Coitus Interruptus Erroneous: Would You Believe That Pulling Out Actually Works?

By Andy Wright, AlterNet. Posted June 22, 2009.

Plug pre-ejaculate, or any of its nicknames, into a search engine with the word pregnancy, and page after page of search results informs the reader that even if the man succeeds in depositing the denouement of his sexual excitement outside the female anatomy, pre-ejaculate brimming with sperm will undo all good works.

Pre-ejaculate, also known as Cowper's fluid, is manufactured in the Cowper's gland (not the testes where semen originates), which is named for its discoverer, seventeenth century anatomist William Cowper. It was impossible for Cowper to know what a large amount of misinformation would be attached to his tiny gland. (He was no stranger to controversy, however. He was accused of plagiarizing chunks of his book Anatomy of the Humane Bodies from a Mr. Govard Bidloo. This controversy spurred the publishing of indignant pamphlets by both men.)

There are actually two Cowper's glands, which are held together and sit in something that sounds more like an It-bag than a part of the body, called the deep perineal pouch. Basically, it's in the butt. The job of these glands is to produce a viscous fluid during sexual arousal. The fluid lubricates the urethra, preparing the way for the semen that will follow. Small amounts of sperm found in precum are most likely picked up by the fluid when a man has recently had an orgasm and not urinated.

It's unclear exactly where the belief in sperm-filled pre-ejaculate originates, but it doesn't seem outlandish after looking at the work of early researchers of reproduction. Sperm reigned supreme. Many of them believed that making humans was a one-stop-shopping affair, with all the vital ingredients packed into the semen. Women were just the incubator. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a celebrated Dutch microscope maker and the first person to describe the spermatozoa of humans in November of 1677, went so far as to claim he had even seen nerves, arteries and veins in the stuff. (He later retracted this statement, but similar accounts popped up in other researchers' work.) It's not a great leap to assume that early scientists would ascribe import to anything that leaked from the male reproductive organ. A simple, helpful lubricant couldn't possibly flow from the font of life.

Fast forward to the present day, and all the misinformation and nay-saying about pulling out hasn't changed very much. Human sexuality textbooks used in colleges and written within the last five years still promote the idea that withdrawal doesn't work. "It is entirely possible for a woman to become pregnant," chirps the 2004 edition of Exploring Human Sexualty, "even if her male partner is certain that he "pulled out in time." That is why "withdrawal" as a form of birth control is really not birth control at all!" And really, who cares? What about AIDS? What about men who don't pull out on time? What of the bedspread, for that matter? When other forms of birth control are available, why resort to withdrawal? Maybe it's best for all concerned that everyone continues to think that pulling out doesn't prevent pregnancy.

But misinformation, even when it's spread around for everyone's own good, rarely ends up doing any, especially when it's tangled up with tired stereotypes.

Take for instance, the oft-repeated trope that men just can't be trusted to pull out. Jones, of the Guttmacher study, acknowledges that this is one reason withdrawal has such a bad name. She says, bluntly, "I think it's perpetuated by this idea that men are really sexual and all they want to do is have an orgasm, and you can't trust them to pay attention." In other words, boys will boys.

The same maxim has been used to justify a laundry list of societal ills, from binge drinking to sexual assault. This is not to say that all men can and should be trusted to pull out in time. But what if we actually expected them to? Assuming that all men have the control of boys is especially frustrating when, as Jones points out, "...a lot of women trust their male partners."

The cave-man theory has been a recurring theme in literature about withdrawal from the 1800's into the present, and the reason for its pervasiveness is one that even historians have a hard time putting their fingers on. "If I could answer that question I could be president of the world," says historian John D'Emilio, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. "...When you are writing and researching the history of sexuality it always seems that it's women's sexuality that keeps getting constructed and reconstructed and the model of male sexuality is always the same, that it's just this force waiting to be released."

See more stories tagged with: sex, gender, women, teens, men, withdrawal, relationships, sexuality, stis, casual sex, pulling out, one night stand

Andy Wright is a freelance writer in San Francisco. Her work has been published in the SF Weekly and Mother Jones online.

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