9 ms·

The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand

70 points by aerophilic 6y ago

ilovefood 6y ago
This was a great and fascinating read. The final sentence made me spit my tea out. Tremendous reporting quality!
- dvaun 6y ago
  There were plenty of great moments throughout the article. This in particular cracked me up: > Others advertise their smarts. John in Arizona wrote: “I have a 1,400 chess rating and am an analyst. I have a peaceful demeanor and high spirits. I exercise regularly, prefer rollerblades.”
  - gamegoblin 6y ago
    This one is a little Dunning–Kruger-y to me. The range from 1400-1800 is mostly full of people who play casually but don't seriously train to become better. You can beat any friends who just happen to know the rules, but are at the very bottom tier of people who play regularly. Saying that one is a 1400 player would be like someone who goes on a 5km jog around the neighborhood once or twice a week talking up their running ability. Sure, it's nice to be in slighty-above-average shape, but it's not really notable.
    - lwigo 6y ago
      Most Americans have no idea, even after Queens Gambit.
    - whymauri 6y ago
      I think that's what adds to the humor.
    - thisisnico 6y ago
      Doing a 5k jog twice a week would be decently above average, since the average is so incredibly low IMO, after a while you'll get into pretty decent shape. But I wouldn't call myself a runner.
      - gamegoblin 6y ago
        It's decently above average, just like being 1400 in chess is decently above average -- because the average person doesn't play chess at all. But like the average person could work up to doing a 5kg jog twice a week with a few months of moderate practice (see the couch to 5k program), so too could they become 1400 in chess.
    - yrimaxi 6y ago
      In his defense, he only wanted to impress someone so much that they would want to impregnate themselves with his seed, not do something impossible like impress the HN readership.
thursday0987 6y ago
morality aside, the men who donate sperm will have an outsize influence on the genetic diversity of our species. Think ghengis khan except on a smaller scale. also interesting to think about the implications on human evolution over long periods of time: will humans still have a 50:50 gender ratio of men to women? seems like sperm donation facilitates a much lower number of men required to maintain populations. will humans still desire relationships with the other gender, or will we be more like bears (men show up for 20 minutes, do the deed, then don't help raise the kids)? lots of interesting implications to consider.
- mpalczewski 6y ago
  In general 50:50 ratio is observed in most species even with great variability in male reproductive success because the expectation for offspring is equal between male and female so the selection pressure generally keeps it close to 50.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    > the expectation for offspring is equal between male and female so the selection pressure generally keeps it close to 50 It's the other way around: the selection pressure drives the expected offspring to become equal. The expected offspring for an individual of a certain gender is (total offspring)/(number of individuals of that gender). The fewer individuals of one gender there are, the higher the expected offspring and the greater the selective pressure to produce more offspring of that gender. So the gender ratio is self-stabilizing.
    - FabHK 6y ago
      This is really a quite surprising and profound fact, worth pondering. Naively, one would think that if you have (in some antediluvian setting) village A with 50 men and 50 women, and village B with 10 men and 90 women (and children born with that gender ratio, respectively), that village B could "produce" way more offspring and grow faster. A naive "group selection" view of evolution might even predict something like that to happen. But, in village B, there is an incentive, so to speak, to cheat and have boys at a higher ratio, because that would increase expected total number of offspring. So, the gender ratio stabilises around 50/50 - a Nash equilibrium, if you will.
blueyes 6y ago
Why let the facts get in the way of a good story? Nellie Bowles good stories...
rvr_ 6y ago
Cutting the middle man => having sex with some random dude who created an FB group.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Pictures at various times during their youth, vacations, with family members, and proof of employment by being on a selective school/employer’s website may very well be less random than taking a sperm bank’s word for it.
  - teachrdan 6y ago
    Who's going to validate all that information? I would assume a (hypothetical) impartial third party who's paid by the sperm buyer. That same third party might even offer services like testing the sperm for diseases, storing it for future use if the donor travels, etc. Which is basically reinventing a sperm bank.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      The person receiving the sperm would be the person spending their time sifting through the donor’s social media for proof. The comment I responded to referred to cutting out middlemen and meeting with the donors directly.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  As mentioned in the article, most men only offer AI.
  - gautamcgoel 6y ago
    Took me a moment to parse that acronym. AI = artificial insemination.
    - ilovefood 6y ago
      Why do you assume that? It could also be that they provide a whitepaper and complementary pytorch model along with the service ;-)
ianhawes 6y ago
This is a net positive considering the US population growth rate is declining.
- astura 6y ago
  Why is population growth a net positive?
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    Maybe the parent was talking about how artificial insemination might stem decline, not necessary about how it can grow the population. For example, artificial insemination might help the population remain unchanging.
- d1zzy 6y ago
  Easy solution: allow for more immigration :)
jslakro 6y ago
Pandemials
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Melting_Harps 6y ago
