It’s the first time I’ve seen murky white soap come out of an Aesop bottle and I’m about to feel sick. I’m getting nauseous with each pump, unsure if it’s the food I ate while walking or the Influenza B spreading around the city, while washing my hands and face clean and dry in the bathroom of a rooftop bar in Hong Kong, at the talk-of-the-town event of the evening.
It’s 8:30 p.m. on a Wednesday when I go back outside to crowds heaving with sweat on the outdoor patio of AOAO, the nightlife home base for fitness bros and mainstream fashion influencers. Friends down at street level are texting me that there’s a line stretching 200 meters from the building’s entrance because over 900 people have signed up for tonight’s event on Partiful. Within the steaming, clamoring, sardine-packed sea of people, I’m trembling cold like a zombie while someone shines the Bat-Signal for the apocalypse: projected high on the cement wall in graphics stylized like a bunker in Fallout, the words read, “SPERM RACE HONG KONG.” It is Asia’s first-ever sperm race, hosted in one of the least fertile economies in the world.
Compile every single sovereign state and dependent territory in the world into a list, and Hong Kong ranks second in global infertility.1 With 0.75 births per woman, the Special Administrative Region is less fertile than South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China—the five Asian tigers of demographic collapse. Hong Kong trails only Macau in infertility, a city with one-tenth of the population and without the same cultural and economic significance globally.
With Hong Kong’s renowned cultural exports (Wong Kar-wai, Cantonese cuisine, its diaspora population) and financial significance (where China accesses American dollars, where Chinese multinationals IPO), by some accounts it’s the world’s least fertile global economy, with a great deal to lose in the event of a system-wide population collapse. But tonight, underlying root causes like dimming economic futures or the cost of living remain unaddressed, and Hong Kong’s lack of self-reproducibility is traced back toward an unlikely scapegoat: sperm—“Sperm quality is sharply DECLINING. The health of sperm determines … the next generation of CHILDREN,” reads the promotional event copy for “SPERM RACE HONG KONG”—and an even more unlikely savior.
Not Eric Zhu, the Silicon Valley wunderkind who broke headlines in 2025 for raising $10 million in funding to host sperm races across the United States and in the mansions of disgraced YouTuber David Dobrik. Not any individual from a fertility, reproduction, or population health organization in Hong Kong. It was a white guy from Texas.
More specifically, it was a man named “Dick Gay”—the online pseudonym of Luke Hawash, the son of a successful Houston attorney—spotted in Hong Kong, half a world away from home like the supposed Norwegian man abandoned in India as a boy, “lost between borders… surviving,” and caught in 4K on a local rip-off of SubwayTakes, saying, “The MOST IMPORTANT problem in the world is SPERM… there’s HALF AS MUCH SPERM in every guy’s BALLS in the last fifty years.”
Back in the middle of the outdoor patio of AOAO, he wades his lanky body, covered in a cream corduroy suit, through a crowd of models and masc lesbians with sleeves fully covered in tattoos, through Instagram fitness influencers dressed in white unbuttoned polos, and through a trio of men wearing plastic shower hair wraps, cosplaying a sperm’s acrosome. At 6’5” (a friend’s estimate), lines start to form wherever “Dick Gay” goes, and from the press area’s astroturfed floor—with speakers blasting heavy-reverb DaBaby, livestreamers in Douyin face speaking Cantonese to the camera, and me, the only writer—I hear the words “CAN WE GET A PHOTO?” demanded in the distance, as three chuds (gender-neutral) at a time line up like gremlins for a selfie with Gay.
“Dick Gay,” as his over 140,000 followers saw, had only surfaced on Hong Kong social algorithms earlier in the summer. Before, he toured around rival American schools hosting sperm races, pitting USC against UCLA, UT Austin against Texas A&M, like collegiate football games for the age of population collapse, and churning slop marketing from his Instagram account to spread his message beyond the United States: walking around college campuses, dressed like a sperm cell, asking two men, “Can you fill these cups with your KIIIDSSS????” before the deafening echo of a vine boom. It was clear by now that he had become one of those burn-bright-die-fast internet celebrities in Hong Kong. He was the creamy white savior of the world’s least fertile economy.
