Women often compare the smell of sperm to plant or flower scents. Herb Robert (Geranium robertianum), St John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum), the flowers of the European barberry (Berberis vulgaris) and chestnuts all smell of sperm. The same applies to the crushed flowers of the henna plant (Lawsonia inermis). Moroccan women love rubbing them into their palms, while Western European women use them, often in powder form, to dye their hair.
Billy-goats, long regarded as the epitome of animal horniness, spray their own beards with sperm and urine. The Ancient Greeks dreamt up all kinds of hybrids of man and billy-goat, such as the demi-god Satyr and the forest god Pan, and the physical attributes of these sensuous figures (horns, hoofs and beard) were adopted by Christianity to depict the Devil. Billy-goats, however, have some surprisingly female aspects. If one massages their nipples for an extended period, a milk-giving udder appears in front of the scrotum!
The American jazz musician Charles Mingus compared the texture of sperm to cream: ‘She gulps and slurps the cream out of me while I melt and she sucks hard at my tree.’ John Hunter, a nineteenth-century English surgeon, observed in one of his essays that ‘if one holds sperm in one’s mouth it gives a warmth like spices’. The celebrated sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) wrote that many primitive peoples, particularly the Australian aborigines, made potions from sperm, which were given to sick or dying members of the tribe. In addition he mentions the Manicheans and the Albigensians, who sprinkled the bread used for Holy Communion with human sperm. In the seventeenth century sperm was regarded as an effective defence against witchcraft and a precious aphrodisiac. The church, however, refused to tolerate it, and in his book Ellis records prison sentences of seven years for the offence.
According to reliable sources it is not unusual for young women today in a get-together in the pub to admit whether they ‘swallow’ or not. They’re not talking about E, amphetamines or suchlike, but whether or not they swallow sperm. There is some similarity between suckling and fellatio, between mother’s milk and sperm: just as an infant can taste whether its mother has eaten garlic, a woman who ‘swallows’ can taste the garlic that her partner has eaten the day before. Sperm is both stronger in flavour and more bitter if a man smokes and drinks a lot of coffee, while the sperm of vegetarians reputedly tastes better than that of carnivores. Kiwi fruit particularly are supposed to improve the flavour. A famous (male) Dutch comic duo felt that truly emancipated women should immediately spit the sperm out again. I can’t remember why, nor do I have any ready-made answer on the subject. I do know, though, that only three men in every thousand can suck themselves off.
While we are talking about ejaculation and secretion, this is the place to mention in passing the glands about which the English physician William Cowper was the first to publish in 1702, situated a little upstream of the prostate and also issuing into the urethra, which in a state of arousal produce the so-called preseminal fluid. In women the corresponding glands are named after the Danish researcher Bartholin (1585-1629).