It might seem unlimited, but sperm is somewhat of a finite resource. Who’s to say guys won’t universally stop producing more semen tomorrow?
On a global level, that’s more of a sci-fi horror story than a concrete reality, but still — is it possible for someone to just… run out of sperm?
Well, kind of.
The average male body is constantly producing both semen and sperm, and it takes around 64 days for the testes to create a full-fledged sperm cell (which they do at a rate of about 1,500 per second). That’s a lot of sperm, but keep in mind that you release between 20 million and 300 million of them each time you ejaculate.
Meanwhile, it takes an estimated two weeks before any unused sperm gets broken down in the body and reabsorbed, meaning you may have around 14 days’ worth of sperm inside you at any given time. Thus, if you were both producing and releasing an average quantity of sperm each day, you’d need to cum around 14 times in a day before you “ran out” of sperm temporarily. Even then, with your body continuously making more sperm, you’d likely just release loads with whatever sperm you had left, though they’d be smaller than average.
Your refractory period might complicate things further. While we don’t actually understand the exact science behind the refractory period, we do know that it also lengthens with age. Most adults require at least 30 minutes in between rounds, a figure that likely extends as the number of rounds grows. So again, you’d need to be extremely strategic and extremely horny in order to run out of sperm in the short term.
In addition to your refractory period lengthening with age, your sperm production also plummets as you get older. Studies of how much sperm count decreases with age have been inconsistent, but they generally show that it drops continuously after the age of 45. Still, production doesn’t stop entirely. There have been men who father children well into their 90s, so you’re likely to always have a few determined swimmers in your saggy balls, even as you near death.
In fact, the biggest age-related impediment here would probably be erectile dysfunction. After age 40, your odds of developing ED are 40 percent, and this increases by an additional 10 percent with each passing decade. You’re far more likely to “run out of sperm” as you get older, strictly in the sense that you may have more difficulty performing the acts necessary to release said sperm into the wild. Though again, your testicles would still be producing it, so you’re never really bereft.
Save for people with vasectomies or azoospermia, a condition impacting one percent of men that causes semen production with exactly zero sperm, there aren’t really any situations in which you’d just cum all the semen you could possibly ever cum in your lifetime. You might be able to cum so many times in a day that you don’t release anything at all, and whatever you do manage to ejaculate would contain far less sperm than usual, but it would take some serious effort to truly deplete yourself, and it seems kind of pointless, anyway.
Unless, of course, you have word that everyone with a Y chromosome is going to die in 24 hours. In that case, please jack off as much as possible and store it in your freezer so that humanity can soldier on.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