Would SPERM RACE HONG KONG go down as another case of IRL brain rot—slop incarnate as a party? Or was “Dick Gay” honest about creating a platform to understand the new issues of the fertility crisis? “You can always go tell people to eat their vegetables and be more healthy,” Gay once told The Daily Texan. “But in the modern attention economy (and) internet entertainment landscape, that doesn’t come across … so we made (sperm racing) to meet people where they are.” I skipped introducing myself, and, watching from the press section, I decided to find out.
A silhouette of red sperm shines on the building across from the window of the club, glimmering like moonlight on the surface of a river.2 “Dick Gay” is huddling with competitors in a circle, eyes collectively gazing downward toward crotches. Meanwhile, a singular stanchion blocks a crowd of about fifty from the press area, clamoring, gurgling, screaming like the undead, with arms reaching outward toward a large screen playing a (seemingly) AI-generated sequence of two shiny metallic sperm flying through the Hong Kong skyline.
When an MC—the Hong Kong SubwayTakes rip-off host—calls upon “Dick Gay” to introduce himself, audience members shout, “DICK! DICK! DICK!” in unison, while Gay strides in from the corner of the stage.
“HOW WE DOIN’ Hong Kong,” he screams. “Thank YOU for COMING.” After a pause, the crowd erupts in a giggle.
On stage, Gay explains the mechanism behind tonight’s race: After procuring sperm samples from eight competitors in total, “we LOAD IT into SPERM ANALYSIS. And using that sperm analysis, we construct the races you see tonight.” Results are, allegedly, “extremely accurate” to what would be seen “under a microfluidic track.”
Tonight, competing in a league-style bracket, facing off one-on-one in quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals, eight racers sat on two pleather sofas on each side of the stage: a local Central Cee doppelgänger, a 36-year-old, a skinny soyjak, a man dressed like a Miami pimp, a short king in a tank top, the token Wasian, a teenager with saggy white pants, and a Bangladeshi man who decided to go shirtless, wrapping a red scarf, roughly the size and thickness and texture of an airplane blanket, around his shoulders. A good half were influencers.
“This is where the BOYS become MEN,” says Gay. “May the most fertile man win.”
The first match begins with little fanfare. The 36-year-old, a street-interview show host named Vincent, rises to the stage without an entrance song and without cheers from the crowd. “I don’t prefer being first, but let’s go,” he whispers into the microphone. “You’re going down.” The local Central Cee doppelgänger, an influencer named Jazzy, rushes to the stage after a brief MC introduction, and screams “AYO SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADYYYY,” while Kanye West’s “All of the Lights” begins playing in the background.
“Dick Gay” makes an attempt to quell the conflict, and divert the event back to its educational purposes. “This is about health, guys. This is about men’s health,” Gay says. He turns to Vincent, and asks “Why do you think you’re gonna win tonight? What did you do to prepare?”
“Go on YouTube, look up sperm boost frequency. Listen to that and sleep with it.”
A pause. “Uhhh, let’s see if that works tonight.”
So when it’s time for the actual race, sponsorship banners dissolve into a straight, horizontal two-slot racetrack. The audience OOOs and AHHs as a red stage light shines directly at our faces, and swarms of egg-shaped heads and squiggling tails propel forward from a line of pixels marked “START,” and a trap song mixed with a high-pitched sample of “Better Off Alone” floods across the rooftop.
“MAKE SOME NOISE,” Gay shouts. The race begins and it’s neck-and-neck, tail for tail; a swarm of phones (my own included) and DJI action cameras are raised from hands to record the race as it happens. “IT’S VINCENT,” Gay screams as the 36-year-old’s sperm advances ahead, trap beat trembling with every squiggle and inch toward the finish line. “WAIT, IT’S JAZZY…” Central Cee doppelgänger’s girlfriend, sitting on the couch in front of me and blocking my view, lets out an anguished scream. “IT’S VINCENT…” There’s a millisecond-long pause that feels like it lasts for a minute and the only thing we can hear is the skittering kick drum. “NO, IT’S JAZZY!” Central Cee’s sperm crosses the finish line and he’s crowned victorious.
