In her article (Making babies is beginning to look as difficult for men as it always has for women, 27 July), Suzanne Moore states that the average man “produces 14 gallons of ejaculate in a lifetime”. One doesn’t have to be Einstein to work out that 14 gallons of semen would require 12,740 ejaculations of five millilitres volume (the oft-quoted average). This would mean an average of just over four ejaculations per week, every week for a 60-year period (or five per week over 50 years, etc), say from early teens to early seventies. This seems unlikely. Perhaps Ms Moore is confusing gallons with litres – 14 litres produces rather more believable averages. I think that some proper checking of journalists’ figures is required.
Andrew Barnard
Staines, Middlesex
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