Marie Stopes’ Legacy

Fotie Photenhauer wrote a cooking book called “Natural Harvest - A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes”. In its presentation you can get some “true facts”: Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties. Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food. This book hopes to change that. Once you overcome any initial hesitation, you will be surprised to learn how wonderful semen is in the kitchen. Semen is an exciting ingredient that can give every dish you make an interesting twist.

What it might sound funny, wacky or just a disgusting joke has some damn serious discourse behind: this is where Marie Stopes comes on stage. She was a famous Scottish eugenicist, campaigner for women's rights, reproductive rights and she basically invented the field of family planning. The huge and respected family planning organization that bears her name, Marie Stopes International, works in 38 countries across the world - ranging from the UK, Bolivia, and the Philippines through to Pakistan, Kenya and Papua New Guinea. Acording to their website, Marie Stopes International is the UK's leading provider of sexual and reproductive healthcare services. Our nationwide network of sexual health clinics see over 100,000 men and women each year who come to us for information, advice and professional care, they say.

Stopes was a hectic campaigner for the implementation of policies inspired by eugenics. In her Radiant Motherhood (1920) she called for the “sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood (to) be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory." Stopes even cut her son Harry out of her will after he married a near-sighted woman - Mary Eyre Wallis. Stopes considered that her prospective grandchildren might inherit the affliction.

Thanks to Feminist Philosophers I got the connection Semen-Based Recipes – Marie Stopes. Apparently Stopes was also campaigning for the healthy ingestion of semen. She was explaining how crucial it is for a woman’s sexual health. If you are a woman and you don’t get enough semen in your body from your male partner you are exposed to some extreme risks: your sex will run wild, you might become a lesbian or you might masturbate excessively. Marie says: Can anything be done? Of course, self-stimulus, or masturbation, is extremely common… Masturbation is always unsatisfactory… Another practical solution which some deprived women find is in Lesbian love with their own sex…

The scientific explanations and solutions come with rigor: …homosexual excitement does not really meet their need for the physiological fact (I have never yet seen it clearly stated anywhere, but it is of the greatest importance in a consideration of this problem) is that… a woman’s need and hunger for nourishment in sex union is a true physiological hunger to be satisfied by the supplying of the actual molecular substances lacked by her system… the chemical molecules produced by the glandular systems of the male…It has been found possible to prepare some at least of the very molecular compounds really nourishing to the woman’s system, and which she lacks and requires.

Her solution is the next step to our starting point, the semen in food: artificial semen in capsule form.
And one last thing: in 1999, Marie Stopes came first in the Guardian's "Women of the Millennium" poll.