I Had a Vasectomy, But the Excesses of Modern Pornography Made Me Sterile

NSFW + TMI Warning: If you want to avoid reading about sex, male sexuality, and male reproductive health, then don’t read this essay. Seriously.

My wife and I had a pregnancy scare back in January. She was more than a week late and we had reached the point of periconception known in unplanned pregnancy circles as “shitting ourselves.”

At the ages of 52 and 43, children are decidedly no longer in our plans. We met and married later in life, so we always had a smallish window if we wanted to have kids. It was something we considered initially, but kept delaying due to health issues, financial limitations, and broader concerns about the world we would be leaving to our children.

The cost of childcare was a considerable concern. Our families aren’t around to help care for a new baby. My parents moved back to New Hampshire after my dad retired, and my wife’s parents moved to North Carolina following my father-in-law’s retirement. That meant we would need to go down to one income or pay for childcare if we were to have a kid. That was not doable.

Eventually, we decided that having kids didn’t make sense for us. It felt like a momentous decision, but in the end, it was rather simple. The conversation occurred during a car ride home from New Hampshire to New Jersey after a visit with my parents. This was before COVID… probably 2018, so I would have been 46, and the thought of chasing after a toddler at 50 years old—a toddler I couldn’t give back to someone else at the end of the day—was not really to my liking. My wife had concerns about what pregnancy hormones could do to her mental health. Additionally, there were the financial expenses and related childcare concerns, a point that was driven home during the 6+ hour ride back from my parents’ place. And honestly, that’s the easy drive. My in-laws are 13 hours away.

Our discussion wasn’t long, and I think we both felt a sense of peace afterward. All of a sudden, a looming biological deadline had disappeared. It was freeing in a way. Our decision was also eased along because we are friendly with several couples who have chosen to remain childless. Now we were formally among their number.

During that car ride, there was some brief discussion about reproductive health issues. My wife was on birth control, but did she want to continue to be for the foreseeable future? I mentioned a vasectomy, but I told her the thought of that seemed really final, even though the procedure is reversible. I was ready to declare I wasn’t having kids, but I wasn’t ready to ensure it. Also, the thought of someone taking a scalpel or laser to my balls was… unpleasant.

My wife suggested getting her tubes tied, but I’d always heard that was a more invasive and risky procedure than vasectomy, so we nixed that idea. We opted to table the discussion on reproductive health for another day. My wife would remain on birth control for the time being.

And so things remained for the next several years, until our potential mishap in January prompted us back into discussion.

My wife again put tubal ligation on the table. I still disliked the idea, but clearly, oral contraception had some risks. And we didn’t want to return to using physical methods of contraception. Hell, getting rid of the condoms was one of the perks of being in a committed, monogamous relationship. So, I sucked it up. I would get a vasectomy.

Vasectomy is a fairly minor procedure these days. I remember when my father had the procedure some 40-odd years ago, and it wasn’t a big deal then. I know plenty of other men who’ve also done the snip-snip without any trouble. Hell, I’d had something similar done to my male pets, and they seemed to be okay.

Once I got past the thought of someone operating on my testicles, it wasn’t that scary a prospect. The procedure is even simpler and less invasive than it has ever been. Now it's done laparoscopically and under local anesthesia. I was awake, fully aware, and fortunately quite numb throughout the entire process.

One thing that’s come out of this experience—I can identify now with what women go through when they’re propped up in the stirrups at the gyno’s office. It was a weird sensation, being fully dressed from neck to waist while my naked nether region shivered nervously beneath a thin sheet. The sheet certainly wasn’t for my warmth. Perhaps it was for modesty; mine more than the doctor’s, I’d wager. Because while I couldn’t see what was happening below my waist, when he walked in, he said hello and immediately peeked under the veil for a better look at my knish and kneidlach.¹

He peered at my genitalia for what I guess was a normal amount of time, complimented me on the closeness of my shaving, and then instructed me to slide my hairless manhood toward him.

“Scooch down,” he said. “Scooch. More. More. Good.”

