The Nutrition Study: Jason's Story

"Study # 761: male volunteers needed for a nutrition study, generous compensation. Must be 18+, healthy, not currently sexual active, and able to visit the research clinic once a day for at least one continuous month. Call..."

The ad was not visually prominent, but the description stood out from the others as Jason scanned the bulletin board full of requests for test subjects. He was one of many students at his University who liked to supplement his budget by applying for the many tests that needed research subjects, whether to follow a blinking light on a screen and later be asked if he could guess what blinking object appeared in the corner, to eat as much dry bread as he could and then report on his feelings two hours later, or to sniff a new cold medicine and have his blood sampled for the next few days. Sometimes inconvenient and intrusive, but they paid decently for the time it took and you sometimes got free food to boot. It never could pay the rent, but a few extra bucks for the movies always helped. He guessed that this one also involved some free food.

He wondered why did they not want anyone who was sexually active. Jason never thought that his virginity would be any particular advantage to anyone, except maybe a really cautious date. But so far any of his dates who had been cautious enough to see that as an advantage had been, well, too cautious for him to get any benefit from that. Well, that's probably just because he was shy, he always suspected it was the more aggressive guys who got laid. He was OK with waiting a bit, and wasn't too sad at still being an 18-year old virgin, as long as he couldn't say the same by the time he graduated. There was plenty of time.

Ring. Ring. "Hello, Nutrition Research."

"Hi, my name is Jason, I read about the study...um, number 761."

"Thanks for calling, Jason." The receptionist (nurse?) was straightforward and evidently following a routine. She asked a few quick questions about when he was available and his age—she didn't ask about his sexual activity, she noticed, maybe they were too polite to discuss that over the phone. He started to ask what the study involved. "Due to the nature of the study you need to discuss that with one of the research staff, can you come in this afternoon?"

He put it mostly out of his mind through his mid-day history class. As the professor droned on he turned his attention to better things than the Persian Empire—like the exposed butt crack of the girl in the seat in front of him. Quite an age he was living in, he thought. His older brother assured him that you would never have seen that in public even just a few years ago, but now it was almost unremarkable. Whatever. After two o'clock he strolled over to the clinic for his appointment with Nurse Joy, who would tell him about the study.

Joy looked pretty ordinary at first, a short-haired brunette with a medium build and a pleasant tone of voice. Though after he sat with her for a few minutes he decided she was kind of pretty, maybe it was mostly personality but she had an easy-going, relaxing style that made him feel comfortable. After repeating some of the more routine questions, and a few more about his typical eating habits, she asked him in a very neutral, medical kind of way whether he was sexually active, or had been in the past.
"No." "No past sexual activity with another person?" "No," he said with a smile. She had a slight smile but it was clearly simply approval, as if she was faintly pleased, but not erotically so, which almost made him feel better than if she had said "Great!" and then jumped him. She had the best medical interview style he had ever come across, so non-threatening and reassuring, he knew he was going to be happy whatever this involved.

"Now I'm going to give you a sheet of paper that describes the study, and let you read it for a few minutes while I wait in the next room. If you decide the study is not for you, you can simply leave it on the table and head out, no questions asked. If you think you can go through with it, just knock on the door and I'll come back to answer any questions you have, if I can."

Jason was a little surprised by the sudden change of approach, it seemed almost secretive. In every other study he had been in he got the terms over the phone or in person, and Joy seemed so personable he was now really curious about what it involved. He started to read quickly after she left. "Protocol... past research... caloric intake... protein content... blah blah"—he went quickly past the standard prefatory stuff, although this one seemed to have more preface and jargon than the usual. After a minute he realized he had missed something, he was looking for a description of the food and seemed unable to find it by skimming for key words. He started over reading more slowly looking for larger phrases that would make things more clear.

What?! He stared at the paper. Are they serious? "Caloric content of semen... lack of data calls for inquiry... nutritional supplement... underutilized resource... subject must remain celibate so as to maximize output...."

