If you read the entire article, which I suspect many commentators haven't bothered to do, you'll find that there are so many confounders in the data that any trend is highly suspect. For example, this one is a bit amusing:
> "After ejaculation, sperm count decreases and takes a while to build back up again; if your community’s ejaculation frequency is changing (eg people have gained access to online porn), that will change its average sperm count."
If one wanted to, one could claim that the sexually frustrated society of the 1950s was resulted in the high sperm count samples from that era, and that sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in people having sex more frequently, hence the lower sperm counts in submitted samples.
Of course, there are about a half-dozen other confounders one could cherry-pick so that's not a valid conclusion either. All in all the trend doesn't seem to be very well-supported, compared to other studied trends like the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel combustion, the decrease of oxygen in the deep ocean due to warming and fertilizer inputs, an increase in heavy metals in the environment due to centuries of coal combustion, etc.
Were men sexually frustrated in the 50s? I don't know the stats, but I do know that a lot of the nostalgia about that period comes from high rates of stable marriage and a male-lead household.
At least on paper, it sounds like every man basically had an unlimited sex license.
I read that as there being much more social pressure against infidelity in the 50s as compared to the 60s/70s.
Stable marriage certainly doesn't translate into unlimited sexual license. What's the old saying? A newly-married couple puts a marble in a jar every time they have sex during their first year of marriage. Then remove one marble every time, beginning year 2 and beyond. They never empty the jar.
>What's the old saying? A newly-married couple puts a marble in a jar every time they have sex during their first year of marriage. Then remove one marble every time, beginning year 2 and beyond. They never empty the jar.
That certainly doesn't line up with my experience, or the stats I've read.
From what I've heard, it's pretty common for married couples to keep at it (with a slow decline, as both parties age) until they physically can't any more. And with modern technology (cialis etc.), that age keeps getting pushed further and further up.
I agree here. The graphs showing the trend lines in the bubble graph read to me as pretty much noise.
I looked at the paper Scott pulled it from and couldn't find the r2 value.
Perhaps someone with a better stats knowledge can help me out here in trying to interpret how the 95% CIs that are presented help relate to something like an r2 value? Is the data presented three dimensional? What's going on here?
The authors of the paper state: "These findings strongly suggest a significant decline in male reproductive health, which has serious implications beyond fertility concerns". But because of my limited stats knowledge, I'm seeing the opposite of their conclusion.
Are there studies that taken MTBE into account (eg asking men to build of x days of material before collection, or at least only comparing men across time with similar MTBEs)?
I was concerned about this, so I actually went to a fertility clinic myself and got a semen analysis. My sperm count came out low but "within range" and the motility was low and "out of range". I am a healthy normal guy, I exercise 6/7 days a week, am not obese, don't drink much, and eat pretty healthy generally. My low "in range" count would have been considered extremely low and out of range a generation ago. So anecdotally, I think that something is not right here.
Read the book "Countdown". The author goes into great detail all of the reasons that modern life is putting downward pressure on sperm quality and quantity. The author, Dr. Swan, is a leading expert in the field. The book is really good, and pretty scary.
I’m surprised by the eagerness to dismiss this trend, both in the above article and the discussion here. A lot of saying it’s not happening, and even if it is, it doesn’t matter. Like the saying goes, “It was a long time ago and it didn’t happen.”
In reality, even if it’s possible to have kids with 50% lower sperm counts, that’s not really the point. That is a huge drop, and likely indicates other changes as well. Testosterone levels are way down over the last few generations. Is that related? What about rising rates of depression among young men [1]?
That's the entire point of the article - that it's less clear than you might think. There are several reasons why the average sperm counts might be reported as lower than they were in the past, and it's not necessarily an indication of a society-wide problem.
It’s definitely a massive change, but it’s worth noting we don’t exactly have long term numbers on this. The first studies on sperm count are from 1929, and we started to see this issue in the 1970s. It could be that we’re seeing a drop down from a period where sperm counts were unnaturally high for some reason, as opposed to a lowering below baseline human levels.
(Do I think that’s likely? No, probably we’re seeing the affect of one of the many chemicals that have been introduced over the last 100 years. But it’s always worth thinking through all possibilities)
I completely agree, it's deeply concerning that a huge number of opinions on this topic in educated circles seem to think that increased difficulty in having kids and lower testosterone levels are a good thing. You can see it in the responses to this article in these comments, but also I have heard the same opinions after working with my friends in Silicon Valley for many years.
They legitimately seem to regard humans as a kind of virus (literally have had multiple people use that word exactly to me in conversation), and cheer on the reduction in the number of people. This is problematic for many reasons, but just on the surface, cheering on the sexual dysfunction of your fellow man, this is just immoral and unethical on so many levels to me.
Per the article, there is really very little evidence that anything is happening at all with sperm counts. There is a good chance that there is no effect, that it's all measurement artifacts and/or localized changes.
Might be TMI, but I get my sperm tested frequently (partly because of this problem), and will say there is a lot of variability in my samples.
A standard deviation of 48.29 for total motile, and a very low positive correlation with abstinence period (R^2 of 0.082). There isn’t a discernible pattern over time yet (I’m expecting as I age for my average to decrease but I haven’t seen that yet), and I haven’t made any significant diet changes. I think my hydration level is important but I haven’t tracked that in conjunction with my tests. Also because it takes 74 days [1] for spermatogenesis, any change you make in lifestyle has to be performed for a while before it potentially can affect your sperm.
Alls that to say, I wouldn’t necessarily worry about one test being low. I’ve had some lows that initially worried me when I was first testing, and now it feels within expected variation. Though, the broader macro trend (or potential of a trend) is still concerning, so its worth it to me to keep an eye on it individually
> Read the book "Countdown". The author goes into great detail all of the reasons that modern life is putting downward pressure on sperm quality and quantity.
"They’ve been shown to be anti-androgenic—in other words, they decrease testosterone. In studies with rats, it’s been shown that if you dose the pregnant mother, the offspring have defects of the male reproductive tract. There have also been studies in humans that have found anti-androgenic effects on development of the male reproductive tract."
"There was also a dose–response relationship between MBzP (the primary hydrolytic metabolite of BBzP) and below WHO reference value sperm concentration. In a recent follow-up study including these 168 men, plus an additional 295 men newly recruited into the study, Hauser et al. (2006) confirmed the associations between MBP and increased odds of below-reference sperm concentration and motility. "
One big problem with this whole thing is that the country that has the most possible factors for sperm-count decline, the US (obesity, pollution, circadian cycles disruptions, etc.) is also the country with the smallest measured drop.
That also happens to be the country where the EPA said water and air were clean after the Ohio train derailment [0]. The same EPA that falsifies new chemicals risk assessments as a matter of course [1].
Where the FCC said millions of dead people, many with the same name, wanted net neutrality overturned. And when caught, went ahead and overturned it anyway.
Where the CDC said that masks don't help against an airborne virus, before exaggerating their effectiveness to justify ineffective mandates and lockdowns in schools.
Where whistleblowers are smeared, jailed, and tortured.
Where environmental lawyers are disbarred and jailed by the justice system itself as recrimination for exposing corporate atrocities [3].
Where the military leaves dangerous chemicals around as a matter of routine with absolutely no consequences (other than the organ failures and cancer).
Where the tapwater around the country is hazardous to human health [4].
Where reliable numbers on something as crucial as vaccine effectiveness vs a dangerous pandemic are impossible to obtain.
Where estimates of civilian casualties in its illegal wars are off by 7 figures.
My point: You might want to take official America's numbers on anything and everything with some salt. Including sperm counts.
What is beyond doubt is that US chemical and agri corps have made concerted efforts over decades to infiltrate regulatory agencies, and have a long history of covering up their atrocities.
So, cast a skeptic eye on anything from them, the agencies they're in, and the scientists they fund. If there's any other reasonable take, you should post it.
The data is very noisy, and the studies often don't match - as pointed out in the article. So I don't know where you get the idea that the data is "united".
As for who benefits: The polluters - big chemical, defense, agri etc; the people who we pay to regulate them (usually people from those industries); the corporate media who takes huge advertising money from those companies; the shareholders of all the above companies; and the politicans responsible for keeping the status quo going.
Take, for example, the Deepwater Horizon spill. The company paid out what, 1 billion in fines? Less than 5% of last years profits. The Obama administration helped minimize reputation damage and accountability. The media - all media - were barred from filming or investigating; not that many in corporate media tried. If shareholders had a problem with the lack of action, or the horrific decision to cover up the spill with Corexit, they were quiet as church-mice about it.