I tried to control my feelings of self-consciousness by reminding myself that both he and the assisting nurse were medical professionals who had probably seen more penises than the combined cast of 17 seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race. This didn’t stop me from worrying that they were comparing my junk to the junk of every other male patient they had ever seen. I figured they must have a mental library of all the male sexual organs they’ve operated on, organized by some kind of Penile Dewey Decimal System.²

Despite the whispers of my neuroses, I was surprisingly calm as the doctor explained the procedure again, while rolling first one testis then the other between his fingers like a pimento-stuffed olive. Then, he began to engage me in polite conversation while he worked. It was a bit surreal having a full and active conversation with my doctor while he was playing laser tag in my scrotum. It was a bit like being at the dentist, except the metal instruments were between my legs rather than in my mouth.

At one point, he interrupted our conversation to ask, “Do you want to see what your vas looks like?”³

I was momentarily puzzled by his phrasing. I’d always heard these little sperm-funneling tubes referred to as the vas deferens, rather than the more diminutive and familiar vas. I guess after performing so many ectomies, he was on a first-name basis with the entire deferens family.

“Um sure, why the fuck not?” I responded.

Suddenly, there was a scalpel being held in front of my face with what appeared to be a tiny piece of cooked ramen noodle or vermicelli on the flat end.

This, of course, immediately made me think of the scene from The Lost Boys where Michael is in the cave with the vampire biker gang and Kiefer Sutherland hands him a carton of fried rice and tells him to eat it, but when Michael looks into the container, it’s full of writhing maggots instead of rice. Yeah, gross.

Then I briefly imagined being forced to eat my vas because that’s the type of thing my brain does to me. You’re welcome.

Following this intimate viewing experience, the doctor returned his attention to sterilizing me, and I went back to talking to him about Substack like nothing unusual had happened.

At one point, he apologized that things were taking so long down there. I have a “thick cord,” he told me, which made the procedure a bit more difficult. I don’t know what this means in terms of actual biology, but it sounded like he was telling me I was girthy, so I took it as a win.

A few minutes later, he asked if I wanted to see my other vas, an offer I couldn’t refuse, just in case it looked different from the first one. Sadly, it looked exactly the same. I briefly considered asking to take it home as a keepsake, but where exactly does one display that trophy? Could I arrange a vase full of vas, accented with peonies and baby’s breath? I’d call it my vase deferens.

And then we were done. The doctor helped me into a pair of compression shorts, gave me my follow-up care instructions (more on that momentarily), and sent me on my way.

I was sore for a couple of days following the procedure, but Advil and ice packs helped. As I said, it really wasn’t a big deal. I was even able to attend a local professional conference two days after the procedure.

However, the real fun of a vasectomy begins after a week of healing.

An important part of the follow-up process is ensuring there are no sperm remaining in the vas deferens post-surgery. In fact, a male isn’t considered sterile post-vasectomy until the doctor verifies that his pistol is out of ammo. If my wife and I were to have sex before confirming this, it could result in a pregnancy, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place. As my doctor explained it, the vas, when uncoiled, could each stretch for a foot or more. So even though they have been severed from my testes, there’s more than enough space in the disconnected tubes for millions of homeless sperm to hold a never-ending house party while they wait for me to get lucky again.

The solution to this problem, if you haven’t already guessed, is to pleasure oneself regularly and repeatedly until any leftover sperm has been thoroughly cleared. And I wasn’t assigned some random number of stroking sessions either. Apparently, there’s a scientific number of times one must masturbate post-vasectomy to empty the tubes. I was told I had to ejaculate 30 times over 4-5 weeks, after which point I was to provide a specimen to be analyzed by my doctor, who would let me know if all the swimmers had indeed left the pool.

This seemed a daunting task. When I was 15, I could have pulled off this feat in a week, but at 52, it just felt exhausting. Also, my wife and I can be pretty sporadic in our love making. We are very physically intimate and affectionate, but we’re not one of those couples who have sex daily, or even weekly, especially as we’ve grown older. As such, this cleansing of the pipes would require a good amount of auto-stimulation on my part.