The only real, science-based takeaways that I, as a man, got from this event were that for sperm health, oysters = good, cold plunges and gooning = bad; men need to be healthy ninety days prior to conception, and 30–50% of fertility problems are caused by sperm, but women suffer the brunt of invasive fertility treatments. Besides a thirty-second speech from a fertility advocate and a few comments on diet, SPERM RACE HONG KONG was not designed to meet people “where they are” to learn about “intentional family planning” “at a young age,” as Gay once claimed in The Daily Texan, but instead, engineered for spectacle and viral soundbites: like “Dick Gay” telling the audience, “YOU CARRY THE NEXT GENERATION IN YOUR BALLS”; like “Dick Gay” asking the skinny soyjak named Louis, claiming to be a daily gooner, when was the last time you didn’t jack off, and him, standing awkwardly, replying, I dunno, this morning?
Other contestants seemed way too excited about the attention. When it’s time for shirtless Bangladeshi man (an influencer named Moosa) to race, he takes his red scarf off, wipes his hands on his washboard abs and flexes, does that teenage boy masturbation charade, miming a few strokes near the crotch.
“Holy shit, you’re cut,” says “Dick Gay,” with saliva slobbering into the microphone.
“If I don’t win, it’s rigged,” he replies. “Look at me.”
I texted a friend the morning after the event, who wrote back, saying “Hong Kong culture is getting so chopt. And unsophisticated.” We were left asking a bigger question: How does one of the least fertile economies in the world—with a local government spending billions in stipends to increase birth rates—transform a moment meant for education into a spectacle that could only be conceived from the goon cave?
You could look at the city’s lack of strong mainstream cultural institutions, which leave white space open for grifters and clout chasers hungry for internet metrics, creating dick-measuring contests under the guise of education. Anyone can recognize, however, that these issues are not unique to any place. Even revered cultural capitals like New York or London aren’t immune to this kind of desperate, vulgar pursuit of engagement as “culture.” But for me they do signal the internet’s new, perverted understanding of the transgressive.
Transgression, as it had been traditionally used by subcultural spaces, often required stakes—driven from a worldview, experience, or identity with genuine substance, genuine difference, and genuine risk of pushback. As W. David Marx similarly reflects in Blank Space, in pursuing and taking on identities with real social consequences, the language and practices of subcultural communities “carried power because there were still stakes to the community’s transgression.”3 SPERM RACE HONG KONG and accompanying forms of viral IRL brain rot symbolize a new appropriation of transgression and vulgarity in the age of the internet. Empty, devoid of substance, because doing raunchy things for the sake of metrics alone never produced anything. I don’t know what kind of unique language or culture that men miming masturbation or speaking in the exaggerated vulgarity of a high schooler produces. Some of the contestants were over thirty. I thought we were all supposed to stop doing that as adults.
Come finals, a member of the audience asks shirtless Bangladeshi, “Does your MOTHER know you’re doing this?”
“She’s dead!”
And that’s the first time no one lets out a laugh. I begin to feel sick again. I’m not sure again if it’s the Influenza B spreading, the idea of dead mothers, or if experiencing in-real-life brainrot at a club is supposed to feel like that.
The race concludes, and the winner is the nineteen-year-old token Wasian. His name is Anton, and when someone from the crowd heckles, “WHAT DOES IT TASTE LIKE?” Anton says, “WHY DON’T WE ASK MY GIRLFRIEND,” pointing to a girl sitting two rows in front of me who just cowers and crumbles in horror. “SHE’S RIGHT HERE.” I run to the elevator once he’s handed the trophy. And I think I’m about to gag.
In this segment of the book, Marx is specifically talking about drag queens. I’ve generalized the insight from the text to apply to various subcultures. Please note that this is purely my interpretation alone, and I don’t mean to misconstrue Marx’s words.
Excellent frontline reporting, I am hooked and traumatised
This feels like a fever dream gone bad gone worse. Hong Kong needs to end its toxic relationship with the manosphere asap!!