You can not get pregnant if you get semen on your hands, wash them thoroughly with soap and water, and then finger yourself.

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Given some of the questions that I get, I want to congratulate the many of you* who have asked me this question for having a solid grasp of good hygiene. Thank you for recognizing that if you get bodily fluids on your hands, you should wash them with soap and water. I applaud you.

Some might say that, right now, I have a low bar for being impressed by people. I say, don’t judge me until you’ve walked a mile in my inbox.

I also say that there has got to be a better way to adopt that metaphor. Read a million in my inbox? Walk a mile in my e-mail? I’ll take suggestions below.

_{Explanation for why you can’t get pregnant by fingering yourself after washing your hands with soap and water:}

_{Semen is not made out of glue. When you wash it, it comes off. That said, it’s also sticky. If you failed to wash your hands thoroughly enough that a significant amount of semen remained, you’d notice.}

_{*Given how often I get asked this question, I’m kind of amazed I hadn’t written this before now}

Giving a man a blow job, or masturbating him to orgasm, does NOT use up his sperm, and it is NOT a form of conntraception. If you have sex with him afterwards, he can still get you pregnant.

You can not get pregnant by swallowing someone else’s saliva.

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You could drink saliva by the gallon and while it might make you nauseated in a way that, theoretically, could simulate morning sickness, it would not make you pregnant.

For the record: the simulation of morning sickness would be more accurate if you drank the gallons of saliva every day. Most people get morning sick on a regular basis, not just once.

That said, if you had access to gallons of saliva to drink as part of your regular morning routine, I would be concerned that you were part of a vast criminal conspiracy that enticed men to drool into cups by showing them pictures of scantily clad women.

_{And for the record, even if those cups were held lower down, you couldn’t get pregnant by drinking that bodily fluid either, unless something absolutely extraordinary were to occur.}

_{Explanation for why you can’t get pregnant by drinking saliva:}

_{There are no sperm in saliva. I repeat. There are no sperm in saliva. Since you can not get pregnant without sperm, there is no way for saliva to make you pregnant.}

_{In addition, even if there were sperm in the saliva you were swallowing, there would be no way for it to get from your stomach to your uterus.}

You can not get pregnant by masturbating.

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You can not even get pregnant by masturbating someone else.

More importantly, if someone gives you a pregnancy test there is absolutely no way for them to know if you have been masturbating. Pregnancy tests are not masturbation detectors. Pregnancy tests are pregnancy detectors.

People can also not tell if you were masturbating by looking for hair on your palms. They might, however, be able to tell if you don’t wash the items you masturbate with so, if you are concerned about people knowing you masturbate, soap and water are your friends. So is doing your own laundry.

That said, although some people are uncomfortable about the fact that they masturbate, masturbation shouldn’t be a source of shame. It’s fun, it improves your sex life, and it can make it easier to get a good night’s sleep. Plus, if you have a high sex drive, masturbation can help keep you from making poor sexual decisions (that could get you pregnant) with someone else.

_{Explanation for why you can’t get pregnant by masturbating:}

_{Getting pregnant requires sperm to reach a fertilized egg inside your body. Masturbating doesn’t provide the sperm. Alternatively, masturbating someone else doesn’t provide the egg (or the inside of your body.) From the perspective of pregnancy, masturbation is entirely safe sex.}

_{This was written in response to a question asking if masturbation will make a pregnancy test turn positive.}

You can not get pregnant if you give a guy a hand job, tissue off your hand, do a bunch of stuff, and eventually end up going to the bathroom and wipe yourself with your formally erotically charged hand – even if you aren’t holding a piece of toilet paper at the time.

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Although you should really wash your hands after giving a guy a hand job. Semen gets sticky as it dries, and that’s really just unpleasant. Not the hand job. Hand jobs are fun and reasonably safe sex. What is unpleasant is failing to clean up the mess afterward… and the thought of people who apparently walk around all day without ever washing their hands (a running theme in the questions I receive.)

_{Explanation for why you can’t get pregnant by touching semen, practicing bad sex hygiene, and eventually going to the bathroom:}

_{For semen to get you pregnant, it has to}

• _{still be wet enough to support the sperm}
• _{get into your vagina and through your cervix so that it can make friends with an egg.}

_{Wiping off your hands with a tissue after sex is almost certainly going to remove most, or all, or the semen and sperm and dry up what’s left. Furthermore, if it didn’t, you’d probably end up wanting to wash your hands because of the sticky/tacky problem.}

_{Even with the most cursory post-hand job cleanup, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that any sperm would still be alive several hours later . It’s even less likely that they would conspire to find their way into your body simply because you wiped yourself with the same hand after you peed.}

If a man has ejaculated on the floor of a shower, and then you go take a shower and sit on the floor, you’re not going to get pregnant.

