A Seminal Event in Urban Legends

There is an urban legend that goes like this:

"Did you hear about [popular rock star]? He got sick and had to be rushed to the hospital. They had to pump his stomach and they found out it had a gallon of semen in it!"

I heard this story in the late 1980's and even though I was no skeptic back then, I still thought the story sounded fishy. I didn't have the resources like www.snopes.com to look up the facts, or the proper reference materials to work out the logistics of such a ridiculous claim.

But I do now. And while Snopes does a nice job of explaining that yes, this is an urban legend, I think a little "show your work" might have been in order. Let's do it here. Right here - right now!

What are the logistics of such a fellatious feat? What do we need to know to figure out whether this story is even possible?

If we go with the most common version of the story that I've heard, we're dealing with a gallon of semen. Snopes mentions 7 ounces, 1 gallon and 10 gallons.

OK, then what's the capacity of the human stomach?

According to my research the human stomach can hold around a liter of food, but can be distended to hold up to 4 liters. (A discomfortable thought.) It turns out that 1 gallon is equal to 3.79 liters - which is very close to the maximum capacity of a stomach. If our story were true, this seems the most likely quantity of man juice. (10 gallons has to be discarded as a hypothesis because it exceeds the maximum possible stomach capacity.)

How big are these numbers?

7 oz = .21 liters = 14 tablespoons
1 gallon = 3.79 liters = 256 tablespoons

According to my research on semen volume, the average ejaculation contains about 5cc of semen.

If the 7 oz story were correct, that would equate to 210 cc - or 42 loads of sploodge.

If the 1 gallon story were correct?
1 liter = 1000 cc
3.79 liters = 3790 cc
3790/5 = 758 ejaculations worth of semen.

If each man came but once into [famous rock star]'s mouth - that's a lot of guys to have to keep a pretty shocking secret. (And it's a long wait in line, too.)

We can presume the real premise of the story is that [famous rock star] is secretly gay and has these huge man orgies where he gives mouth-service to a long line of gentlemen callers. (Snopes calls it a "sour grapes" story.)

Mathematically, the story is just silly. 758 guys didn't stand in line for this. If each oral service session that [famous rock star] had to give lasted a mere 5 minutes, it would take more than 2 and a half days of non-stop sucking. (758 x 5 = 3790 minutes ... 3790 min/60 = 63.16 hours ... 63.16/24 = 2.63 days)

I don't care how dedicated you are, nobody can stay awake sucking cocks for 2.6 days. You have to stop to sleep every now and then, and sooner or later your mouth would get dry or you'd need to go take dump... It's just not feasible.

758 men would probably have difficulty standing in line for 2.6 days too. Of course they could come in shifts.

OK - what if it wasn't other men's sploodge? Like what if [famous rock star] did drink a gallon of semen, but it was his own? Is that possible? Well, based on the 5 cc baseline, if [famous rock star] masturbated once per day into a gallon container, he could achieve the required 758 ejaculations in just over 2 years. Not a completely impossible task, but one wonders whether the 5 cc average could be maintained with a daily ejaculation? (Thanks to alert reader Jeremy for catching my previous math mistake.)

So, the bottom line is that we can safely presume this story to be false, because if it were true over 2.6 days the semen being ingested would be digested and there wouldn't be a gallon of the stuff to pump out at the ER.

But what if it were just 7 oz? That's still 42 loads of sploodge. At 5 mins per blowjob, that still takes [famous rock star] 3 and a half hours of marathon blow job delivery. I suspect there might possibly be people out there who could blow 42 guys in a setting - but [famous rock star] is not one of them. Next time you hear this story or any version of it, you can say, "that story is logistically unlikely to be true." After all, just because you think [famous rock star]'s music sucks, it doesn't necessarily mean that he himself sucks.

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