And that's one high profile example, out of hundreds, of just oil spills alone. Then there's the agricultural runoff, the pesticides, the insecticides, the food additives, the chemicals in cosmetics that are banned in other countries, the military waste, the toxins from cars and tire, the industrial accidents, the train derailments...
So... Yeah. There's some vested interests going on there, with no shortage of historical examples to draw from.
>Take, for example, the Deepwater Horizon spill. The company paid out what, 1 billion in fines? Less than 5% of last years profits.
How much should they pay? 100% of profits? Whatever percent you think it should be, do you think that if you spilled a bunch of used oil on the ground should you be fined the equivalent amount of your disposable income?
>The media - all media - were barred from filming or investigating
The wikipedia article[1] for that disaster doesn't seem to have a shortage of media on that topic. There's even photos from the government itself.
> The data is very noisy, and the studies often don't match - as pointed out in the article. So I don't know where you get the idea that the data is "united".
Well the comment you replied to said:
> the US (obesity, pollution, circadian cycles disruptions, etc.) is also the country with the smallest measured drop
and you said that the US is known to lie (with so many examples). So for that above to be a lie, many people across different states need to work in unison, delivering false results.
Also nobody really knows if this effect is really there to begin with, let alone knowing what causes it. People lobbying so organized across the states against an unknown is very unlikely.
My point stands though. If you're swallowing any US agencies information without salt, you have an incomplete information diet.
Dow, Monsanto, DuPont etc have a long track record of getting their people into agencies via the old US politics revolving door system, and they have every reason to downplay the environmental factors that they have inflicted on the planet, especially American soil (and air and water).
> Endocrine disrupting chemicals (mostly phthalates), they are present in most food and bathroom packaging. Any plastic that is flexible.
Citation, please. As I understand it, polyethylene (especially LDPE) and polypropylene are flexible all by themselves and generally contain no plasticizers at all. And they are quite common.
It doesn't explain an individual's sperm count declining over time. But more people spending more time indoors with warm balls could explain the average sperm count decreasing.
This is the only way. Make it costly via legislation to produce harmful products. Hell make it illegal. We've see how quickly industry can adapt when forced to during covid. It's just that no one is forcing them to do anything.
This has got to be sarcasm. How is it simpler to completely replace sexual reproduction than it is to find another chemical that makes plastic more flexible? Seems like a case of 0 knowledge of chemistry or biology.
You make a excellent point, I agree that as a species we should collectively pursue this, as an option at least.
I expect a successful artificial procreation attempt is on the horizon, a few decades away at most, as we already have stem cell technology that can do part of this, and in-vitro fertilization is a well-established technique.
As a symbolic gesture, it would be wonderful to see a lesbian couple co-conceive with each others' genetic material, entirely eliminating males from the process.
The really hard part will be perfecting and commodifying the process before hordes of angry men rebel at their sudden uselessness, and have such research banned and the labs destroyed.
Nice of you to ignore the article which explains all the reasons why data indicating sperm counts are decreasing are flawed and likely not significant.
> I don't think it's super scary. Our population can't continue growing at this rate forever so a natural stabilization would be very welcome.
It can be quite scary - what's the minimum population count needed to sustain colony species?
We depend on so much infrastructure to stay alive, and have so few survival skills I would guess that even quite a large population (few million) would die out if they were scattered throughout the world.
Look at how the passenger pigeon went from the most numerous bird in North America to extinct in 10 years, purely because the minimum number to keep the colony alive was breached.
> We were doing fine as a species at 1.6bln in 1900.
Maybe, but we were, as a species, a lot less specialised, and so individuals could succeed with smaller numbers.
The other part you are missing is that we no longer have access to the low-hanging fruit in terms of natural resources.
In 1900 we could subsist because we had a lot more natural resources simply lying around, or close to the surface. We used those up. We razed down countrysides, replaced with non-fertile concrete.
We have almost nothing right now that cannot run on electricity, which requires experts in multiple fields to harvest and distribute.
The majority of humans in 1900 were mostly self-sufficient, those who weren't starved to death. The majority of humans now are clearly nowhere near to self-sufficient if infrastructure starts to decay due to insufficient experts.
Remember, I did not say it will be scary, I said it can be a scary thought.
jfc go look at a population chart that's broken down by country. If you think the idea of overpopulation is scary just wait until you're living in a world where you can't get your basic needs met because there aren't enough people to do all the specialized and non-specialized jobs that keep society running. Oh and by the way, you'll be in the most vulnerable group by then too so enjoy being forgotten about in the scramble.
> Oh and by the way, you'll be in the most vulnerable group by then too so enjoy being forgotten about in the scramble
This thought keeps me up at night sometimes. I’m nearly 40 with no kids, nieces/nephews, and even my cousins are mostly childless.
Our eldercare models are already beginning to buckle under the strain of the retiring Boomers - and they still overwhelmingly have family/church/pensions as primary non-govt support structures.
You can’t paper over this with immigration either. There will be absolutely no political will power to saddle millions of productive first/second gen immigrants with the sort of crippling tax burden the state would need to “replace” a total loss of the family/church/pension support triad. Expecting a huge push towards “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) seems to be a safe bet.
Tl;dr: the current elder care system prioritizes “old maids” but the future system will undoubtedly be “the Olds get MAID”
I'm holding out hope for a grassroots educational campaign to tell young people that if they want families they need to have them early. Oddly enough it isn't that the last few generations have wanted kids any less, that percentage of people has stayed relatively constant. What happened is a lot of people decided to delay having a family in favour of a career or just enjoying their 20s and then found out the hard way what no one bothered to tell them; how difficult it is to conceive after 30. That means a good percentage of people that wanted to have children simply can't.
Even if we successfully turn the trend around there'll still be a generational gap that will cause a series of smaller generations going forward.
How much of that financial anxiety is caused by would-be grandparents taking a "you're on your own, kid" attitude to their children and then wondering why they choose to focus on career instead of reproduction?
Far be it from me to cover for the Boomers’ greedy shortsightedness, but iirc we’re now at 52% of 18-29 year olds living at home and a large percentage of young married couples being DINKs (dual income, no kids). And current day Boomers poll fairly solidly against stuff like NAFTA and offshoring.
So imo, it’s not 2020s grandkid-wanting Boomers/GenX going “you’re on your own, kid” so much as it’s their greedy younger selves getting manipulated into mortgaging their eventual children’s future away in the 80s and 90s.
A distinction without a difference I guess, but the root of this problem stems from the Reagan/Clinton eras and not many people seem interested in discussing how we can successfully roll back some of the more egregious anti-worker legal/regulatory changes from those days.
Sort of agree with this, I feel that way about the hippies of the 60's though. Watching videos of them sitting around in Golden Gate Park narcissistically talking about how they are disillusioned with their parents' work ethic and they don't align with traditional values (like hard work). It's like watching a group of people throw away their generational inheritance and complaining about having too much free time and easy money.
There's a lot to admire in the boomers I think, they had a great culture, and they contributed a massive amount of technological and scientific progress as well. But agree they never had the competition these newer generations are facing and so did not do enough to prepare their kids for a more competitive world (I mean, some did, but not enough).
My understanding of the disillusionment with the hard work ethic stems from the question of "toward which goal?" Hard work for the sake of having worked hard is how your boss gets rich, from that view.
I like your analysis. It passes the gut check, unlike the garbage that assumes that it's all personal responsibility that can magically be solved today through better choices. It doesn't matter much what choices the Boomers/X make today, as the damage was done long before the general public recognized there would be problems.
> I'm holding out hope for a grassroots educational campaign to tell young people that if they want families they need to have them early.
Yeah it’s still not too late for this sort of thing in the West. Though the cynic in me thinks it’s very unlikely the political class travels the idealogical axis from today’s mostly explicit anti-natalism to having the political willpower necessary for implementing pro-family policies.
At least we have a chance. Places like South Korea/Japan might as well change their national mottos to “omae wa mou shindeiru”
We shouldn't turn the trend around though. Most of our environmental problems including most likely this one, are caused by our overpopulation and increased welfare. We just need too many resources, this can't continue.
So if people organically decide (or due to this sperm count thing are forced) to have fewer kids, this is really a brilliant thing for the planet.
Anti-human garbage take IMO. The planet is not more important than humanity. Vast swathes of this planet are uninhabited by humans, people have been predicting for generations that too many people would destroy civilization and the planet and none of it has come true (see the Population Bomb "predictions" section on Wikipedia for a laugh)
This narrative has been popular, especially among wealthy, educated, people for a long long time. But most of it is hogwash.
