CARNAL NATION

"Enhance fellation, achieve elation, with frugivorous combinations!" (Your columnist, besotted.)

“There’s a supplement I used to take... and after about a week or so, my cum used to taste like liquid sugar. Was REALLY good, actually. I got to the point where I was shooting into my own mouth just for the hell of it.” (Young man, blogging.)

If I’m to believe 88,400 Google results for “bad sperm taste,” 39,700 for “bad semen taste,” 250,000 for “bad tasting cum,” 32,600 results for “better tasting sperm,” 20,000 for “better tasting semen,” and 362,000 for “better tasting cum,” not to mention 3,480,000 for “sperm cigarette taste” and 2,490,000 for “semen cigarette taste,” an awful lot of people are obsessing over the taste of semen. I was tempted to write this week about the sexological implications of “draining people’s fat for cosmetics,” but that only garners a paltry 178,000 results (and “human fat for cosmetics” gets 137,000), and I’ve been too obscure lately. So, you know, this week I’ll go with the numbers... I want to write a really popular column for once, doncha know?

Guys may dream of bombarding their partner’s uvula with a “big load” or “a thick wad” but a money-shot’s worth of deep throat, tapioca pudding may not be what the partner has in mind.

Besides, there’s a certain logic to dealing with the topic of semen taste after having written a couple of weeks ago about the internet traffic in used (very used) women’s panties (purchased for their taste as well as smell). As far as I know, there is no black market (yet?) in siphoning off human sexual fluids for use in cosmetics, but “the real scientists” who write for The Beauty Brains website say bull semen is used for “shiny hair” in some European salons. Can a similar use for human sperm be far behind? Incidentally, human breast milk has been used to make soap, and placenta is used in skin care products. (So why in heck did I bury the second one I ever made under the Cecil Breuner rose bush? But I digress...)

Speaking of science, I can’t find an actual study to back this up, but Internet folk wisdom touts the pineapple as the number-one semen flavor enhancer. (2,800,000 results for “pineapple better sperm” and 1,890,000 for “pineapple better semen.”) General fruit consumption is said to be helpful as well.

Weren’t we all agog when we heard about female short-nosed fruit bats (Cynopterus sphinx) performing fellatio? Researchers from England and China said the bat who licks the shaft of her partner’s penis enjoys a longer period of copulation (six extra seconds on the average). Okay, so that’s one behavioral reward (or not, depending on whether the female needs to wash her hair that night). The researchers offered four possible hypothetical advantages of bat fellatio: it may increase lubrication or stimulation of the bat penis; it might provide an additional period of “mate guarding” (six whole seconds!) as the bats typically segregate after the breeding season; it might prevent disease, due to the antibacterial, anti-fungal, antichlamydia, and antiviral properties of saliva; and it may make possible “detection and identification of MHC-dependent chemical cues associated with mate choice.” (Guys, take serious note of this last hypothesis!) The researchers conclude that it “is conceivable that the female manipulates the male by increasing sexual stimulation, so that she ultimately benefits.” Do I detect a slight note of male bias here?

But why do some female “bats with benefits” indulge in fellatio and others do not? (Or is it that they indulge in fellatio with some partners and not others?) What could motivate the female bat to begin in the first place?  Let’s add another potential hypothesis, maybe the male bat’s semen is generally sweet as a result of his frugivorous diet (fruit, pollen, and nectar). Let’s say the females really like the fruity taste of the semen, which might be running down the male bat’s shaft, so they start licking. (Please also note: the males also licked their own penises “for several seconds” after copulation.) Bats in the study were limited to bananas, water, and vitamin supplements, but what might happen if a little mango provides an even bigger turn on? Scientists, please, let’s see those follow up studies of fruit bat diet and its relation to fruit bat fellatio!