This resulted in my having to view an unhealthy amount of internet pornography.

Now, I’m not a prude (OK, I’m kind of a prude, but I’ve loosened up with age). I’ve been viewing various forms of pornography since my pre-teen years, when a friend showed me a ragged, crumpled page torn from a Playboy magazine. And while I don’t love pornography, I’m not opposed to it entirely. Porn can have a place in consenting adult relationships and solo adventures. My wife and I have watched explicit videos and listened to sexually arousing stories read aloud as a form of foreplay and mood setting. If what I’m viewing involves adults, isn’t exploitative, or the result of coercion and manipulation—I believe these days they call that “ethical pornography”—I’m usually okay with it.

However, much of the video content I found online didn’t seem very ethical to me. It was decidedly more explicit, misogynistic, disturbing, and even violent than much of what I remember viewing as a teen and young adult. This was not erotica to me, it was a turn-off. If the vasectomy hadn’t successfully sterilized me, the excesses of modern pornography surely did.

I suppose every adult generation thinks that what teens are doing and watching now is worse than what the older generation was used to. I remember my father ranting about a Penthouse magazine my mother found in the house one day and the extremely explicit photographic layouts it contained.

“When I was a kid, they didn’t even show hair!” my father raged, the Brooklyn accent that surfaced when he became flustered in full effect. “Now the girls just sit there, with their legs open like THIS!” he bellowed, throwing his lower appendages wide in a V-shape. It was a classic moment in the Feldman household.

Of course, these days porno magazines are passé. The internet has replaced carefully curated magazines with an ocean of explicit images and videos. I didn’t want to clutter up my google search history with sexually-based searches, so I did most of my free porn surfing on the sites I was already familiar with—Pornhub and Redtube, which I have since learned are owned by the same parent company.

The video content displayed on the main landing pages of both sites was very similar in tone and style and clearly aimed at men: a smorgasbord of scantily clad women, large breasts, bare asses, and close up penetration scenes, interspersed with flashing ads promising hook-ups waiting just one town over, unending staying power, and an extra four inches in length, sometimes all in one ad.

I can only describe the experience of mandatory, medically ordered masturbation to these types of visuals as soul-sucking. It was forced self-flagellation. The whole experience left me feeling depressed and empty. It was not something that brought me fun or pleasure; it was mechanical and emotionless, like the videos I was watching.

One of the most common types of videos I encountered was the point-of-view video, where the guy films the scene from his perspective. The most common scenarios enacted seemed to be of the taboo fantasy variety: stepfather and stepdaughter, stepbrother and stepsister, guy who is seduced by his girlfriend’s teenage daughter... You know, the stuff that when it occurs in real life, we call rape and abuse.

Perhaps worse than that, though, were the sexual behaviors being presented as common or normal sexual acts in these videos. Almost every video, regardless of the “narrative” or set up, involved spitting, choking, gagging, and the brutalization of women. The new cool thing seems to be for the girls in the videos to roll their eyes into the back of their heads and loll their tongues like they’re dogs panting… or dead. I think it may be an anime or manga thing.

Look, I’m not trying to kink shame. I know consenting adults can get into some pretty outrageous behaviors for sexual play and gratification, but that’s not the type of stuff kids need to be using as their sexual training manuals.

I learned about sex and sexuality from peers, R-rated movies, and still photographs in magazines (Sorry, Dad, that five-minute sex talk didn’t do it). Sure, we spread all kinds of stupid misinformation amongst ourselves, and, yeah, we got ahead of ourselves and probably did way more than we should have at the age we did it. That’s what teens have always done in our modern world (OK, not me. I didn’t even make out with a girl until college).

But photographs and movie scenes only go so far before the rest is left to imagination. Meanwhile, the videos on the internet today present a constant and seemingly limitless stream of degrading and dehumanizing images that treat women as little more than objects for male sexual gratification.