We really are heading into some Brave New World situation, aren't we? With that said, I recently used a sperm freezing service as I refuse to have children under the current circumstances (but wish to do so in the future) and this was always one of my concerns: that the business 'fails' and gets bought out by a large corp and my sample is just another asset on their balance sheet, so the vulture/disaster capitalism model is to take it as it assumes all liabilities and tries to recover its 'investment' and finds a certain Market need. This pandemic baby model driven by low sperm access only proves why that would be a likely scenario after all, at the time I only had a very unsettling sense of unwarranted paranoia to back it up. I'm not into online dating, as I need more bio-feedback than an online profile to even consider a woman as a possible partner, but hasn't the advent of tinder like apps pretty much made a 'Sperm donor' a SaaS? > This is a net positive considering the US population is declining at an alarming rate. I disagree, I think that growth should be curtailed far more this will allow us to implement a better system rather with a less messy transition than to breed only to throw more fodder into the pitfalls of our current casino, rent seeking, war addled, gig-economy mess of a system. Anyone who has any experience living even remotely in that system often feels the same, hence why so many people even in developed countries with good jobs and partners opt for dogs instead of children these days. I attribute it to the same reaction mechanisms you see with people in tech who work at Social media corps and do not allow their children to use the very same products they work on.
robertlagrant 6y ago
This could result in some crazy cat-fishing stories in 9 months.
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
I've never understood sperm donation. Isn't a child of a sperm or egg donor biologically the child of that donor? Why then do the donor not have rights to even so much as visit the kid? I get that they get paid to waive those rights, but if they regret later and pay back the money they don't regain the right yeah? I don't know why that situation worries me but it does...
nostromo 6y ago
Don't start selling your sperm on a FB group without a good lawyer -- you may accidentally make yourself a legal guardian and be required to pay child support. Don't start buying sperm without a good lawyer either. In some states, the sperm donor may legally request custody or visitation rights. Family law is different in each state, making this a thorny issue. For example, Arizona's law states that a surrogate mother is the presumed mother of any baby she births. And if she's married to a man, her husband is the father. Making a contract that says otherwise in Arizona is not legally recognized. So... very few people choose surrogates in Arizona.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Surrogacy and sperm donation aside, in many states, the husband is legally the father, even if a paternity test shows otherwise, leading to men who divorce their cheating spouses being on the hook for financially supporting the result of the affair.
  - thisisnico 6y ago
    That is truly a nightmare situation that would drive me to suicide. I couldn't imagine a more horrible situation to be in.
    - jdeibele 6y ago
      It seems like a terrible situation to me. My wife, who's an attorney, says that the law is for the benefit of the child. Better to have somebody helping pay child support as well as the mother. Those laws were passed before DNA testing. It seems like they could be updated for that.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        > Better to have somebody helping pay child support as well as the mother. I think a better solution is taxpayers shouldering the burden than punishing an innocent individual (actually a victim).
jedberg 6y ago
> A donor on Known Donor Registry told me that he used to donate to a big sperm bank but that it was too clinical and cold. I can empathize with that. We did IVF, so I had to go through the same process a sperm donor goes through. It's quite clinical and not really very enjoyable.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Do they not have machines in US like china? 0] https://youtu.be/QAZfHHi58AU https://youtu.be/QAZfHHi58AU
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Sadly no. Just CRTs with DVD players and plastic chairs with puppy pads.
fsdfgsfsdfsdfsd 6y ago
Almost every man will be an incel in the near future.
beefman 6y ago
https://archive.is/3AFf6 https://archive.is/3AFf6
LockAndLol 6y ago
But... why? Why would you, in the middle of a pandemic, be emboldened to have a child? Did the financial situation of people wanting artificial insemination improve? Did it get harder to adopt? Are people loving their partners *more* thanks to the pandemic? Has seeing other people struggle being locked in with kids created a wish to personally replicate the same? Very curious...
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  A lot of women (millions in the West) are "ageing out" of their eggs during the lockdown because feminists told them school and career were the only priorities in life. IVF is their last shot if they're still single at 35 now. They're literally panicking.
Bakary 6y ago
There are many aspects to sperm donation that hit a raw social/emotional/cultural/instinctual nerve. — There is massive demand for sperm from desirable men but zero demand for undesirable men. There is only a shortage because clients are wholly uninterested in most sperm. This is a reminder of natural behaviors, but made more explicit when society used to soften the blow until now. If in the future, undesirable men have fewer and fewer occasions to reproduce, and are rejected more and more explicitly through increasingly online and impersonal services, this might probably lead to social unrest. — The anxiety of not seeing your genes passed on. Even if you have an existentialist mindset, it can affect you on a fundamental level. I saw a comment on the NY Times section of a person saying their excellent genes might die with them. But isn't the possibility to reproduce the fundamental, inevitable benchmark for the worth of genes, by definition? It does invoke a strange impression that Isaac Newton not reproducing does imply a certain failure on an important criteria compared to a junkie having many children. — From a Darwinian perspective, donating sperm to many different women but not having to expend any energy raising them is probably the ideal. Of course, from a cultural perspective it's frowned upon. Some of these donors are probably more genetically successful than many kings and conquerors of the past. — The complex feelings successful donors experience as a result of all of this — The clash of morality and Darwinian success. Most commenters on the Times noted the number of foster children awaiting care. But to me, that sounded completely tone deaf. The drive to reproduce is something so raw and fundamental that you'll have a hard time convincing people not to do it in exchange for fulfilling some vague moral appeal. Ironically, the ones who listen to this brand of morality and opt to raise another person's child will be rewarded by not passing on their genes. Conversely, adulterous people who employ to cuckoo tactic or parents who abandon their child for adoption are rewarded for it. Their personality and decision style passes on.
jaygray0919 6y ago
Seems like eugenics to me. Isn't this mengele-redux; DNA-based population management?

