If men are skilled at anything, it’s the ability to turn absolutely nothing into a competition. From ‘rawdogging‘ air travel (i.e. competitively going a whole flight without eating, sleeping or doing anything fun), to the whole biohacking craze—men love to take something normal and make it, well, weird. Their latest venture? Sperm racing.
A group of young men in the United States have reportedly invented competitive sperm racing, where they put two semen samples head to head under a microscope, and see which has faster sperm. Per the Sperm Racing website, they’ve invented a “microscopic racetrack that mimics the reproductive system”, complete with hi-res cameras for our viewing pleasure. Add in live-streaming capabilities and a leaderboard, and bob’s your uncle—we have a sport!
To be honest, I’m still not entirely sure it’s not a joke. (If it is: Congratulations, it’s pretty funny.) But The Cut ran an article about them raising US $1.5million for their new sporting venture, and their Instagram has a trailer for the first “fight” to take place next week. They’re even selling tickets for anyone who wants to watch it all unfold at the Hollywood Palladium.
But, hey, if you were thinking this was just about guys with too much time on their hands, trying to find a productive outlet for their masturbatory urges—you would be wrong! There is altruism beneath it all!
The Sperm Racing manifesto (indeed, the what?) claims the sport serves to spotlight the underserved issue of men’s declining fertility.
To be fair, in some lights, male fertility is a cause worthy of attention. Unfortunately, it is not this light.
To begin, it seems these enterprising young upstarts (some of whom are still teenagers) have discovered something that is new information to them (declining male fertility), and figured the reason they’ve never heard of it before is because nobody is talking about it. It couldn’t possibly be because, oh, they just learned something new? There could even be many, very qualified people who know a lot about male fertility—and we bet they would love $1.5 million to help their cause.
Unfortunately, one also can’t talk about ‘sperm racing’—an idea conceived by young men working in tech and finance—without touching on the tech world’s booming obsession with fertility, as modelled most efficiently and disturbingly by the industry’s marsupial-faced poster boy, Elon Musk. As far as we know, Musk has at least 14 children but aspires to a “legion-level” of offspring “before the apocalypse comes”. It’s all tied to his perceived idea of an underpopulation crisis, and probably more so to his desire to contribute to a master race, one he believes will help populate Mars. While Sperm Racing has no direct ties with Musk (that we know of…), fertility conversations in the tech world are certainly hard to view in isolation of his influence. And making biological functionality into a competitive sport does contain a whiff of the same doctrine.
However, if we were to give Sperm Racing the benefit of the doubt and assume it was genuinely interested in helping men with their fertility journeys, the question then becomes whether the best place to broach this chat is in a stadium full of presumably raging fans?
Far from the goals of its founders, not only could sperm racing not be very interesting (the sperm could just flub around, chase their tails and die), we could also end up with some very upset young men who’ve just found out they have slow sperm in front of a stadium full of people. Let’s hope part of that $1.5million is set aside for trauma counselling. Perhaps for us all.
