I read Chuck’s short story Guts a while back. One of the stories is about a boy who masturbates in a swimming pool while sitting on the water intake on the bottom of his swimming pool. His intestines get sucked in and he has to chew through them to avoid drowning. As if that wasn’t horrifying enough, his sister then becomes pregnant after swimming in the pool and has an abortion.
In this interview, Chuck says the bit about the intestines was true, but the part about the sister being pregnant was “added”. So, I was wondering, would this actually be possible, given the chlorine and other chemicals that are added to swimming pools? How long would sperm survive in a pool?
I don’t believe it’s possible for your intestines to get ripped out that way. The sphincter is the opening at the end of the colon - it’s not like the colon is floating around there. That’s like having a hose hooked up to something with a lot of pressure and then saying that the hose itself got sucked into that intake valve. It doesn’t make sense. At best, it’d get turned inside out, but that doesn’t really make much sense, either.
Prior thread on the question of whether intestines can be sucked out in this way: Can you really have your intestines pulled out of your body by a pool drain?? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
Short answer: Yes, it’s possible.
I was more interested in whether it was possible for sperm floating around in a swimming pool to get someone else pregnant. Sorry that I wasn’t clearer.
I guess it would be unlikely that it would find its way into the vagina of someone else going for a swim, but is it possible, given the amount of chemicals in a swimming pool? Would the chlorine and whatever else they put in it kill the sperm? If not, how long would the sperm survive? Minutes? Hours? Days?
http://chuckpalahniuk.net/features/shorts/guts
for those interested in reading it,
Evidently the bit about the pill was the part that would make listeners pass out at live readings.
I doubt seriously you could get pregnant swimming In a pool with sperm in it under anything even close to normal circumstances.
This is one of those things were we can’t quite say it’s impossible… but it’s so close to impossible that you might as well sit around watching to see if protons decay.
First off, the biggest problem is that semen released in water clumps up. These clumps would stick to a bathing suit and not just pass through. The sperm are not going to just dissipate into the water like a sugar cube dissolving. So the girl has to be swimming nude and she has to be sucking up a lot of water into her vagina. I suppose water does get into the vagina… but in the quantities necessary to get a glob of semen in there? And if water is going in and out at that volume, is the semen going to stay put? I tend to doubt it on both accounts.
In terms of lifespan, a properly chlorinated pool is lethal to micro organisms almost instantly, and we’ve already postulated that pool water must get into the vagina along with the semen, so that’s bad news. Of course, the clumping factor for semen might protect a few of the sperm inside.
But still, people don’t get pregnant from just one or two viable sperm. Men with low sperm counts are still delivering more live sperm to their partners than our hypothetical pool situation ever could.