Remember the illogical question Captain Kirk asked that evil floating robot that made its head smoke? Here's one for your favorite vegan.

All vegans go out of their way to avoid ingesting animal products—even cage-free eggs, milk and honey. But boy, is there a sticky situation for those with male sex partners: Semen is not plant-based. And, depending on whether teeth are involved, it may not even be cruelty-free.

Isn't it hypocritical to morally oppose eating eggs in the kitchen while downing sperm in the bedroom?

The Vegan Society, the Supreme Court of meat non-eating—whose founder, Donald Watson, coined the word "vegan" in 1944—is "strictly neutral on the actions of consenting adults," according to rep Samantha Calvert. "Veganism relates explicitly to non-human animals."

For many vegans, they've chosen the lifestyle exclusively to avoid inflicting cruelty upon our helpless furry and feathered friends. These vegans let the human products slide… down their throats. I mean, if they took it to that extreme, they couldn't even kiss another vegan, because isn't saliva an animal product, too?

"Our goal is about doing the least harm," says Maria Gara of Las Vegas, who is both a vegan and a good catch for hetero males. Gara notes that no one can be 100 percent vegan or they couldn't use cars or computers. (Cholesterol is used to manufacture LCD displays, gelatin for batteries.)

But sperm presents what could be the ultimate conundrum for a sexually active, pro-oral sex vegan. Not only does ejaculate come from an animal, it contains actual living organisms that are not plants or fungi—an average of 280 million of them, to be exact.

"If you're someone who just wants to eat plants and not animals, without any deeper underlying philosophy behind it, I can understand how there might be a problem," says Anne Dinshah, vice president of the American Vegan Society and author of Dating Vegans: Recipes for Relationships. "But sperm is given willingly and lovingly in a relationship between consenting participants, whereas eggs and milk are products of animal exploitation that involve suffering and misery. And if you're going to call yourself a vegan, then compassion and a desire to improve the world should be your guiding principles."

Whether or not sperm itself is vegan, we have some good news for vegans with non-vegan partners: the sperm of a meat-eater is no meatier than that of a vegan.

"It's made de novo, meaning built from scratch, from purines and pyrimidens in testis," says Dr. Darius Paduch, Ph.D., a urologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. "For that to happen, you need to break down what you ingest." If this weren't the case, Paduch explains, anaphylactic shock would regularly result from people with peanut allergies performing oral sex on people who have eaten peanuts.

But my friend Gara may have the best reason for why vegans shouldn't be concerned about the diets of their lovers. "Even though animals have been harmed by the meat-eater at the expensive dinner he took me out to prior to my going down on him," she says, "no one is harmed in my blowjobs."

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