Upsetting Day: Semenology

Welcome, adventurous reader. Pour yourself a glass of mostly semen.

I should have probably eased you into 2013's SEMENOLOGY: THE SEMEN BARTENDER'S HANDBOOK, but are there any words that could have bridged the gap between the life you were living and this one, where you now know a semen bartender's handbook exists? There was no gentle way of breaking it to you. There's not even a vocabulary for it in our universe. How could a semen bartender possibly explain himself? Hi, all these margaritas are pregnant? I fucked all of your mint juleps? H- cough, cough how many condoms should I cough empty into your martini? Are you hearing this? I sound like a crazy person.

You might recognize this idea, and this author, from his previous book Natural Harvest: A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes. It was one of the most uniquely deranged things ever created– a man mixing semen into every sauce and squirting old sperm onto clam shells while screaming "Look at me, look at me, but also this is quite normal!"

Paul "Fotie" Photenhauer starts his semen cocktail book the same way he started his semen food book– by arguing his obvious pervert thing is actually a fashionable trend. It never was, and his previous book didn't change that. His arguments are so desperate they're almost a foreign language. Paul sounds like a man explaining how he's saving money on anniversary gifts by putting his dick in a horse. "Um, eggs are technically, actually, chicken menstruation, and thus therefore, in conclusion, it is only sensible for me to suck my dinner out of your balls." It's nonsense. And he should know. He wrote the first semen cookbook and after four years, there was no semen foodie movement. The world explained to him, as clearly as it could, his theories on free food stored in the human penis were ridiculous.

The main thing to take away from Paul's intro is this is still not a joke. It sounds like it must be because fucking look at what we're talking about, right? Also, he's testing his sperm recipes on someone named Rickard Gagnér, which is just the name Dick Gagger in a thin disguise. But if it's a prank, he's too entrenched. He's dedicated two books to eating sperm. If Paul "Fotie" Photenhauer was to suddenly say, "Ha ha you fools, I've eaten far less semen than I claimed," it would only make him sound more filled with sperm.

Paul uses the word "exciting" too much because even he, the only semen cookbook author there will ever be, has no idea how to describe finding jizz in your drink. He might be trying to be cute when he says obviously impossible things like "the experienced semen bartender," but the entire book is written as if such a thing exists. Paul has imagined a world where that's a real occupation, and if you don't accept that premise this book is going to sound absolutely insane. I don't accept that premise.

Paul opens with a cocktail containing no semen along with an apology for the lack of semen. Why bother? Is this meant to ease us into it? It's a book about jizz drinks, not edging drinks. Jerk off into the pomegranate juice, pervert. I made this point earlier– there's no elegant transition between a drink without sperm and a drink with sperm. Finding "some" sperm in your drink is like finding "some" barn intruders in your horse. If I'm a semen bartender, I don't say, "A lot of people find sperm in this context off-putting, so I'll try to get -hrrk- most of this batch on my shiiiiiiiiIIIIRRRRRTTT!!!!!!!--"

Paul recently learned "mojito" is Spanish for "a little wet" because he somehow makes milk-frothing unfrozen human sperm into a glass sound gross. But look at the photo. Look at all that sperm cascading down the ice. It looks like eight men fucked this mojito, and not in a way where the recipe came together. Like, if I was the kind of person who drank semen like this I'd say Paul's Macho Mojito was a failure. Am I supposed to blend it with my straw, or just spend my cocktail haunted by a smear of jizz on one side of my glass? Sipping this would be like jumping between a blowjob and a drink and mixing the flavors in my own mouth. I'm not going to do that. What is this, every bachelor party?

For a Semen Rimmed Margarita, you need to prepare your semen salt "well in advance." This is done by curing and storing ejaculate in an act of craftiness far beyond mere perversion. This is too much of your life to dedicate to your dumb sex thing, Paul. You seem to think this sperm drinking is a personality, but this drink preparation is a series of horror reveals. It's like finding out someone restored a full panzer tank for their inflatable doll, so she can hatch spiders.