70 points by aerophilic 6y ago

ilovefood 6y ago

This was a great and fascinating read. The final sentence made me spit my tea out. Tremendous reporting quality!

dvaun 6y ago
There were plenty of great moments throughout the article. This in particular cracked me up: > Others advertise their smarts. John in Arizona wrote: “I have a 1,400 chess rating and am an analyst. I have a peaceful demeanor and high spirits. I exercise regularly, prefer rollerblades.”
- gamegoblin 6y ago
  This one is a little Dunning–Kruger-y to me. The range from 1400-1800 is mostly full of people who play casually but don't seriously train to become better. You can beat any friends who just happen to know the rules, but are at the very bottom tier of people who play regularly. Saying that one is a 1400 player would be like someone who goes on a 5km jog around the neighborhood once or twice a week talking up their running ability. Sure, it's nice to be in slighty-above-average shape, but it's not really notable.
  - lwigo 6y ago
    Most Americans have no idea, even after Queens Gambit.
  - whymauri 6y ago
    I think that's what adds to the humor.
  - thisisnico 6y ago
    Doing a 5k jog twice a week would be decently above average, since the average is so incredibly low IMO, after a while you'll get into pretty decent shape. But I wouldn't call myself a runner.
    - gamegoblin 6y ago
      It's decently above average, just like being 1400 in chess is decently above average -- because the average person doesn't play chess at all. But like the average person could work up to doing a 5kg jog twice a week with a few months of moderate practice (see the couch to 5k program), so too could they become 1400 in chess.
  - yrimaxi 6y ago
    In his defense, he only wanted to impress someone so much that they would want to impregnate themselves with his seed, not do something impossible like impress the HN readership.

thursday0987 6y ago

morality aside, the men who donate sperm will have an outsize influence on the genetic diversity of our species. Think ghengis khan except on a smaller scale. also interesting to think about the implications on human evolution over long periods of time: will humans still have a 50:50 gender ratio of men to women? seems like sperm donation facilitates a much lower number of men required to maintain populations. will humans still desire relationships with the other gender, or will we be more like bears (men show up for 20 minutes, do the deed, then don't help raise the kids)? lots of interesting implications to consider.

