The Sexually Functioning Man

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YOU MEAN THINGS HAVE TO WORK RIGHT?

The erectile tissue in the penis is independent of the reproductive function of the body. The penis can be stimulated to have an erection sometimes just by thinking about it. But you have to have testosterone to have an erection.

Unlike women, who need more sexual stimulation for arousal and orgasm, men do not. To have an enjoyable sexual experience, it's nice to have great foreplay, but it's not necessary for a man to have prolonged foreplay to have an erection and orgasm. In fact it takes an experienced man to prolong his orgasm to give his partner pleasure - and to enjoy all the sensations of his body aroused.

It takes sperm to produce a pregnancy. It takes several glands to get the mature sperm from the testes to the end of the urethra in the ejaculate (cum). Men can get an erection and not produce an ejaculate.

How Your Body Works

The testes is where sperm are formed. The new sperm travel through the epididymis, behind each testis, where they mature. The mature sperm travel through a tube called the vas deferens through the seminal vesicle, a sac near the bladder. In the seminal vesicle, semen is added. The semen-sperm mixture (ejaculate) passes through the prostate and joins the urethra. The ejaculate travels through the urethra (the tube that carries urine from the bladder to the end of the penis), and is discharged.

Contrary to women, who produce an egg a month, men are capable of producing billions of sperm. A healthy man can produce about 1000 sperm per minute in the seminiferous tubules. Even though the numbers can decrease after the age of forty, men are capable of producing sperm from puberty well into life. Men can be fathers in their eighties and nineties. Cary Grant and Charlie Chaplin are good examples of that.

Men are born with immature sperm cells called spermatogonia. At puberty, the pituitary gland produces the exact same two hormones, FSH and LH, that it produces in women. However, the effect in men is very different. One causes the testes to produce the male hormone testosterone, which is required for sperm to mature and for the sex organs to become fully operational. A healthy young man can produce about 1,000 sperm per minute and they are produced in the part of the testes called the seminiferous tubules. Each ejaculation contains roughly 500 million sperm. However, about half of these have some defect that render them incapable of fertilizing an egg. The more frequent the ejaculation, the less sperm in each ejaculate.

Sperm can live in the vagina, cervix, uterus and fallopian tubes for up to five days. Only a few hundred of the 250 million healthy sperm reach the egg. It takes about two hours to make the entire journey to the egg; however, some sperm are Olympic swimmers and can reach the egg in a half an hour.

The sperm are made capable of fertilizing an egg by substances found in the cervix, uterus and fallopian tubes. If no egg is available to fertilize, the sperm swim around patiently waiting to bump into one. Because there is no chemical or physical attraction of the sperm for the egg, the sperm literally must bump into the egg.

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