How Sex Works by Dr. Sharon Moalem

Author:Dr. Sharon Moalem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

IF FEMALE EJACULATE helps to keep women healthy, it may not be the only bodily fluid that lends a hidden helping hand. Semen may help to get women pregnant—which sounds obvious—but not just by supplying sperm. In 2003, an email circulated that included what appeared to be a CNN report discussing a study that linked women giving oral sex to a decrease in breast cancer. There was no such study—just a well-crafted college student joke. The email led to the embarrassment of some international media outlets that took it seriously and ran with it. Even though semen exposure through oral sex doesn’t decrease breast cancer risk, it may very well increase the chances of a successful pregnancy.

Here’s the idea in a nutshell. In women’s bodies, sperm are foreign entities, which means they should be treated like other foreign microbes—attacked and destroyed by the immune system. That doesn’t happen, at least not all the time—if it did, of course, we wouldn’t be here today. But it may be that a woman’s immune response to invading sperm is yet another hurdle sperm have to overcome in their race to fertilize an egg. It’s possible that repeated exposure to a partner’s semen (and a chemical called TGF-beta and the sperm within) may familiarize a woman’s body with it and make it more acceptable. If familiar sperm are treated more favorably than other sperm, it might provide another advantage as well: it would decrease the odds of pregnancy from a sexual encounter with a stranger, while increasing the odds for reproduction with a long-term mate. This theory is supported by new research that found that women who engaged in oral sex with their male partners were less likely to suffer from a rather dangerous pregnancy-related hypertensive crisis called preeclampsia. This condition can occur during pregnancy (family history, especially in sisters, is just one of the risk factors), in which blood pressure rises to potentially dangerous levels. Some women with preeclampsia can even deteriorate further, developing eclampsia, which is characterized by seizures and classified as a true obstetrical emergency. Providing even stronger evidence that the link between oral semen exposure reduced the risk of preeclampsia, the women who reported swallowing their partners’ semen had the most protection.

And, of course, the key may very well be overall semen exposure—not just oral sex. In all associative studies, while trying to tease out relationships between different factors, in this case semen exposure and preeclampsia, it’s difficult to know what is truly causal. For example, women who engage in oral sex and swallow semen have been found to be more likely to engage in other sexual behaviors more frequently than women who don’t, including unprotected vaginal sex and anal intercourse, both of which could increase their exposure to semen. And though this research looks interesting, so far the results are not confirmed. Suffice it to say, before doctors begin recommending oral sex and semen exposure to women trying to conceive, much more research still needs to be done.

But if

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