Is "church support" still a thing? It's not here in Europe. Perhaps in rural USA?
However it's ok, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs due to automation anyway, leaving more people free for healthcare. It will not be easy but we'll cope. And we have to in order not to burn up this planet.
> Is "church support" still a thing? It's not here in Europe. Perhaps in rural USA?
Not just rural or even conservative USA: my mom lives in a city that would be in the top 5 of everyone’s “Name the most liberal city in America” list.
She had major surgery right before Covid and her church had people bringing her flowers and keeping her company nearly every day while she was an inpatient - and then had a coordinated rotating list of church members bringing home cooked dinners and visiting her every day for several weeks while she recuperated at home.
I expect this sort of thing will largely die with the Boomers and we’ll join our Euro-brethren in the bubbling soup of cynicism and lowered expectations
Would you find it more scary if you realized it applied to almost all mammals, not just humans? Species which are already facing severe pressure from habitat loss and fragmentation?
I share your view that human populations need a natural stabilization (and we've found it, by combining urban living with available birth control).
It's been too long since I looked into this issue, and I'm at work so don't have time to do the research now, but I remember studies showing that declining sperm count is a problem across multiple species.
It is scary because more people are becoming unable to have kids or the only way for them to have them is through IVF. There are still plenty of people out there who WANT kids.
I don't have a problem with people deciding to take themselves out of the gene pool, that's their own choice to make.
But you are using nalgene BPA-free water bottles (7 in triangle), have PEX pipes at home, eat meals cooked in non-sticky pans and have soy added to your food... Out of your control...
It is almost impossible to outrun our civilisation bent on self-destruction...
Non-stick pans are coated in Teflon, the same material used for many implants thanks to its inertness in the body. Soybeans have been cultivated since as early as 7000 BCE and been a staple crop for many civilizations for millennia. These are unlikely to have any unexpected or negative effects.
Yes, Teflon is completely harmless, especially in non-stick cookware. To prove this, I routinely heat up my hernia-repair implants to several hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and I've suffered no ill effects whatsoever.
> Where are sperm samples coming from? Some people give samples because they are sperm donors, others because they are infertile and want to figure out why.
That's about enough to conclude all this doesn't mean much. The only way to have reliable data is to have a great sample selected at random; if the incoming data is not random, but is in fact skewed by factors relevant to the data we're looking for, there's very little value in it.
The rest of this (excellent) article explains why the procedures are inconsistent, geographically as well as historically, and poorly documented, etc., and lists many reasons why the various studies could be flawed. It ends without a definitive conclusion, and saying we don't quite know.
This prudence is admirable, but IMHO the anxiety about sperm count seems largely overblown. I'm not too worried.
Edit: One important thing the article doesn't talk about is how sperm is actually counted. Obviously researchers don't count all 150 to 300 million sperms per sample; they probably count a small (or very small) sub-sample and extrapolate. At least they did when they first started studying this. And maybe today some studies use machines? Or other sophisticated / more precise methods? And others don't? The evolution and diversity of the counting methods is obviously a major factor that needs to be discussed.
> That's about enough to conclude all this doesn't mean much.
You list a common confounder, then skip over the section that says 5/6 studies that have none of these confounders find a decline. That's a fairly important followup.
> However, Auger identify six (of their original seventy) studies that they say are extremely well done and suffer from none of these potential confounders. They say five of the six still show declining sperm counts, and believe that the effect might be real (they say there is no evidence it is global rather than limited to these five regions but I think if an effect happens in five regions, and there is only one region where it is not happening, it is fair to wonder whether it represents a broader trend). I interpret their conclusions as very cautiously pro-decline-hypothesis (Fisch remains against).
> Edit: One important thing the article doesn't talk about is how sperm is actually counted. Obviously researchers don't count all 150 to 300 million sperms per sample; they probably count a small (or very small) sub-sample and extrapolate
When you've got hundreds of millions of something distributed essentially randomly in some space, counting a subsample and extrapolating is fine.
> If for example, they did rough extrapolations in the 50s, and then in the 90s they were able to do an exact and exhaustive count, it's a problem.
That's not a change that's happened, smaller volumes are still analysed, but no that's not necessarily a problem.
At such scales, "small" samples can be totally fine and have an extremely high chance of matching a complete analysis. That's why polling and sampling works.
The problem shrinks even more when you're looking at averages over groups. Smaller samples are noisy, not biased. Averaging over many doesn't lower bias but it does lower the noise.
if the incoming data is not random, but is in fact skewed by factors relevant to the data we're looking for, there's very little value in it
Looking at people who donate sperm effectively is a random sample of men unless there's a causal link between sperm count and the desire to be a donor.
Sampling only people who self-select themselves into one specific group (sperm donors) definitely isn’t a random sample. There are obviously correlations between income, geographic area and age with the desire to become a donor.
Don't sperm banks collect all of that relevant information? I would assume they collect at least age, income, and education. Probably some health history as well.
There can easily be a causal link. It’s a self selected group specifically on sexual reproductive strategy. I don’t need to be able to explain the relationship in detail; it’s enough that it’s plausible and that it hasn’t already been studied.
Personal attacks like this will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. If you'd please read the rules and stick to them, we'd appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You may not owe erroneous sperm counters better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Also, "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." That's in the site guidelines too, because it's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.
It’s not intellectual dishonesty, but a simple matter of how the wage gap is defined. If you take the wage gap simply as the percentage of men’s earnings without correcting for anything, you can then take that measure and see how it changes over time and by region. That’s useful and worthwhile research. But for some reason any mention of the wage gap makes some people so angry that they refuse to look at the actual studies and how they work.
Maybe the reason the phenomenon is hard to account for, is because it's not real. Things that don't exist are difficult to explain.
Maybe we shouldn't spend so much energy trying to find causes when we're not even sure there's an effect. TFA argues, in essence, that metastudies point to severe inconsistencies and are ultimately inconclusive, and I agree with it.
(Also: "armchair analyst" is involuntary funny, because most analysts, unlike generals (or maybe like most generals?) work at a desk.)
I’ve run a lot of linear regressions. The first thing that jumps out at me are the initial studies conducted, which pull the tail fit up quite a lot.
there are a huge number of methods to test for stability of the model. Does anyone see a way to access the model data?
Beyond the model, knowing the distribution of sperm counts across men and across men of different races would be immensely informative. increasing sample sizes or simple increasing total observations could actually make it look like a change is occurring when in reality you are simply converging to the global population mean.
This article mentions but talks around the idea of their simply being a step-change in sperm counts due to lifestyle factors - i.e. the observation that sitting can reduce sperm count, and more people have office jobs.
If you take an average in a population, and then re-arrange the population distribution to the lower-side of the step change, then take another average your result would look exactly like a decline over time, even though there's no actual ongoing component to it - the sitting population, if identified would have a lower normal rate that's not decreasing otherwise.
Which would give you a real effect on average, but not an actual trend you can extrapolate since you're just observing two averages for two population groups, where the membership of each is varying. Which again - is alluded to, but I found it weird this mechanism wasn't called out explicitly (except under the "mysteriously stops" conclusion).
I don't know why everyones obsessed about sperm count decreasing. It's definitely not the limiting factor of the US's birth rate, and will probably never be. We should be more worried about our society having less babies and the future effects, where immigration will have to make up for our aging demographics.
The article said there might be "missing cues of fertility that would otherwise increase sperm production" which reminded me of "study shows that when men smell T-shirts worn by women while ovulating, it triggers a surge in the sex hormone testosterone" [1] which would be exactly such a cue of fertility.
I think a big part of that is age of child birth. If you start having kids at 22 it's straight forward to end up with 5 before you are 35. If you try to have your first at 35+ you may have to get fertility treatment if you wait longer or want multiple that are spaced out.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The small-town, big family folks I know (my parents included), all started their families before 25. It's the double professional degree couples with a late start who end up at the fertility clinic, and tragically, are incredibly more likely to produce children with complications.
Even now, as someone who's 27 and looking to start a family before I'm 30, I'm having to be more discerning with age when picking a lifelong partner. My women friends haven't been especially supportive of this strategy, and I can see it when I introduce them to a date a few years younger than them. Call it selfishness, call it pragmatism, but when it comes to the health of my future children, I don't mind being choosy.
If these women are younger than them, I think the judgement can be safely categorised as jealousy. The fact that you're picking partners younger than them makes them feel like they're not good enough, which is why they are upset. That doesn't make you selfish - you don't exist to make others feel good.
