Think About the 'Other' Sperm Cells

Not that I mean to fuck with anyone’s head ….. but I’ve been away for a week, and I’ve been thinking:

The average male ejaculation contains anywhere from 40 to 300 million sperm cells (I hope I haven’t offended or misgendered anyone by using the word ‘male’, I don’t believe it’s illegal yet). So let’s call it, I don’t know, say 170 million sperm cells per ejaculation. And the average bloke shags twice a week, so that would be 340 million sperm cells per week, or about 18 billion sperm cells a year, give or take one or two ….. per person.

And there are about four billion blokes on earth, all spunking quintillions of sperm cells every year. More sperm cells, in fact, than all the grains of sand in Arabia! And somehow you arrived on the planet. Following just one ejaculation you took your marks, said ‘Fuck it! I’m up for this!’ and GO, following a streamlined dive-start you set off on the biggest ever race of your life! No one knows how long you were swimming, probably somewhere between 15 minutes and 12 hours. But unbelievably, against 169,999,999 fellow competitors, and without any performance-enhancing drugs, you won the race! You fist-pumped the fallopian tubes, laughed at all the other sperm losers and entered the fallopian tube the victor

Of course, there are a lot of imponderables here, not least of which is that you could have ended up in someone’s bum, but maybe that’s a can of worms it’s best not to open.

But think of those quintillion sperm cells every year that don’t even get to live. Certainly those unborn ghosts include scientists greater than Nikola Tesla, poets and playwrights greater than Shakespeare, faster runners than Usain Bolt, greater composers than Beethoven or Mozart, deeper thinkers than Aristotle, Plato and Socrates combined, sexier birds than No-Knickers Nicky who works in our local café, better painters than Leonardo da Vinci or Vincent Van Gogh, better nurses than Florence Nightingale, better footballers than Cristiano Ronaldo, better boxers than Muhammad Ali, greater generals than Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, and no doubt people more evil than Joseph Stalin, Vlad the Impaler or even Keir Starmer.

But because they were shit swimmers they never got to live.

Isn’t that something? Yet against all the odds, such overwhelming odds, it’s you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We special few. We honoured few, who won the lottery of birth.

How dare we grumble and complain, or fear our eventual death, when the vast majority never even saw the light of day?