Gulp. He had no idea what to expect. He was like any guy, he thought about sex and enjoyed a good orgasm, and occasionally had kinky fantasies, but he had no idea that anything like this was possible. He had to think for a few minutes about whether he could go through with this. It still wasn't completely clear what it involved. "...will be collected for one week, then in phase two...." A bit of jargon, but he gathered he was going to be asked to masturbate into a cup and then they'd test it somehow. It was a bit obscure, but apparently the point was to find out how much nutritional value there was in semen for those who, well, partook of it. Who would need to know this, he wondered? He was so dazed that he barely paid attention to the final reference to compensation; it was small but adequate for what sounded like daily visits to jerk off into a cup. Couldn't take more than 10 minutes. OK, it's a little embarrassing, but hey, it's money.

Joy came back shortly after her knock, with the most gentle hint of a smile, totally professional, without the least hint that there was anything odd about the study or that Jason was anything but a noble volunteer in the name of science. She made him feel great. He said quickly that it sounded OK, and signed his name. She added that if he knew anyone else who would be willing to participate, they needed more subjects—and in the only hint that there was anything the least bit embarrassing about the subject, gave him several anonymous notes advertising the study which he could presumably slip anonymous into someone's book or mailbox without anyone else knowing that he was in it. He wanted to melt into Joy's arms, she was so cool. He didn't mind at all when she took his preliminary blood sample for testing, and walked out confident that this was just another medical study like any other, at least as far as it affected him.

A few days later he was told his tests were fine—apparently among other things they made sure he had a clean bill of health, including no STDs, and the study could begin.

The first week was just as he expected—he went in each day at whatever time of the afternoon or evening he found convenient, and was given a cup. The clinic bathroom was a little antiseptic, not the most erotic atmosphere, but it helped him to think about some of the odd things about the study. The nutritional value of semen? So, they wanted to know if someone who swallowed his ejaculate would get more protein.... He thought about this as he stroked. Oral sex was as foreign to him as intercourse, and as far as he could tell he probably thought about fellatio no more, and perhaps less, than did his peers (some of whom were clearly obsessed with it, whether they had had any or not). Still, he started to think about this more, clearly it was done often enough by enough people that someone funded a study about this. He imagined rows of women sucking off one guy after another, hungry for...uh, uh—aaaaa! He gasped and started to let his breathing down gently while holding the cup steady. The instructions were clear that volume measurement was very important. He wasn't quite sure why, since he imagined they would just take an average of the nutritional value across several guys, but it explicitly said that one of the conditions was that he could not have an orgasm outside the clinic while the study was going on, they needed every drop of his semen, and would invite him back any time of day to collect it (and he was given a cup to take home and seal in case an orgasm somehow forced itself on him at another time).

Once he calmed down he zipped back up and walked out, placing the cup quickly on the nearby counter. No one saw him but it was still embarrassing the first time. A few moments later he walked past another window and Joy thanked him. She was one of several men and women running the study, but she was the only one who talked to him personally—apparently she did most of the contacts with subjects, or at least each subject had only one contact within the study, so his conversations with the other staff were curt and hurried, but Joy always had her usual friendly but strictly professional demeanor, which made Jason happy to come back. She wasn't always there, but usually she greeted him on the way in or out, though she seemed to have a lot of paperwork or be running to or from something most of the time. There were often several other men in the waiting room, though a few women as well. He wondered how many were there to do what he did, surely some of them were, although there were several other studies going on at the same time so you could never be sure about any one person. It was a large research clinic and this helped him feel more anonymous. No one needed to know how he was earning his candy money.

And so it went for a week. Towards the end of "phase one" he had another interview with Joy. She started telling him that he was one of the first subjects here, and that phase two—which was described rather obliquely in the first handout—was just being fully developed, the protocol was experimental, etc. He didn't worry too much, he had a lot of confidence in Joy. More so when she told him that he was free to back out of the study at this point if he wasn't comfortable with the next step, which would last approximately one month. "Sure," he said, confident that he could handle whatever it was.