I’m around the same age group as the above commenter described, and I can confidently say “not being supportive of dating someone significantly younger than yourself” at our age is looked frown upon. We usually joke about “lol i can’t imagine having anything common with 21 year old self, and as a self respecting person, i wouldn’t date one either”.
I think it’s a cultural thing, and personally I wouldn’t judge two of-age people making their own decisions. Really depends on your group dynamics and groupthink.
Also, not every co-ed friendship is rooted in jealousy or sexual desires.
This is it. Evolutionarily, 30-35 is extremely late for procreation in humans. That doesn't give you enough time to raise them before you die at around 45 (around the life expectancy of wild humans).
That's true of most of the civilized period when humans were relatively safe from predators. Most of human history was not like that. As far as I know, hunter-gatherer humans without this form of safety generally didn't live past 40 except in exceptional cases, even if they survived as a child.
So you have very few fertile years left into which to fit multiple healthy children. 2.1 is needed to merely sustain a population (with all the medicine of industrialized society to keep them alive). For "wild" humans, that number would be considerably higher.
Perhaps historically there was evolutionary selection pressure towards higher sperm counts, and something about modern (as in Holocene) human behavior has eliminated this selection pressure, and thus sperm counts are now varying randomly.
Probably, right. The cave men or before that probably only had one or a few chances to mate while in our society we live in couples and can copulate many times per month, year in and year out, and thus a lower sperm count is countered by an increase in the number of tries.
I also find it hard to believe that sperm count should be such an important factor, there is still such a huge amount or sperms that have a chance to reach the egg.
But we haven’t got any observations of a steady baseline prior to the last century. There could have been declines (or rises!) during the previous centuries and millennia.
The chart from the meta-analysis does actually look very random, and the OP article discusses several confounding factors which might make us doubt the evidence. It’s easy to find patterns in noisy data.
I think it might be interesting to compare countries with a high rate of obesity (e.g. US) and countries with a low rate of obesity (e.g. Singapore) here, both because it very likely directly affects men's health and testosterone levels and also because it'll likely create a different level of optical stimulation, thereby indirectly affecting testosterone levels.
Also, the time range of the diagrams in the article correspond to a time when the weight of an average american roughly 1.5x-ed. I'd guess that diluting the same absolute testosterone amount to 1.5x the volume will also have measurable effects.
> Obesity and bad diets can impact sperm count. But the US, a world center of obesity, seems to be doing better than many less obese countries, and countries like China and France that have maintained relatively low rates of obesity and overweight seem heavily affected. If modern diets are the problem, then it has to be something more insidious than obvious you-are-very-fat obesity - unless you want to use the “all regional comparisons are too low sample size for us to care” card.
It is disappointing to me that how this issue impacts men is largely brushed aside. It is well documented that testosterone levels have greatly declined in the last 100 years. If you couple these two facts, it seems impossible they are incorrect.
And when this topic comes up, the responses are generally, “who cares?” First, attention is diverted from the male to fertility, because the issue must be seen as impacting females negatively to justify any interest by society. Second, the way this impacts boys and men is entirely ignored. Responses exist like, “we just need a way to reproduce without men”, or “everyone can just use IVF and still have children”. I worry very few people respect how being wished out of existence so that females can enjoy plastics and pesticides impacts men. Very few people respect how demeaning it is for men to be infertile and how this would impact their mental health. Very few people respect how being unable to produce the hormones that allow boys to develop correctly or men to perform their biological functions impacts men. It is wholly disheartening.
If there were even the slightest indication that something similar impacted women only, I doubt we would be here discussing whether or not the effect was real, but instead, what should we do about it? Instead, since sperm count and testosterone levels are “men’s issues”, nobody cares unless it can be shown to impact the other 50% of society that apparently is the only portion deserving of any care.
Don't worry, you can find plenty of examples where society or medicine ignored the needs or voices of women.
Combative narratives are suboptimal. They are alienating to those you complain about, when obtaining their support would further your cause. It's possible, and more effective, to advance men's rights without complaining about women, or any other rights movement.
Not everything has to be Us vs Them. I'd much rather live in a world where it isn't.
This is a weird statement. His comment wasn't combatative at all, and additionally men have been very marginalized in anglophone societies (USA, UK, AUS, CAD, etc) in the past 20 years by the media (just look at those ads where the guy's only function in his family is to cook steak on the BBQs, while the woman brilliantly manages everything like a CEO :P ), while women have been celebrated. The original idea of all this when I first encountered it in the 90s was something called "equality". But it's been thrown out the window totally.
Even if you don't agree with it, people are allowed to express how they feel. Passionate reactions (and this is hardly even passionate -- it's just a statement of this person's perception of the state of things), are ok. Sometimes even needed to spark discussion. He feels things aren't equal anymore -- and they aren't. Again in anglophone societies....
I don't think parent's comment was combative at all. Simply, their opinion and/or observation.
If you don't think we live in a time when men's (white especially) interests are being attacked you're delusional. They are at the bottom of the identity politics war. Ideas of toxic masculinity, undeserved privilege, power, etc. are being touted as gospel by the educated, political class.
Maybe it's all deserved. Paying for generations of misbehavior or something. It doesn't really matter. The reality is that political popularity and public "good graces" _are_ a zero sum game. Politics are currently very much us vs them. And men are very much them right now.
> If you don't think we live in a time when men's (white especially) interests are being attacked you're delusional.
Nonsense. This is just a rhetorical technique to try to dismiss people who hold opinions that differ from yours without having to actually engage them.
It's interesting that you claim my statement is nonsense. That seems hypocritically dismissive. Ask for evidence or simply disagree. By saying nonsense are you implying that it's not possible that men's interests could be discounted by the popular opinion of today?
How about the amount of funding and attention that breast cancer gets vs prostate cancer?
Once again I'm not interested in why, just the current state.
I'll cover up their rhetorical technique with statistics:
Women have outpaced men in Bachelor's degree completions since 1981, and Master's degrees since 1986. At present they are 57.7% of Bachelor's degree recipients and 60.7% of Master's degrees [0]. You might argue that most of the advance women made was prior to the year 2000, so it isn't reflective of trends today.
Women have a "struggle for reproductive rights". Abortion and contraceptives are "critical reproductive healthcare services", according to the White House [1]. Men cannot have abortions, cannot take birth control pills, cannot receive birth control shots or implants, cannot obtain IUDs, and (mostly) cannot choose to have a child without the support of their partner. I suppose, then, men do not even have a chance at having what is a "critical reproductive healthcare service" and are thus inherently deprived.
Women are the heads of four out of five single parent households [2]. Put differently, four out of five men do not obtain custody of their children in situations where the parents do not live together.
Male life expectancy is more than five years less than female life expectancy in the US [3].
The bigger issue than all of this, to me, is the psychological aspect of this discussion that I cannot quantify with large-scale statistics. When men's disadvantages are brought up, society generally shouts "shut up". Since I left my original comment, I have been told that my post was a "hollow unsubstantiated rant", an "incredibly sexist framing", "disingenuous" and "not constructive", "combative" and "alienating". Can you imagine similar attacks being levied against a woman arguing in support of abortion? I sure cannot. Again, I do not know how to quantify this, but the experience of never mentioning an issue which impacts men for fear of being similarly shot down is in the back of my mind every day, and I'd imagine many men face similar thoughts. The thought police hold far more sway over my discourse than I'd like.
How long does it take to filter up? White men remain over-represented amongst the rich and powerful, and in senior positions. Is there some level in society where this flips around and suddenly white men are at the top, or is this some kind of time delay effect and in a century or so, we'll see white men at the bottom at all levels?
Meanwhile the majority of white men who are neither rich nor powerful find themselves at the bottom of the politically correct social order. Not that anyone cares anymore. /s
>White men remain over-represented amongst the rich and powerful, and in senior positions.
If you live in a majority white country, why is this a problem? Statistically it's inevitable you'll get mostly white people at the top if those are your demographics.
Also in my country women are often in top leadership positions, and out of merit, not out of some pro-feminist corporate PR agenda.
Combative narratives are unavoidable if another movement is pushing for something contradictory to your movement. Pro-choice movements are inevitably running into conflict with anti-abortion movements because their desires are directly contradictory. Likewise, a group seeking to eliminate gender discrimination is going to directly run up against a group advocating for gender quotas.
Pro-choice and anti-abortion movements are not necessarily contradictory, as there are many services and strategies that are proven to reduce abortions, aside from criminal penalties.
