a man?,” people assume you are discussing some culture wars shit about how men can supposedly get pregnant. No. I am not discussing that. I just wonder to myself sometimes what my worth or value is in the world if I can’t produce kids, especially if my wife sees kids as a major point in her own life.

This is where you get the “adoption,” “foster,” “IVF,” etc. sidebars. We did IVF. That bombed. I sometimes wonder if that was my fault. Here’s a story to that end.

I don’t mind fostering or adopting. That might be the only card to play here. I do feel bad about not helping my wife “carry” and have that experience. The whole sequence leads to me feeling bad and questioning myself. Again, not in a victim sense — in a “Whoa, I fucked up a lot of my life” sense.

I guess all I can do right now is try to stay on the straight and narrow and see what happens. Maybe something works. Maybe it doesn’t. But I just need to try and keep being and doing positive. No?

And yes, assholes become dads. Assholes become moms too. I cannot control every asshole with faster motility than I have. That’s a losing battle.

Any takes, I’m here.