mpalczewski 6y ago
In general 50:50 ratio is observed in most species even with great variability in male reproductive success because the expectation for offspring is equal between male and female so the selection pressure generally keeps it close to 50.
- yorwba 6y ago
  > the expectation for offspring is equal between male and female so the selection pressure generally keeps it close to 50 It's the other way around: the selection pressure drives the expected offspring to become equal. The expected offspring for an individual of a certain gender is (total offspring)/(number of individuals of that gender). The fewer individuals of one gender there are, the higher the expected offspring and the greater the selective pressure to produce more offspring of that gender. So the gender ratio is self-stabilizing.
  - FabHK 6y ago
    This is really a quite surprising and profound fact, worth pondering. Naively, one would think that if you have (in some antediluvian setting) village A with 50 men and 50 women, and village B with 10 men and 90 women (and children born with that gender ratio, respectively), that village B could "produce" way more offspring and grow faster. A naive "group selection" view of evolution might even predict something like that to happen. But, in village B, there is an incentive, so to speak, to cheat and have boys at a higher ratio, because that would increase expected total number of offspring. So, the gender ratio stabilises around 50/50 - a Nash equilibrium, if you will.

blueyes 6y ago

Why let the facts get in the way of a good story? Nellie Bowles good stories...

rvr_ 6y ago

Cutting the middle man => having sex with some random dude who created an FB group.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
Pictures at various times during their youth, vacations, with family members, and proof of employment by being on a selective school/employer’s website may very well be less random than taking a sperm bank’s word for it.
- teachrdan 6y ago
  Who's going to validate all that information? I would assume a (hypothetical) impartial third party who's paid by the sperm buyer. That same third party might even offer services like testing the sperm for diseases, storing it for future use if the donor travels, etc. Which is basically reinventing a sperm bank.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    The person receiving the sperm would be the person spending their time sifting through the donor’s social media for proof. The comment I responded to referred to cutting out middlemen and meeting with the donors directly.
saagarjha 6y ago
As mentioned in the article, most men only offer AI.
- gautamcgoel 6y ago
  Took me a moment to parse that acronym. AI = artificial insemination.
  - ilovefood 6y ago
    Why do you assume that? It could also be that they provide a whitepaper and complementary pytorch model along with the service ;-)

ianhawes 6y ago

This is a net positive considering the US population growth rate is declining.

astura 6y ago
Why is population growth a net positive?
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  Maybe the parent was talking about how artificial insemination might stem decline, not necessary about how it can grow the population. For example, artificial insemination might help the population remain unchanging.
d1zzy 6y ago
Easy solution: allow for more immigration :)

jslakro 6y ago

Pandemials

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Melting_Harps 6y ago

We really are heading into some Brave New World situation, aren't we? With that said, I recently used a sperm freezing service as I refuse to have children under the current circumstances (but wish to do so in the future) and this was always one of my concerns: that the business 'fails' and gets bought out by a large corp and my sample is just another asset on their balance sheet, so the vulture/disaster capitalism model is to take it as it assumes all liabilities and tries to recover its 'investment' and finds a certain Market need. This pandemic baby model driven by low sperm access only proves why that would be a likely scenario after all, at the time I only had a very unsettling sense of unwarranted paranoia to back it up. I'm not into online dating, as I need more bio-feedback than an online profile to even consider a woman as a possible partner, but hasn't the advent of tinder like apps pretty much made a 'Sperm donor' a SaaS? > This is a net positive considering the US population is declining at an alarming rate. I disagree, I think that growth should be curtailed far more this will allow us to implement a better system rather with a less messy transition than to breed only to throw more fodder into the pitfalls of our current casino, rent seeking, war addled, gig-economy mess of a system. Anyone who has any experience living even remotely in that system often feels the same, hence why so many people even in developed countries with good jobs and partners opt for dogs instead of children these days. I attribute it to the same reaction mechanisms you see with people in tech who work at Social media corps and do not allow their children to use the very same products they work on.

robertlagrant 6y ago

This could result in some crazy cat-fishing stories in 9 months.

notsureaboutpg 6y ago

I've never understood sperm donation. Isn't a child of a sperm or egg donor biologically the child of that donor? Why then do the donor not have rights to even so much as visit the kid? I get that they get paid to waive those rights, but if they regret later and pay back the money they don't regain the right yeah? I don't know why that situation worries me but it does...