Incredible. The ingredients are cognac and a teaspoon of semen. I want to remind everyone, again, this man had already written a book about sperm recipes four years before this. He started multiple social media accounts to promote it. His entire public-facing persona was the guy who eats semen. And after one thousand four hundred days of a life dedicated to preparing and serving semen dishes, this is what he came up with. M-maybe jizz in some brandy?

That's really all there is to it. He dressed it up the best he could, but Paul dropped some old sperm in cognac and called it exciting luxury. The next two pages are wordless glamor shots of it:

Was this him trying to rescue the bit? Did he tell the photographer, "We're just dumping sperm into a glass for this recipe, so these pictures have to tell a story." He is the world's leading expert in exactly this and yet we're looking at fucking anyone's first try at a semen cocktail. This book could have been a Pornhub comment. It's nothing. I learned this recipe when John Travolta and I had a meet cute at a cigar bar.

I don't know what I was complaining about with Heavenly Cognac because the drink recipes are worse when Paul tries to get complicated. In Semen Enhanced Absinthe, you do a little science project over a glass of liquor. I hate it because it's stupid and gross in a way that feels childlike. It's something you would drink to celebrate getting into 6th grade after eleven tries. This is the breakfast in bed you'd make if you were a confused 7-year-old whose mother farted into pudding for a living. Happy Mother's Day.

Another brilliant recipe from Paul "Fotie" Photenhauer– jerk off into some vodka. And then do it again, because this recipe calls for twice the volume of an average release. I get this can vary depending on ball size, the allure of your ice-cold shot glass, or how many sperm vodkas you've already made tonight, but it does raise an issue I haven't talked about yet. This is not a viable hobby if you have someone in your life. You'd have to tell your partner, every single night, "Sorry, I'm not in the mood for sex. I already jerked off three times to make the bean dip, creamed spinach, and eggnog." And you're not going to like the second half of this sentence, but speaking of eggnog.

By this point, Paul's imagination has gotten away from him. I don't doubt he eats sperm, and way more than most people, but there's no way he's jizzing together four-course dinners with a sperm sommelier every night. And since he's definitely out of actual sperm recipes he's tried, he's now flying through a world of pure ejaculate wonder. "Want heartier nog? Harvest the dongs of an entire fraternity pledge class as a substitute for an egg!"

Paul's having fun, but let's really think about it. Is he picturing some kind of Christmas party where more than one person wants to drink inseminated eggnog? That will never happen. If there's any sincere audience for this book, and I don't think there is, someone is melting a month's worth of frozen sperm into a gallon of eggnog and drinking it alone. That's depressing beyond all reason. That's a short story called "Sadness Diarrhea." That ends with a coroner saying, "Detective, you're never going to guess what I found in this John Doe's stomach. Oh, wow, you're exactly right– one egg's worth of his own semen."

"Paul got drunk once and added milk and liquor to a milky liquor. It occurred to him years later he should also masturbate into it."

- This Cocktail's Origin Story

I've lost all perspective. Paul is adding crushed frozen semen to lumpy semen to delicately minted semen. That means you'd have to masturbate three different times per drink. Semenologists either A) don't exist, or B) spend their day getting pulled inside out by a milking machine.

Maybe we skip this one.

Jim & Tonic is named after Paul's friend Jim who smokes so much the awful flavor of his semen needs to be masked with malaria medicine. It's a real unpleasant thing for you and me to hear, but imagine being Jim. To him, this is a tragic ending to a story that started with a handjob.

I don't know how this book started at Maximum Upsetting and somehow kept raising the stakes. But it's here, on page 30, where the author admits it's tempting to feed unknowing people semen. When he discovered the chemical secret to masking the taste of Jim's shitty ashtray sperm, the first thing that occurred to him was, "I could make them all drink my sperm NO YOU MUSTN'T PAUL! But I could get away with it if I wanted to NO PAUL IT IS FORBIDDEN!"

I think ketchup may have wounded the word, but "fancy" is now officially dead after this pervert used it to describe fucking a watermelon and putting it back in the freezer.