Is this what impressionable teens are watching to learn about sex and sexuality? Do they think this is normal? Is Hawk Tuah Girl their role model?⁴

Hold on, because I’m about to get super graphic here—

When I see a video of a girl going down on a guy, and for most of the video she’s kneeling in front of him while he thrusts away relentlessly at her mouthhole… thaaaaat’s a woman being used as an object, not two people engaging in mutual play. And the girl in the scenario never looks like she’s enjoying herself—she’s just there to service the man. We’re watching something being done to someone, not done with someone. It’s the line between consent and coercion; between ecstasy and abuse.

If I had kids—which is decidedly unlikely now, unless the urologist screwed up—I’d want them to learn how to love and respect their partners. How to ask for consent. How to be truly intimate with another person and not just… ram them, for lack of better words. Some people like rough sex, and if both partners consent and are into it, then more power to them. Just because I’m fairly vanilla doesn’t mean everyone is. But kids starting their sexual education with this type of material? It’s like learning to mountain climb on Everest instead of a climbing wall at the gym. It’s buying your 6-year-old a Harley-Davidson instead of a Schwinn with training wheels.

A recent New York Times article, “The Delusion of Porn’s Harmlessness,” by Christine Emba, tackles this issue. Emba claims young men and young women are being trained by the hardcore porn industry “to see women as objects—as things to silence, restrain, fetishize or brutalize.”

She quotes one teenager who wrote in 2023, “The porn children view today makes Playboy look like an American Girl doll catalog.”

Emba is particularly worried about Gen Z. She notes they are the first generation to grow up alongside unlimited and easily accessible hardcore porn and to have their first experiences of sex shaped and mediated by it.

She also notes, “It’s hard not to see a connection between porn-trained behaviors—the choking, slapping, and spitting that have become the norm even in early sexual encounters—and young women’s distrust in young men.”

The impact of pornography on society is a complex and often controversial topic. But regardless of your stance towards porn, it’s hard to argue that there’s something not so good going on here. Hardcore porn is distorting sexual expectations, normalizing sexual violence and aggression, and contributing to the furthering of gender stereotypes and the objectification of women. It may be preventing our young people from developing true sexual closeness and intimacy.

But these things aren’t occurring in a vacuum. They are happening in the context of a social and political atmosphere that is likewise moving towards cruelty, dehumanization, and the degradation of others.

Consider the filthy propaganda video created during Kristi Noem’s visit to the CECOT detention facility in El Salvador. In it, Noem appears standing in front of a cell packed with dozens of shirtless, tattooed detainees, where she warns: "If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face… This facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people."

This is how media, pornographic or otherwise, tells us we should treat people. We use them as props. We show them in compromising positions. We celebrate their suffering. We erase their dignity.

An article in New Lines Magazine highlights another video, posted by the White House official Twitter/X account, entitled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”⁵ The article states:

The video featured rattling chains and handcuffs being placed on detainees. The Daily Beast called it “deportation porn” for its core message that placing “other human beings in chains makes us feel good.” An article from The Nation called the video “slavery porn,” lamenting how [Administration 47] is presenting the contents as “a model of what federal employees should be doing: stripping away the humanity and livelihoods of foreign-born people.”

In some ways, the violence, degradation, and misogyny present in modern hardcore porn is merely a reflection of a broader society that is becoming more callous, cruel, and dismissive of people and the human experience. It’s created a vast echo chamber repeating back at us over and over that certain lives have no value and certain people need to be subjugated, dominated, and oppressed. Pornography is just another place where this message is being transmitted.

Dehumanization is the preferred tactic of those seeking to exploit others for personal gain. We see it in the way the president and the MAGA faithful talk about immigrants, liberals, the impoverished, and anyone else who stands in the way of their goals. We see it in the indifference towards the suffering in Gaza, Sudan, and Myanmar. And we see it in the profit-driven internet porn industry that seems determined to cater to people’s most base desires and to make money off of the exploitation of not just young women, but children and underage teens, as well. Yes, despite, disclaimers to the contrary, a lot of online porn features underage persons.