She left him with another sheet of paper. This time he read it carefully from the beginning, with no presuppositions. It was still a little obscure, technical, jargony. In fact when he was finished it still wasn't entirely clear. But he had a rough idea. "Direct ingestion... anonymous paired transmission... regular schedule... important that the secretions be entirely released within the clinic lab...." It went on with a few technicalities, requirements he had to follow. This time when he knocked his face held a more puzzled look after Joy came back in.

"Do you have any questions I can answer?" she said in her usual professional voice.

Gulp. Um. My god, how can I ask her anything about this? Do I even want to know (or want to hear her say)? Am I going to look stupid by admitting that I don't know exactly what this is about? It took him a minute to figure out what to say, but Joy's steadfastly professional attitude and caring patience helped him get it out finally. "So, is it actually going to be... I mean..." Joy waited for him to find his words. He looked down at the sheet and read off from it to reduce his embarrassment: "it will be 'delivered' to another person in the study?"

"Yes, there's a separate set of recipient volunteers in the study, and we'll be measuring the nutritional effects on their bodies of the intake of semen from the first set. The first phase was for preliminary lab tests, including getting a baseline on average daily volume." She said it as if she was talking about extracting penicillin from a culture, completely neutral and matter-of-fact. Huh. Well. After a few seconds she guessed what he might be unable to ask next. "A screen will separate the volunteers so that the procedure is done anonymously. Now I can tell you that most of the recipient volunteers are female, but men are not excluded from it; you indicated that you are heterosexual, so I need to know that you are comfortable with this." Comfortable with what, exactly? It still was a little unclear, but he supposed that somebody would end up being fed his ejaculate (in a milkshake, or how?) Well, that's OK, he guessed, and he mumbled as much. Joy gave another one of her soft smiles and said that she looked forward to seeing him next week.

The next few days when he returned for the clinic he thought more and more about what the next stage could possibly be like. Would he stand in front of a curtain and somehow masturbate in front of someone he couldn't see on the other side? And then they...she?...would...? His ejaculations became slightly more nervous. This was a little too bizarre, or could be. He didn't know yet. But he couldn't not find out.

Monday he came at the appointed time, six o'clock. Timing was somehow more important for phase two, he supposed because of the coordination with the... other volunteer (or volunteers?) He still boggled at trying to figure out just what all the jargon in the release form really meant. They said it was "experimental" and "in development," so maybe they were still figuring it out as it went along. Who was it they said was the primary researcher, some Doctor Jensen. He realized he didn't even know if that was a male or female, not that it mattered for him. Jason occasionally got a hard on earlier in the day thinking about what might go on here, but quickly dismissed it without even trying to, reflecting that it was likely to be fairly cold and medical, like the jar in the bathroom.

After sitting in the reception area for a few minutes, he heard a familiar voice. "Hi Jason, we've been expecting you." It was Joy. He followed her down a new hallway into a much smaller reception area where two men were already sitting; one about his age, the other about 40 and looking a little ragged and downbeat. They get all types in medical studies, he reflected. Her instructions were brief: "just wait here until your number appears on the screen", here she motioned to a small electronic display of the sort often found in waiting rooms. His number, today at least, was four. "Then go through the next door into the transfer room, and not before." That was another thing the written instructions had been very clear on, don't enter the transfer room until your number came up. OK, he could deal with that.

Transfer room?

He nodded, but was still as bewildered about the details as he was in his class on postmodernist literature. Something was going to happen, something was happening, but god knows what it was, he thought. I'll find out soon enough, can't worry too much until then.