nostromo 6y ago

Don't start selling your sperm on a FB group without a good lawyer -- you may accidentally make yourself a legal guardian and be required to pay child support. Don't start buying sperm without a good lawyer either. In some states, the sperm donor may legally request custody or visitation rights. Family law is different in each state, making this a thorny issue. For example, Arizona's law states that a surrogate mother is the presumed mother of any baby she births. And if she's married to a man, her husband is the father. Making a contract that says otherwise in Arizona is not legally recognized. So... very few people choose surrogates in Arizona.

aidenn0 6y ago
Surrogacy and sperm donation aside, in many states, the husband is legally the father, even if a paternity test shows otherwise, leading to men who divorce their cheating spouses being on the hook for financially supporting the result of the affair.
- thisisnico 6y ago
  That is truly a nightmare situation that would drive me to suicide. I couldn't imagine a more horrible situation to be in.
  - jdeibele 6y ago
    It seems like a terrible situation to me. My wife, who's an attorney, says that the law is for the benefit of the child. Better to have somebody helping pay child support as well as the mother. Those laws were passed before DNA testing. It seems like they could be updated for that.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      > Better to have somebody helping pay child support as well as the mother. I think a better solution is taxpayers shouldering the burden than punishing an innocent individual (actually a victim).

jedberg 6y ago

> A donor on Known Donor Registry told me that he used to donate to a big sperm bank but that it was too clinical and cold. I can empathize with that. We did IVF, so I had to go through the same process a sperm donor goes through. It's quite clinical and not really very enjoyable.

searchableguy 6y ago
Do they not have machines in US like china? 0] https://youtu.be/QAZfHHi58AU https://youtu.be/QAZfHHi58AU
- jedberg 6y ago
  Sadly no. Just CRTs with DVD players and plastic chairs with puppy pads.

fsdfgsfsdfsdfsd 6y ago

Almost every man will be an incel in the near future.

beefman 6y ago

https://archive.is/3AFf6 https://archive.is/3AFf6

LockAndLol 6y ago

But... why? Why would you, in the middle of a pandemic, be emboldened to have a child? Did the financial situation of people wanting artificial insemination improve? Did it get harder to adopt? Are people loving their partners *more* thanks to the pandemic? Has seeing other people struggle being locked in with kids created a wish to personally replicate the same? Very curious...

redis_mlc 6y ago
A lot of women (millions in the West) are "ageing out" of their eggs during the lockdown because feminists told them school and career were the only priorities in life. IVF is their last shot if they're still single at 35 now. They're literally panicking.

Bakary 6y ago

There are many aspects to sperm donation that hit a raw social/emotional/cultural/instinctual nerve. — There is massive demand for sperm from desirable men but zero demand for undesirable men. There is only a shortage because clients are wholly uninterested in most sperm. This is a reminder of natural behaviors, but made more explicit when society used to soften the blow until now. If in the future, undesirable men have fewer and fewer occasions to reproduce, and are rejected more and more explicitly through increasingly online and impersonal services, this might probably lead to social unrest. — The anxiety of not seeing your genes passed on. Even if you have an existentialist mindset, it can affect you on a fundamental level. I saw a comment on the NY Times section of a person saying their excellent genes might die with them. But isn't the possibility to reproduce the fundamental, inevitable benchmark for the worth of genes, by definition? It does invoke a strange impression that Isaac Newton not reproducing does imply a certain failure on an important criteria compared to a junkie having many children. — From a Darwinian perspective, donating sperm to many different women but not having to expend any energy raising them is probably the ideal. Of course, from a cultural perspective it's frowned upon. Some of these donors are probably more genetically successful than many kings and conquerors of the past. — The complex feelings successful donors experience as a result of all of this — The clash of morality and Darwinian success. Most commenters on the Times noted the number of foster children awaiting care. But to me, that sounded completely tone deaf. The drive to reproduce is something so raw and fundamental that you'll have a hard time convincing people not to do it in exchange for fulfilling some vague moral appeal. Ironically, the ones who listen to this brand of morality and opt to raise another person's child will be rewarded by not passing on their genes. Conversely, adulterous people who employ to cuckoo tactic or parents who abandon their child for adoption are rewarded for it. Their personality and decision style passes on.

jaygray0919 6y ago

Seems like eugenics to me. Isn't this mengele-redux; DNA-based population management?