For example, the broad and free availability of sex education and contraception greatly reduces accidental pregnancies, which are a leading cause of elective abortions. And genetic screenings and counseling can help women identify risk factors for inheritable developmental issues and decide whether to have children, or pursue alternatives like adoption.
Sure, now ask them "should elective abortion be legal?" And then you'll immediately see the conflict between the two positions. The fact that they may both support contraception is whataboutism. The core objectives of the two groups are indeed directly contradictory.
You missed the point, which is that there is a difference between the substance of an issue and the combative political campaigns set up around an issue.
The substance is not binary; there is substantial overlap and gray areas. Most things are not zero-sum. But it’s beneficial politically to set up an “us vs them” mentality.
So yes, you’re right that the people are in conflict. But the point is, much of that is artificial.
The substances may overlap in some areas, but the defining goal of two groups are often directly contradictory. The goal of a group whose primary goal is to criminalize abortion is directly contradictory to a group that wants to make or keep abortion legal. The fact that they may both support contraceptives is missing the forest for the trees, the primary goals of the two groups are indeed directly contradictory. Achieving the goal of one necessarily means the other fails in their goal. There's nothing artificial about this.
You are correct that those two movements are not completely contradictory. First, it must not be assumed that everyone who is pro-choice will always chose abortion. Second, neither the pro-choice nor anti-abortion movements seem to have a large scale plan for the care of children born from unwanted pregnancies. So there are areas that are not contradictory.
I've been following this issue for decades and early on a lot of it was supposed to be around body image issues. It was claimed that men had these impossible beauty standards and womens issues were largely due to not living up to them. Then the internet became popular and it became possible to quantify the gender of people making these body shaming comments, turns out it's mostly other women. Online dating further proved that men are attracted to all sorts of women and while a specific man may have certain things he prefers, men in general are very forgiving, in fact it turns out women are the ones with impossible standards, they all chase after the same 1% of men.
Then there was the wage gap stuff, it was popular for a while, and as that was looked into we found women make different choices at work, they take more sick days, go on more vacations and work less overtime, not to mention they tend to choose less demanding jobs in the first place.
So now it's this undefinable and unfalsifiable "patriarchy", this new one doesn't really make specific claims but rest assured men are the source of all the worlds problems.
I don't know if this was an extreme case of ideological battle or trolling, but either way it's against the site guidelines, so please don't do it here.
You are right that questioning the testosterone levels should be done, but the way you're framing the issue feels very disingenuous. You could be stuck in a bubble of discourse that matches what you're saying, but consider that maybe looking at the issue with the perspective "this wouldn't happen if women were affected" is not constructive.
PS. Also Scott has a good track record of revisiting articles he wrote if new elements come up from readers or specialists. Let's hope that someone out there in his subscribers list will make the same pertinent observation - reading through the comments, there are a couple of mentions already.
We are comment on an article which is built upon studies that are most definitely not brushing the issue aside and saying "who cares". I consider myself a pretty seasoned user of the internet and I have yet to stumble in online spaces that are framing the issue in terms of “we just need a way to reproduce without men”, or “everyone can just use IVF and still have children”.
Most of all I have an issue - as a male of an age where thinking about the next generation is a thing to be done - with claiming that if similar issues would happen to women they would be taken more seriously. Framing the issue as a men vs women one is not, like I said, constructive in any way.
The parent is conflating the decreasing sperm count with decreasing testosterone levels, mostly because they seem so closely related as to be the same issue - but which is not mentioned in Scott's article or in the studies he discusses, and presents that as a problem that affects young boys and prevents their development. If this is indeed the case I would like to see some substantiating to the claim.
> We are comment on an article which is built upon studies that are most definitely not brushing the issue aside and saying "who cares".
The question is: how representative are those studies? Sure they're evidence that there exists some researcher living under some academic rock who cared enough to do a study, however they're not evidence of widespread cultural concern (which is usually driven by mass-media concern).
> ...and I have yet to stumble in online spaces that are framing the issue in terms of “we just need a way to reproduce without men”, or “everyone can just use IVF and still have children”.
I've definitely seen the former. It was almost certainly half-serious nasty snark, but that doesn't mean it doesn't contribute to setting the tone, especially when it goes unchallenged by the "right" people. The later reads like textbook, "I don't want to care, so I'm going lazily think up some half-ass idea on the spot to justify not caring."
Do you feel the same about all of the coverage dedicated to issues that affect women more than men? That the framing in those cases is not constructive? Or in matters of issues presented as impacted one race more than another?
They weren’t claiming that they had an issue with the article talking about an issue that affects men. They were taking an issue with the framing of the commenter that changed the framing into a “mens issues vs womens issues” thing, which is very distinct from just talking about an issue that only affects a certain subsection of humanity.
So a popular example would be with discussion around BLM, which revolves around black people dying at the hands of police, despite the fact that far more white people are killed by police.
The argument is based on per capita vs total, and so is definitely discussed in terms of how it affects one group more than the other. You also see it around gender discussions that revolve around crime rate victimization - since men are more likely to be victims of violent crime.
The point is you see it framed that way all the time, and yet it's only an issue in instances like this. Anything that frames the wrong group as a victim is a no-no.
I don’t know if I’d describe it as disingenuous because perhaps the parent commenter sincerely believes what they said…
…but it is a ridiculous comment. There’s dozens of examples where women are disadvantaged and mistreated by healthcare systems all over the world, in ways that men don’t experience. Study after study has shown that black women are especially vulnerable to a disregard for their pain, so much so, black women have a much higher risk of death during childbirth!
I can buy in to someone being concerned about testosterone levels and the impact it’s having on men, it’s totally fair and valid, but to suggest that this is an example of men being mistreated by the healthcare system and that the healthcare system prioritises women over men doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny.
Fertility is actually a fantastic example where women are disadvantaged compared to men. Consider how harmful birth control can be, consider how menopause can be an awful experience with very little medical support available. Ask a woman how easy it is to get a hysterectomy, or their tubes tied, ask a woman how they’re treated when getting a birth control implant…
> black women have a much higher risk of death during childbirth
Found the NY Times reader.
Fwiw, that article takes a somewhat flawed study [1] and decides the only possible explanation for wealthy(!!) black women dying in childbirth at a higher rate is systemic white racism.
It then compares white vs black rates of infant mortality, also chalking that up to so-called ”white supremacist culture”, except the research study clearly shows both Asians and Hispanics having lower infant mortality rates than whites. To give the NYT the absolute smallest bit of credit, they do briefly admit to this way down the article.
Differences in group outcomes always have to be racism/bias and can never be a result of any biological/cultural differences. Can’t discuss obesity rates, prevalence of hypertensive diseases, Vitamin D deficiency being heavily correlated with low birth weights [2] and black mothers being SIX TIMES more likely to be Vitamin D deficient at birth compared to white mothers [3] - you apparently aren’t even allowed to control for age!
And thus the NY Times tells its unquestioning readers that Systemic White Supremacy is literally killing rich black women and also mysteriously elevating the Superior Asian Baby high above the rest.
It’s nonsensical post-truth garbage that would be laughable if it weren’t being taken seriously and used as part of the rationalization superstructure used to justify increasingly ineffectual and, frankly, dangerous policies.
You've fallen for recency bias. Just because you saw the article in the New York Times today, does not mean I read the same article and based my argument on that. I'm not sure if you're challenging the New York Times article which I am not referencing, or the general belief that black women die more often in childbirth (which has been well established and reported for many, many years -- certainly not a new invention of the New York Times)?
I don't think it's fair of you to characterize my comment as "ridiculous". I'll focus on the US, specifically, since that's where I'm from and is the society I'm most familiar with.
I am glad you used the example of black women. Race is irrelevant to the conversation at hand (though I would note, lest I am called insensitive, that black individuals are disadvantaged in health). You're using race to divert attention: your statistic actually compares black vs. white and ignores men vs. women. Why don't you compare men to women, or black men to black women, or white men to white women? Is it maybe because white men (who have the highest life expectancy among men in the US) have a lower life expectancy than white women, all women, and black women [0]? And those men have a 0% risk of death during childbirth! They're making up for it by having a higher chance of dying than women, every single year of their life, up until age 80, when women outpace them because there are so few men left [1]. When you compare apples to apples, men draw the short end of the stick, in terms of life expectancy at least.