A few minutes later Joy brought another young man, about 25, into the room, and left him there after the same brief, soft-spoken instructions. Just after three o'clock, the number 1 clicked up. None of the men said or did anything. "Who is number one?" Jason thought wryly. He couldn't laugh though, the situation was too weird. There were some magazines to flip through: Time, GQ, Elle, Cosmo... nothing that interested any of the men too much, who said nothing to each other. After another minute the number flipped to 2. The older gentleman got up without a word and walked through the door.

A minute passed. The first younger man asked Jason "so is this your first day here?"

"Um, yeah on this phase of the study, I think it's the first for all of us." He suddenly realized how fast he had just blurted this out, to cover his nervousness.

"I don't know what the room is like, I guess we'll find out."

"Yeah," Jason replied. His penis felt small and shriveled. How is this going to work, he thought?

Flip. Number three. No one moved. The latest arrival sighed ambiguously, as if he was either impatient to get this going or at the naivete of the other men. "My name is Joel" said the first boy.

"Jason."

Neither looked at the other man, who said nothing, but seemed occupied by a magazine. Jason thought of asking him if he knew more about the procedure than they did when the tiny ding sound indicated the flip of the next number. Four. Jason's.

He got up and walked through the door, into a short passage which turned sharply left. He was no in a fairly small chamber lit by a single light, and obviously subdivided from a larger room with recently constructed barriers, probably wood underneath but with some cloth and foam coverings over part of them. The floor was perhaps 5x5 feet, but the ceiling 5x7, as there was an overhanging space which started almost five feet off the floor, almost as if for a small bed, on one side of the room, almost like the part of a pickup camper that overhangs the cab, just slightly taller. On the center of the floor in front of the overhang was a small movable step. The overhang had some padding near the edge and several short pieces of ropes attached to the lower surface and tied at both ends.

In the middle of the wall face beneath the overhang, about two-thirds of the way up, was a short curtain attached to a string that went through the wall.

A single sign gave large-print instructions. "Step up to the wall and remove your clothing as necessary for transfer, bracing yourself during the procedure." OK, so the ropes on the top were for "bracing," he was apparently supposed to grip the ropes, his head leaning over the short wall, his pelvis...right about in front of the curtain. He imagined the moveable step was for shorter people. He walked up to it then noticed a very small metal grill on the wall to his left, through which came a new voice, not Joy's. "Are you ready number four?" It was professional, though not quite as assuring as Joy's.

"Um, sure, just a second." Oh god. What is going on here? Well... here it goes. He stood in front of the wall and unzipped his pants. Limp city. Well, what could they expect? He leaned forward and gripped the ropes, waiting.

"Ready?"

"Yeah" he said faintly, tensing. Then it wasn't quite silent for a minute. The foam on the walls might have been soundproofing, but he could still hear something through the other side. As he waited for something to happen, he figured it out.

They were talking turns.

There were two waiting rooms, and two "transfer" rooms. Odd numbers in one, even in the other. They would be facing each other if not for the makeshift barrier between them. Underneath, a small chamber between the double overhangs connected with the rest of the room to his left. For efficiency's sake, so it would go nonstop. On either side of this, one guy got "ready" while the other was... was....

Then in a moment he felt the curtain brush aside his flaccid member. OK Jason, boy, sit tight, it's a medical procedure. There'll be a nurse or something who will....

What?!

Ooooo. Ah, ah!—oooooo.

He had never felt it before, but there was little doubt—nothing could cause the feelings he was having except a set of lips and tongue. Licking him. Sucking him. Pulling his weak, sagging organ into a hot, oh my god so very hot mouth. Then a hand. Pulling, teasing. The head wet, kissed perhaps, a tongue swirling around it. But the sensations were too fast and unexpected to really sort out. In a few moments, he quite unexpectedly grew enormously hard, even though he was still incredibly tense. He gripped the ropes tight and tensed to keep his pelvis in place, pressed as far up against the wall as he could. Oh my god, who is doing that? A nurse? No, wait, the other set of subjects... so my god, when they said "transfer," they meant....