"Peach schnapps, grenadine, and coagulated sperm is called a Semen Hemorrhage." That's a sentence an astronaut would scrawl on a console with his eyeball blood. It is the code phrase to activate the anti-Pope. I was already a harsh critic of Paul's work, but how goddamn dare he. Peach schnapps, grenadine, and coagulated sperm!? If I had a time machine, the first thing I would do is tell Hitler how much I hate this.

In order to make these drinks to any kind of scale, for even the smallest of parties, you would have to have such a pulsing testicle disorder. Picture the most you've ever masturbated in a day, multiply it by ten, and you barely have enough for a quiet round of Grasshopper Deluxes. Paul's not a real semen bartender, nor will anyone ever be. It's all nonsense, so why bother being honest here about how he's never jerked an Italian man off into prosecco? Paul could have said, "Despite its Italian origins, this exciting twist on a bellini is best with Bolivian, Punjabi, or Arkansas sperm, in that order. The weak genetics of the sick can be masked with a dash of citrus."

Do you have any exciting, gustatory semen recipes for beer, "Fotie"? You do!? Whoa, whoa, slow down, let me make sure I get all this. "Jizz… into… your… beer." Got it!

It's time for his ultimate signature drink, the one he named after himself. It's two parts semen, one part vodka, with a lemon twist. At first it sounds simple, but like all his nightmare recipes, it gets complicated once you get into the logistics. Each A Shot of Fotie requires six pumps of ejaculate, which he claims is "more than can be harvested from a producer in a single evening." With this, we can determine that Paul cannot masturbate six times a day. Pathetic. Which means it took him at least two days to make each one of these drinks. Assuming he landed on the perfect ratio of vodka to semen on his fifth attempt, that's ten full, dedicated days of masturbation before he was ready to serve one to Rickard. And then, assuming they drank together, that's another four days of intense self harvesting, forsaking all physical love for this one round of shots. But we're not done with our dick math.

Now, we know Rickard says Paul's semen pairs well with crayfish, so all we have to do is estimate how many foods they tried before crayfish. Probably Chinese. Maybe Indian. Brick oven pizzas, I'd bet. The point I'm making is if we take "Fotie" at his word, he jerked off 23,497 days straight… freezing, thawing, and drinking every load to write this one page of his book. Fucking gross. Fucking unlikely. I don't know how much more of this disgusting nonsense I can ta–

Okay, that should do it.

Let's move on to the FAQ section, an inadequate two pages covering none of the many, many questions a normal person might have. Instead it covers batshit madness like this:

I thought I had Paul sort of figured out. He has spent two full books talking about the flavor profile and texture of this very normal cooking ingredient, semen, but the moment he considers using animal sperm he immediately comes clean about how this was a weird sex ritual thing the whole time. It has to be man sperm. I mean, think about it. Rickard's not going to drink a Pig & Tonic or a Semen (Dog Semen) Hemorrhage.

That's not how you spell "Neil Patrick Harris," but like Tom Berenger's lawyer told me, "The poor spelling of my client's name was not our concern when you associated him with the drinking of so much sperm, far more sperm than Mr. Berenger expected."

I was skeptical about Rickard Gagnér being a real person. His name was too on the nose and his hobby of "experimental semen guzzler" was too convenient. I found a man with that name on Linkedin, but…

… he works as a release train engineer, which sounds a little too semen-y. Suspicious. Plus, in Swedish his job is called a Leveransplaneringsledare, which is precisely what I scream when I'm jerking off for the sixth time in a day. Very suspicious.

In the end, Semenology tells the story of a lonely man having sex with whatever he is currently eating or drinking. And judging him by his first two books, it's easy to dismiss Paul "Fotie" Photenhauer as a creep who only ever had one idea. But after his second book flopped and his social media following dwindled to double digits, Paul took some time off to gather his thoughts. After nine years of research and polishing his manuscript, he published a book that would prove he's more than a weird semen guy. Let's check out his third bo–

God damn it, Photenhauer.

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