And despite the above inequity, if you go to the CDC website and look at death rates, what do you see along the sidebar [2]? "Racism and Health", "Women and Health", "Conversations in Equity", "Health Equity Matters Newsletter". At least the CDC is more interested in helping black people and women than they are men, despite that men have the disadvantage here against both categories statistically, even if they're stacked together, i.e. black women. Research into health does not need to be a black vs. white, women vs. men, issue. There is a lot of work to be done for the common good. But to say that "the healthcare system prioritises women over men doesn't stand up to any scrutiny" is false.
Fertility is actually a fantastic example where men are disadvantaged compared to women, at least with respect to birth control. Birth control is harmful. But those who use it, choose to do so. In other words, they think it is best for them, and make that decision. Women have the options of
A) not using birth control, being possibly subject to unwanted pregnancy, and not being subject to its harms
B) using birth control, avoiding unwanted pregnancy, and being subject to its harms.
Men have the options of
A) not using birth control, being possibly subject to unwanted pregnancy, and not being subject to its harms
B) not using birth control, being possibly subject to unwanted pregnancy, and not being subject to its harms.
Note that there are no options. Note that this also does not include the harms to men due to child support payments for children they had no way to prevent.
By the time the average woman experiences menopause (age 51 [3]) and has "an awful experience with very little medical support available", 8.2% of men born at the same time have already died, compared to 4.7% for women [4]. During the years surrounding menopause (45-64; I'd like to be more precise, but this is the granularity given to me), men are more than three times as likely to kill themselves [5]. The living men aren't getting the medical support they need, and the extra dead men certainly didn't.
We can also talk about other sex-related issues such as breast vs. prostate cancer, if you want. They have similar death rates of 19.6 and 18.8 percent respectively [6, 7], but breast cancer research receives twice the funding of prostate cancer research [8]. Why would this be, if our healthcare system doesn't prioritise women over men?
I asserted that nobody cared about the impacts that lower testosterone levels and sperm counts could have with respect to men, based on an article that framed it as a "societal problem" and a "fertility problem", and did not acknowledge any of the challenges this specifically poses to men, which I listed in my original post. I pointed out my opinion that society would respond differently if the issue impacted women. You responded by telling me how black women are more likely to die during childbirth than white women, that a country where women live more than 5 years longer than men [9] prioritises men's health care, and that women are at a disadvantage because they have an option they can choose to reduce their risk of unwanted pregnancy, with health tradeoffs. Please rethink whose comment, yours or mine, is ridiculous.
There's so much I could say in response to your points, but you're too deeply entrenched in your position so I'm not going to spend any time on a response other than to say reliance upon the gender-based suicide success figures is a tell for someone who is cherry-picking data: it's not an honest argument.
The difference in men and women's suicide rate is not a reflection on men being more suicidal, in fact, men attempt suicide at a lower rate than women! Men are less suicidal than women! The difference is that if a man attempts suicide, he is much more likely to succeed, whereas women are much more likely to survive. If you want to use suicide as a measure of gender-based wellbeing, success is a meaningless statistic[1], because it's a reflection of metholodgy... suicidal ideation and suicide attempts are a much better measure of wellbeing.
[1] Unless, I guess, you want to go down some sort of line of thinking where women are attempting suicide for attention and "know" they'll survive so actually it doesn't count and men's use of more violent means is actually proof that men are suffering more.
It's convenient that you ignored the majority of my post because I am "too deeply entrenched", and then cherry-picked its one weak point while claiming I am cherry-picking and dishonest. I'll try the same tactic next time I disagree with someone.
We can try a different measure of health if you'd like. Surely I cannot be cherry-picking data if the effect is visible across multiple categories, right? Going down the list of highest-cause-of-death [0], death rates per 100,000 here [1] (sorry, hard to find more up-to-date data including age-adjusted rates of death by cause and gender):
Heart Disease (23.1% of deaths): Men 298.9, Women 210.4 (men 42% more likely)
Cancer (21.0% of deaths): Men 217.5, Women 151.3 (men 44% more likely)
Accidents (6.1% of deaths): Men 55.2, Women 25.8 (men 114% more likely)
Chronic lower respiratory diseases (5.5% of deaths): Men 48.0, Women 36.0 (men 33% more likely)
Cerebrovascular disease (5.3% of deaths): Men 42.5, Women 41.3 (men 3% more likely)
Alzheimers disease (4.3% of deaths): Men 18.5, 24.9 (women 35% more likely)
Diabetes mellitus (3.1% of deaths): Men 26.4, Women 19.5 (men 35% more likely)
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis (1.8% of deaths): Men 17.8, Women 12.5 (men 42% more likely)
Influenza and pneumonia (1.7% of deaths): Men 19.3, Women 14.2 (men 36% more likely)
Intentional self-harm (suicide) (1.7% of deaths): Men 18.4, Women 4.7 (men 291% more likely)
If female suicide attempts (0.6%/yr) resulted in death as often as male suicide attempts (0.4%/yr), from the above cited Figure 7, we would see an increase of 27.6 deaths per 100,000 in women. Let's look at death rates per 100,000 in 2021 [2]. Comparing people of the same race, the age-adjusted death rate per 100,000 people for men was 304.7 higher for whites, 458.3 for blacks, 187.0 for Asians, 480.9 for Native Americans, and 315.8 for Hispanics. Weighting that by demographics [4], that averages 320.4.
Let me put that statistic a few different ways for you:
If women were as effective as men at suicide, every successful female suicide would need to include her killing 10 other same-age women to equalize the age-adjusted death rate between men and women for all causes.
The difference in age-adjusted death rate between men and women is larger in magnitude than if there were a second, equally fatal, heart disease, that only impacted men.
You’re absolutely cherry picking. You’re just using whichever numbers provide surface level confirmation of your latest point, without asking the questions about why. You did it with the suicide rate and now you’re doing it with death rates. Females of almost every species of mammal have greater life expectancies than males of the same species! Death rate is a meaningless number in the context of how men are treated by the system unless you can demonstrate that the system is the cause for this higher death rate.
As I said in my original comment, there’s lots of issues that face men that are worth talking about and need to be addressed. I do not dispute that, however, I dispute that you characterise these things as in competition with issues that face women and that men are suffering more in this competition of your own invention. You can advocate for the issues you care about without the self-pitying minimisation of issues faced by others.
I can go further in justifying my position if you’d like, but I’d rather not unless you ask me to. I have no interest in explaining why I believe men have a lower life expectancy as a direct result of the system if you’re just going to tell me my points are meaningless again.
To be clear, I never said that men’s issues are in competition with women’s issues. Both genders have their own, unique issues which deserve attention. I only advocated for attention to be drawn to a men’s issue, and noted how (in my opinion) society typically places more weight on women’s issues than men’s issues. I engaged in this “competition” after you said “that the healthcare system prioritises women over men doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny”. And nowhere that I am aware of have I minimized any of the issues that others face.
You’ve made no effort to explain why these things matter: you’ve just churned out numbers. I don’t want to read more numbers, I know many of the numbers. The value you can provide in this conversation is with your understanding of the issues and your perspective on what can be done… not with NIH footnotes.
These topics have a great deal of depth, there’s many different aspects to consider — for example, life expectancy is a pretty weak measure, what about quality of life?
Go back and read your first comment. Pretend you’re coming into this topic cold: you know nothing of the subject, what do you learn from your comment?
* mens issues are brushed aside
* testosterone levels are lowest in 100 years
* people only care about men when it’s about fertility because fertility is a women’s issue
* men are being wished out of existence so women can enjoy plastics and pesticides
* nobody cares about the mental health impact of infertility in men
* low testosterone impacts men negatively
* if this was about women, people would care
* nobody cares about mens issues unless they impact women
* society thinks only women deserve care
There’s nothing in that comment except mindless complaining about men being victimised by society because they’re not women. There’s nothing of value. Then, when challenged on your statements, you’ve churned out numbers that look on the surface to show that men are suffering but actually under any scrutiny demonstrate nothing of the sort.
If you’re speaking to your personal feelings, that’s valid, if you personally feel that as a man you’re not valued, that’s something you can absolutely share insight into and it’ll be valuable for everyone here but you have to… do that. Embrace how you feel. Don’t frame your feelings as if they’re facts about the world, because then when you’re challenged on them, you’re spinning in circles posting meaningless numbers that don’t say what you think they say.
You should feel valued as a person. You should express your feelings. You should not try to justify your feelings with numbers — you don’t need to. The greatest irony (to me, anyway) is that so much of how we think about masculinity is based on intelligence and logic and rationality. You don’t need to rationalise your feelings. Feel them. Be hurt. And then you don’t need to dig deeper and deeper into numbers to support you in crafting some grand narrative about why this isn’t about feelings it’s about facts! I’m not sad, I’m intellectually perturbed!
