Sowing Your Seed not Wild Oats

All human beings are blessed with a special gift from their creator, the ability to reproduce. While thinking about humans reproducing, I began to wonder why the male sperm is called a "seed" but a woman's egg is not called a seed and the significance of that distinction. I also wondered why men had a longer window to sire children than women. Sperm is the male reproductive cell and is derived from the Greek word sperma (meaning “seed”). A sperm cell is the male sex cell. The word sperm is derived from the Greek word σπέρμα, sperma, meaning "seed". This sperm is a very minute cell present in all men. 

In animals, female gametes are called ova or egg cells and male gametes are called sperm.  When an egg cell and a sperm cell unite, the two combine to form an embryo or an unborn, developing organism. Approximately 200 million to 500 million spermatoza (also called sperm or spermatozoans), produced in the testes, are released per ejaculation.

It may come as a shock but sperm can survive within the female reproductive system for a week! There is a strong desire of the seed to produce life. Sperm are tenacious. The female's egg is viewed as passive. Just hanging out for a while waiting for a sperm to come along. In early reproductive thought, the female's contribution to the formation of life was seen as minimum and downright dismissed.

Four centuries before Christ, Aeschylus wrote: “The woman you call the mother of the child/ is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed. …The man is the source of life — the one who mounts.” The general idea was that the womb provided merely a soft field in which the male seed was sowed. Then in 1672, a Dutch physician named Regnier de Graaf found ovaries full of eggs in a number of mammals, and although he couldn’t find any eggs in humans, he was convinced they must be there somewhere. It would take 150 years and a microscope before anyone would confirm the notion. 

It is unimaginable now to believe people thought only a man could create life. People in past history believed the man alone with his ejaculation at the end of the sex act put a baby inside the woman. The newly formed child was 100% his own creation because he mounted the woman, entered her, and made a deposit. In all honesty I can see it being a plausable assumption before the advancement of science. MEN CREATE LIFE ALONE. Not arrogant at all.

It wasn’t until Antony van Leeuwenhoek sprang up from his marital bed to spread his semen on a microscope in 1677 that anyone saw them. Sperm were first observed in 1677 by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek using a microscope. He described them as being animalcules (little animals), The first person to discover where babies come from, strictly speaking, was a German biologist named Oscar Hertwig. In 1875, working at his microscope in a Naples, Italy laboratory, Hertwig dabbed a drop of sea urchin semen against the gelatinous surface of a sea urchin egg. “Moments later,” according to science journalist Edward Dolnick, “the nucleus of the sperm cell came into view, inside the egg…and then—before Hertwig’s eyes—the two nuclei fused into one. No one in history had ever seen the process of fertilization play out.” 

It was not until 1875 that a German scientist finally put the sperm and the egg together conceptually.

So why then is sperm seen as a "seed?" In farming the land is prepared for the seed to be planted and eventually grow. The seed has to be placed into a forvorable medium and environment to sprout and grow. Even though a woman has an egg, half and the same cell containing DNA to create a totally new human, her "egg" isn't placed into anything by her to sprout and grow. The sperm penetrates the egg. This is one thing (seed) going into another thing (egg) like a plant "seed" must go into the "soil." 

You may say the egg is planted within the uterus which can also represent fertile soil. But the egg just being IN the uterus does not generate or grow. The female egg is more so the representation of fertle soil and the uterus is the enviromental condition condusive for the seed to sprout and grow. Women do not plant seeds. The female egg is singular like a large field would be singular while the male's sperm is numerous just like a farmer would plant several seeds in the hope at least one (or several) will germinate. The man has millions of seeds and a long time to sow the seeds. His potential to reproduce on a large scale is assured by his daily sperm count. Thus the saying a man is sowing his seed and a child is his seed, meaning from his seed (sperm). Women do not refer to their children as their seed.

With the sperm being half of the miraculous ingrdients needed to form life, it is important for men to have healthy viable seeds. Studies have found men who ejaculated 21 or more times per month had a  lower risk of prostate cancer compared to those who ejaculated 4–7 times a month. Researchers theorize that frequent ejaculation clears the prostate of irritants or toxins that cause inflammation and contribute to prostate cancer.

A healthy lifestyle and diet are important. Foods to increase sperm production are dark chocolate which is a powerful aphrodisiac. Dark chocolate contains L-Arginine, an amino-acid which works by increasing nitric oxide, which essentially dilates blood vessels and promotes blood flow to your sexual organs, enhancing sensation, satisfaction and desire. Oysters which contain zincan essential mineral that plays an important role in improving testosterone levels as well as sperm production. Also on the list of foods good for sperm health are eggs, bananas, spinach, asparagus, garlic, and carrots amongst others.