The money shot once had a very specific purpose. Viewers of porn films supposedly want to see that actors are "really" having sex. Because the female orgasm on-screen can be faked, male privacy is more open to cinematic violation than female. Thus the depiction of the male orgasm became the litmus test for pornographic authenticity. Such verisimilitude isn't required of actors in other genres; our enjoyment of a western does not depend on the actors being shot by real bullets. But the pleasure of porn is about voyeurism, not imagination. "Happiness" and "There's Something About Mary," though, are not porn. They suggest rather than depict sexual acts, and solitary male masturbation (even in the world of gay porn) rarely ranks high on the voyeuristic menu. Lonely and mechanical, it's too close to pathos.

The grunts and sighs we hear in these film masturbation scenes, the strenuous arm motions, and the little gob of goo that follows them, make masculine sexuality seem silly. As a current Diesel ad puts it: "Men. Who needs 'em?" Above the caption, three comely young women pose in Diesel products at a sperm bank. One is selecting a test tube containing white fluid -- probably the first appearance of semen in a magazine ad -- from a rack held by an elderly nurse. The clothes the young women wear are sporty, not sexy, but then, who needs sex?

With cloning, we won't need sperm to make a baby. Eventually, we may not need a human womb either. While no one was looking, technology has made sexual reproduction obsolete. It's not clear that genetic diversity must come from the mixing of X and Y chromosomes. What the money shot reminds us of is the impending biological irrelevance of the male. It may never happen on the level of social fact, given that raising a child is still best accomplished by two partners, but the biological family is no longer necessary.

While the fact of this irrelevance is new, its myth is ancient. Not so long before the days of the Bible, people did not realize that a man was needed to make a woman pregnant. The reverence attached to seed in the Bible is an overcompensation, a reinforcement of a new discovery necessary to justify patriarchy. (Enough of the old matriarchal culture survived, at least on the level of suspicion, that designation as a Jew is matrilineal.) Most of us dimly recall a biblical injunction to the effect that casting your seed upon the ground is prohibited. Yet this vignette from Genesis, despite being taken as a parable about the evils of masturbation, is far from unambiguous on this matter. When Onan's brother Judah died, God asked him to impregnate his brother's widow -- the story implies that he pulls out at the last moment, thus engaging in non-productive coitus. Semen, according to the authors of the Bible, is supposed to make babies. Spilling seed is wrong.

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