I’m straying deep into the bowels of my own life experience now, but, why not: in my experience, the big difference between men and women is that men turn their negative feelings into narratives, and women turn their negative feelings inwards. The reason you see so many men complaining is not because men have it worse; but because of how masculinity manifests.
Even if every man on earth has a perfect life, except for you, your sadness would still be valid. Your pain would still be valid. You would still deserve kindness and respect. I categorically disagree with your absurd assertions that the male suicide rate is somehow a reflection of how men have it worse than women, but I don’t for one second think it invalidates any pain and sadness you’re feeling. They’re completely unrelated, ones a grand theory, and the other is you.
If you want to challenge my theories, I’d love to hear meaningful insight from you, I would sincerely appreciate it, but I don’t want numbers. They don’t say anything.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment and showing compassion. I appreciate it. I’ll keep what you’ve said in mind in discussions in the future and will probably be a better contributor for it. I agree with some of your comment and disagree with other parts.
I agree that it can be exhausting to conjure facts to support one’s belief. I’m a believer in what I call “n=1 statistics” - if something happens to me, or to someone else, that’s good enough and worth acting on. It doesn’t matter if a statistically significant amount of people experience the same thing. That doesn’t validate or invalidate anyone’s experience.
I disagree that statistics are nothing of value. For one, they can provide us a large-scale look at where our problems as a society are. There are problems with statistics, sure. They can’t do everything. They’re just one tool we can use in our quest to make the world a better place. Second, though they’re masked behind numbers, every statistic is a real person (in this case): the extra men who die are fathers who leave behind a spouse children. They are children whose parents lament their death. They are people who overdosed on heroin, gassed themselves out in their garage, or hung themselves in their bedrooms. They’re not just men, either; they’re the young girls who kill themselves due to social pressure or bullying, the mothers who leave children behind after a battle with breast cancer, etc.
I also disagree that life expectancy is a weak measure. In a lot of common cases, having died also probably means having had a miserable life (or part of it). Suicide is often preceded by sexual assault or depression or other psychological suffering. Heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and kidney issues are usually long and expensive battles that can be financially and morally debilitating to individuals and their families. Heart disease and cancer, at least, are also correlated with exposure to environmental toxins and stress. If someone is dying early from these conditions, there were probably burdens placed on them that in part caused that. I’ll concede that life expectancy is not the ultimate goal, but I think it is non-negligible when discussing outcomes between people (especially medically), given how we die.
You make an interesting point about how men and women express their frustration. Maybe that is related to why women have done a much better job raising attention regarding their issues and presenting a (mostly) unified front that has allowed for their progress. While we are busy theorycrafting, they’re busy acting and correcting.
Thanks for the well constructed rebuttal... not sure why valid discussions of men's health often disintegrate into generic race and gender whataboutism. It's like no one really listens to anyone anymore. What's so wrong about discussing men's challenges in an online forum?
Yeah we've been hearing about POOR WAMYN endlessly for the past decade. Let's just stop talking solely about women, because no, they are not the only ones disadvantaged.
Taking into account phphphphp's sibling comment, maybe disingenuous wasn't the best word to use. What would better describe my complain would be that OP takes a non-empathetic stance on the problem, and coupled with notorious social bias against women when it comes to their reproductive rights, signals to me an argumentation made in rather bad faith, therefore "disingenuous".
Bad faith and disingenuous both (as I understand it based on the definitions) mean being deceptive or dishonest. It's basically acting like you believe a thing when you don't.
I know this is off topic, and I'm not looking to be the word police or whatever, but this is one of those things that always makes me wonder if I'm crazy and I just don't know what these words mean, or if other people don't.
If you search for these terms across hn comments, you'll find they're very very common, and they're very often used to mean "I disagree" or "you're saying a thing that I find problematic". Which is a fine thing to say, but why not use those words instead?
Or maybe I have the wrong idea and just need to learn what these words actually mean.
I think that parent is *intentionally* has framed their comment as a women vs. men problem to make it sound more dramatic, conveniently disregarding the large amount of issues women have in asserting their reproductive rights. I don't just disagree with OP, I am suspicious of the fact that they omit from their reasoning a very glaring and obvious point of view. Does that clarify for you if I'm using the word right or not?
And apologies for being snippy but I believe my comments in this thread are reasonably well written, and despite the fact that English is not my first language which might lead me to miss some subtle nuances, I made myself perfectly understandable and clarified _why_ I said what I said. It's fine if you don't agree with me, but framing the issue in terms of what other commenters say and, projecting their fallacies onto my words will not lead to a good discussion.
I didn't mean to make this a "women vs. men" problem; I meant to make it a "men" problem, and I believe it would be accepted as one, if you replaced "men" with "women".
For instance, we acknowledge women suffer more than their partners during a miscarriage or a stillborn pregnancy, but both would-be parents suffer the loss of a child. We acknowledge women are affected by rape more than men, but both genders suffer from sexual assault. In this instance, where the issue negatively impacts men more than women, an article which focuses on the issue decided to focus on the common suffering and ignore the suffering that it causes men specifically, so I wanted to reframe the discussion to focus on that, and point out that society is less interested in "men's issues".
I am not looking to go back-and-forth on reproductive rights, since it is not related to my original post, but since you mentioned it, I would like to point out that while women are "[having issues] asserting their reproductive rights", men have no reproductive rights to assert. Women are struggling to obtain or retain access to abortion, and men have no such recourse. Women are struggling to obtain access to birth control, and men have no such recourse. Women can choose to have babies that their partners might not want, and men have no such recourse. The extent of reproductive rights for men is "put on a condom and pray". The "reproductive rights" battle that women are fighting is not about equality, but about getting or staying ahead.
Nicotine is a drug like any other and has all kinds of side effects, some that can be seen as beneficial. Like, if you think you're going to get shot in the next 3 hours, yeah, you should probably smoke a cigarette. Otherwise, stay away from the stuff.
> nobody cares unless it can be shown to impact the other 50% of society that apparently is the only portion deserving of any care
I guess no one informed the author of this article, or the numerous studies cited here.
Please refrain from hollow unsubstantiated rants on HN. Someone can point to your copypasta comment and say "see, another one of those 'men's rights' loonies!"; you're only hurting men. Men and women's issues are not a zero-sum game.
>And when this topic comes up, the responses are generally, “who cares?”
>because the issue must be seen as impacting females negatively to justify any interest by society
Huge cognitive leap between these two sentences. My response is closer to "who cares?" than panic. My reasoning has nothing to do with women. Are men with lower (but functional) testosterone less capable of happy, productive lives? I haven't seen any evidence to support that thesis. Therefore, who cares. Is sperm production a major bottleneck in human reproduction? I haven't seen any evidence to support that. Therefore, who cares.
Fluctuation within the very wide ranges of "enough sperm" and "enough testosterone" doesn't really matter.
Low testosterone levels in men is correlated with depression and anxiety; inversely, testosterone replacement therapies are correlated with reduction of symptoms of depression and anxiety.
You seem to be upset about identity politics, but then proceed to make an argument about identity and social acceptance. None of these details you mention are relevant to the actual problem.
Anyway, there's much clearer evidence supporting the idea that poor mental health (anxiety, depression, etc.) can cause infertility in men due to elevated levels of cortisol, and you sound very stressed out.
I don't think it's necessarily a sexist phenomenon.
A lot of our cultural leaders generally seem to be pushing us toward a weird and sterile (literally and figuratively) existence. Men are encouraged to be less masculine, and women less feminine, and everyone discouraged from having children. More comfort and less creation.
I get what your saying but I don't think you actually want what you're asking for. What would this 'caring' even be good for? Because I don't get the impression that it would actually solve anything right now and only serve to infect the male demographic with the all-to-common victim mentality.
From an individual perspective if testosterone is such a concern you can do trt and remove yourself from this issue. And while ivf isn't ideal and I'm not currently in the market to have children right now, I don't see that route as causing existential stress in me personally or calling my masculinity into question in any meaningful way.
Did we read the same comment? He uses the words men, women, males, and females.
edit: the comment I originally replied to said something like "he uses the word females instead of women, that's a red flag". It's since been updated to just say he sounds like an MRA (why?) and I guess we're supposed to interpret that as a bad thing (because... why?)
Any proof for this assertion? Given that the majority of people in power (i.e, the actual decision makers) are men I'm pretty sure they would be happy to act in their self interest.