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Drains are not the Super Sekrit entrance to your vagina. When the semen slowly swirls down the pipes into the sewer system, it does not do a whole chutes and ladders thing to come back and fertilize you later.

Semen that has gone down the shower drain also doesn’t grow up into giant sperm that haunt the sewers and later attack by climbing up through the toilet. That only happens with alligators.

_{Explanation for why you can’t get pregnant by sitting on a shower floor where semen once was:}

In order to think there was some possibility of pregnancy from sitting down in the shower, you’d have to assume that the semen was still sitting on the floor and hadn’t been washed down the drain.

Then you’d have to assume that the sperm hadn’t been killed by exposure to soap and other things that sperm don’t generally do all that well in.

THEN you’d have to figure out some way for them to climb up into the potential space that is your vagina – which is not actually a gaping hole waiting to vacuum up any potential sources of impregnation – and from there through your cervix to where an egg happened to be waiting to be fertilized.

It’s really not worth worrying your pretty, clean little head about. There are many nasty things that can live on a shower floor, but they’re not going to leave you carrying any new lifeform that isn’t microscopic.

I am not a pregnancy test.

Therefore, I will no longer be answering personal “am I pregnant?” questions.

I may still use them as a resource for topics for articles on this site, but this was always intended as a humor and educational site and not an advice site.

That having been said, one last piece of advice:

If you think you might be pregnant, the best way to find out is to wait until you miss your period and take a pregnancy test. Alternatively, if you’ve had sex without contraception in the past 72 hours, you can explore emergency contraception to try and interrupt the possibility of pregnancy. However, if you haven’t had vaginal intercourse, you are unlikely to be pregnant. It’s not completely impossible, but it’s extremely unlikely.

Before you start having sex, or thinking about having sex, I highly recommend buying a copy of “our bodies, ourselves” or a similar book about your body so that you understand how sex and pregnancy work, and all the possible risks. If you don’t know how sex can affect your body, you shouldn’t be fooling around with it.

You can not get pregnant from petting a dog that may or may not have had the misfortune of lying in a bed covered with your brother’s ejaculate*.

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You also can not get pregnant petting a cat that may have been covered in semen… or a gerbil… or a fish.

Even if you go to the bathroom and wipe yourself afterward while you’re still covered in fish scales.

Even if by “pet” you mean that the animal in question curled up between your legs while you were lying there naked and you rubbed yourself all over it.

Um.

That was not your mother’s LOLcat

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_{Explanation for why you can’t get pregnant by petting your pussy}

Sperm has to be alive to get you pregnant. Furthermore, it has to get inside your vagina, up through your cervix, and have a party with an egg.

If a dog or cat was soaked in enough semen to get your hand wet, you’d still have to shove it up inside your body and get really unlucky – you’re not going to get pregnant just by sperm touching your skin

That having been said, I can only hope that if your pet was covered with a strange slimy substance when you were petting it, you’d wash your hands before sticking your fingers inside your vagina. God knows I would. Semen would be the least of my worries.

_{*Yes. Someone asked. You can see the comment here}

You can not get pregnant if you are wearing underwear and a sanitary napkin, your boyfriend is wearing underwear, and you rub up against each other until he comes in an explosion of unbridled desire.

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The presence or absence of a bra has no effect on the probability of a pregnancy… unless it’s a really GOOD bra. As anyone who has worn one has certainly learned, a really good bra can have disinhibiting effects on a woman’s sense of self restraint. Proper support and a nice bit of uplift, combined with some really sexy lace, have been known to make some women feel so fabulous about themselves that they start picking up men on the street corners and having impromptu, unprotected sex. Having a good boob day is a truly dangerous thing… almost as effective for acquiring new sex partners as pink satin bunny ears.

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_{Explanation for why you can’t get pregnant when well padded}

Sperm need to get up through your cervix if you’re going to get pregnant. There is no conceivable way that the little swimmers are going to be able to climb through two layers of cloth and a sanitary napkin. Sperm don’t carry shovels… or ladders. They have neither backpacks nor hands.