Nicholas Kristof asks rhetorically in a recent New York Times Op Ed:

What goes through the minds of people working at porn companies profiting from videos of children being raped?

Thanks to a filing error in a Federal District Court in Alabama, releasing thousands of pages of internal documents from Pornhub that were meant to be sealed, we now know. The documents, mostly dating from 2020 or earlier, show some employees laughing off what’s on their site.

The article continues:

One internal document indicates that Pornhub as of May 2020 had 706,000 videos available on the site that had been flagged by users for depicting rape or assaults on children or for other problems. That was partly because, the documents suggest, Pornhub did not necessarily review a video for possible removal until it had been flagged at least 16 times. […] [These] documents lift the curtain on what the company was doing behind the scenes up to that point. And that was: a relentless pursuit of market share without much concern for the well-being of those in the videos. […] And there’s evidence that suggests that, despite changes in the past few years, Pornhub has not gone far enough in eliminating from the platform videos that appear to be of child rapes.

I’m not sure what to do about all of this. I’m at a loss for answers, but I feel like something needs to be done. Like Kristof, I suspect porn will always be with us. There will always be someone looking to make a quick buck by exploiting someone else. There will always be people who abuse the power they have over others. Some scumbags are always going to post revenge porn. Even with additional laws and regulations, I don’t see this problem going away.

Perhaps education and open conversation are the answers. I’m not a parent, but if I were, I think I would want to have a discussion with my children about pornography and the messaging it sends. The sex talk needs to be about more than just the birds, the bees, and the basic biology. It needs to be about consent. About how to treat a partner. About safe exploration. And about the problem with online material that presents degrading and dehumanizing behavior as a normal part of the sexual experience.

References:

D’Angelo, A. (April 14, 2025). Partners in Crime. New Lines Magazine. Retrieved from: https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/partners-in-crime/

Emba, C. (May 19, 2025). The Delusion of Porn’s Harmlessness. New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/opinion/pornography-harm-society.html?

Kristof, N. (May 10, 2025). These Internal Documents Show Why We Shouldn’t Trust Porn Companies. New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/opinion/pornhub-children-documents.html

This Week’s Moment of Unconditional Love

I’ve got an update on the scrawny little chicks I featured here last week. They’re all grown up now and have left the nest. My brother managed to get a picture of them a couple of days before they took flight. They’re so cute now! It’s amazing what some feathers can do. And now my mom can finally take down her winter wreath.

Your favorite furry (or feathered!) friends can be featured in the Moment of Unconditional Love, too. Just email photos to jeffreyafeldman2015@outlook.com. I’ll work them into the weekly mix, and just maybe, share a little something special about you and your animal friend, too. (Hint: this is a good way to get me to share your Substack! 🤫)

1. Jewish comfort foods. A knish (pronounced kuh-nish) is a ball of dough stuffed with seasoned potatoes or other fillings (https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/what-is-a-knish/). Kneidlach (pronounced kuh-naydl-achh) are matzah balls. (https://reformjudaism.org/reform-jewish-life/food-recipes/kneidlach-matzah-balls)

2. Sigh… yes, I’m old enough to have used this library book classification system to do school research projects. Card catalogs, the Dewey Decimal System, and librarians shushing us were all part of my childhood. What’s the Dewey Decimal System, you ask? This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification

3. The vas deferens is a muscular tube that transports sperm from the epididymis to the ejaculatory duct during ejaculation. I had to look this up. Also, is it just me, or does the word “epididymis” make you think of Sir Didymus from the movie Labyrinth?

4. Not familiar with Hawk Tuah Girl, Haliey Welch, who became a viral sensation and meme last year? Read this article: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-hawk-tuah-girl

5. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a sensory phenomenon in which individuals experience a tingling, static-like sensation across the scalp, back of the neck, and at times further areas in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli. This sensation is widely reported to be accompanied by feelings of relaxation and well-being. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sleepless-in-america/201809/what-is-asmr-and-why-are-people-watching-these-videos?)