There are home test kits you can get that have a little lens that sits on top of a smart phone camera and uses an app to approximate count and mobility from the video stream. I'm not sure how accurate they are, but it's certainly interesting to see the only human cells with flagellum.
Regardless of how confident one is about the data -- not collecting drastically more high-quality data immediately seems irrational.
I'd go so far as to consider compelling samples - seems shocking but actually much less intrusive than a draft and probably more likely to protect mankind.
We cannot trust our current institutions to solve this problem because they hate white men. If we mean to solve the sperm count deficit we must first replace these institutions with ones that recognize the problem and have the desire to solve it.
The problem of declining sperm counts will solve itself with the proliferation of polyamorous relationships. If you pool multiple males together, there will be a higher chance of at least one of them having good quality sperm.
If polyamorous relationships are indeed getting common enough to affect population surveys, the numbers would suggest an average gender composition far closer to fundamentalist Mormons.
Eg: last week’s Pew relationship survey had the “not in a relationship” age <29 cohort breaking roughly 60/30 male/female.
Barring an extreme misunderstanding of the definition of “relationship”, this seems to indicate most peak reproductive ability men aren’t even getting on the court to shoot their shot, so to speak.
It looks like we're heading for collapse eventually and there's very little we can do about it if it is to believed this is mostly caused by environmental pollution.
These types of pollution are everywhere and line our infrastructure is ways most people can't fathom.
> It looks like we're heading for collapse eventually and there's very little we can do about it if it is to believed this is mostly caused by environmental pollution.
So, this was understood in the bio scenes in the mid 2000s, during the financial collapse, my professor in bio-statistics (a class I loathed wit a professor I detested even more for various reasons) and fave me 2 very strong revelations in my sort lived scientific career built on the following premises: statistics are a poor way to prove anything in the Health Sciences (for or against) and just because someone is an absolute reprehensible person doesn't mean they can't offer insight in a much larger problem tat even they don't seem to grasp despite having a PhD.
is research was on the effects of BPA was having on local male frogs, production of non-viable eggs, and got lots of grant money for it. This was wen BPA was all the rage and being pulled from containers and china was caught selling poison baby formula. I asked him if the implications were longer lasting and if manufacturing SOPs from the 80-2000s could result in a large shift in cultural norms in a country like Japan, where it had shifted desires in the female population in one generation to want a largely androgynous male--albeit wit heavy feminine features--amongst the young females, making female voyeurism of male homosexuality a massive genre, a large uptick in herbivore men, low fertility rates (they were now starting to show how bad they were after the bubble collapsed).
And could that be correlated due Japan having to re-industrialize at all costs post WWII and become a main export economy (and all that entails including contamination). He almost felt offended by my inquiry as I was trying to take credit for is work, and quickly reverted back to showing pictures of the stuff he got from an EPA grant or something.
Something most wont know, unless you did sperm based cryogenics during COVID, women were paying large premiums on viable sperm as many sought to have children on their own and even took to advertising it on social media [0].
Its been a crisis for some time, in fact I was born in late 80s and my parents ad many issues back then. Its only gotten worse, and this may be the larger contributor why the population will likely have peaked at 8 billion more than anything else, thou economics plays a large part, too.
It's tempting to blame modern environmental factors for sperm counts being lower, but isn't it equally likely that something about the environment of the 1980s was causing sperm counts to be inflated? Like maybe sure the ancients of 1983 had a whole bunch of sperm, but because of all the lead in the gasoline most of them were duds in a way that would not have been understood at the time.
I'd like to see a direct cause of X explaining this.
There are lots of things to suggest a correlation (e.g. microplastics) but nothing concrete has ever really been proposed as being the cause.
For all we know, we're better hydrated than ever before and that's what's throwing off our sperm 'density' (I hate the word count because it's a per volume thing).
Doesn't like all of Los Angeles drink water out of water bottles?
the endocrine disruption explanation here claims phthalates play a big role in sperm count reduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLxFazLK2Mg
In an attempt to avoid harmful plastics mentioned by other users getting into my food I started buying meat in a local butchers instead of the supermarket, only to see them one day unpacking pre-cut meats that were heavily wrapped in plastics.
Even if we have an sperm count decline 100 times worse than this as long as there's few people that can reproduce. Natural selection can reverse it in one generation.
The 1950s were the start of our long-term exposure to plastic materials and we've known for a while that some of those substances aren't great for our health.
In contrast nuclear tests and power are usually well contained exactly because of the high risks. And if some of the few accidents had any widespread long-term effect there would probably be a visible bump in the statistics.
> In contrast nuclear tests and power are usually well contained exactly because of the high risks
I was thinking more of the open air tests undertaken around the world - for example Castle Bravo in the Pacific where "The fallout spread traces of radioactive material as far as Australia, India and Japan, and even the United States and parts of Europe".
It's not impossible that this is part of the reason.
But the most common answer given to the question of "why does it seem like there are suddenly so many gay/trans people?" is the graph that shows the "rate of left-handedness by year of birth" that sharply spikes and plateaus after what is apparently a cultural shift in schools to accept left-handed people as they are rather than force them to write right-handed (typically https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c... from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241783005_The_histo...).
That doesn't explain why the increase in people presenting to gender identity clinics is skewed heavily towards female teenagers though. There's something else going on too.
The book Countdown talks about this and the author posits that there is a link. Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC's) cause smaller penis sizes, smaller anogenital distance, and homosexual behaviors in reptiles and other animals. Lower sperm counts, lower sperm motility, smaller penis size, and smaller anogenital distance (the most important indicator, oddly) are all also linked in humans, via TONS of studies, to the same chemicals.
She treats the subject very delicately, rightly so, because many people will probably call you a bigot for even asking the question.
From chapter 4 of the book: "In a 2019 article in Psychology Today, Robert Hedaya, MD, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Georgetown University of Medicine wrote, "It is nothing short of astounding that after hundreds of thousands of years of human history, the fundamental facts of human gender are becoming blurry.""
And in a later passage from the author: "One scientific theory suggests that in utero exposure to EDCs, particularly phthalates, which can lower a fetus's exposure to testosterone, may play a role; these chemicals have been associated with an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) in males. Interestingly, ASD and gender dysphoria, two seemingly unrelated conditions, occur together more often than expected"
Well a point of evidence that disputes this: homosexual men have larger penis sizes on average than heterosexual men [1].This is the opposite of what you'd expect if EDC's are decreasing testosterone and increasing homosexuality.
Isn't this Countdown the exact book explicitly called out in the article as dodgy and unreliable? Per the article, there doesn't seem to be any real data to prove any change in sperm counts, so all the other arguments go out the window as well.
Not to mention, we have 0 idea how prevalent homosexuality was historically (not to mention transgenderism), and animal studies often don't replicate in humans.
I would say the author of this article is dodgy and unreliable. Dr. Swan is a leader in her field and cites a ton of research in her book. This is just some random guy with a substack.
The book is mostly about phthalates and other endocrine disrupting chemicals, and their effects on reproductive health. There is a ton of research on phthalates in humans, the negative correlation between exposure and sperm quantity/quality is undeniable. Do you want me to link to some studies on it? I would not mind, though it is an easy Google.
The article writer's committmemt to empiricism is so flimsy that he argues polling his buddies on Twitter is a valid form of empirical evidence: "Selection Bias Is A Fact Of Life, Not An Excuse For Rejecting Internet Surveys"
I’d say that’s more for ideological reasons than the quality of his analysis. He makes his otherwise questionable policy ideas very palatable to the educated techie class.
Are there actually more transgender people, or are people more willing to self-identify as transgender? Compared to 20 years ago, being openly transgender was far more taboo, so it follows that people were less willing to identify as transgender for these kinds of surveys.
As an aside, "transgenderism" is a relatively contentious term because while historically it had a purely medical definition, more recently certain groups have reappropriated it to refer to it as if it was an ideology, which does a huge disservice to transgender people.
That's an interesting question. I doubt we'll ever be able to answer.
I do wonder if some of the increase is a shift in how people perceive their own gender. Perhaps some in the non binary would have used different language in the past. I wasn't aware of the term 20 years ago.
I think 'non-binary' gender is most likely a result of people being told that being a man or woman is no longer related to the material reality of one's sex but instead is some mysterious inner feeling of gender identity that can't really be explained or understood except by reference to cultural gender stereotypes. It's the identity of the gap left between these exaggerations of masculinity and femininity.
That's also probably why non-binary identity is overwhelmingly the most prevalent amongst the youngest generations, as they've been brought up being taught the ideology of gender identity as if it's a fact.
> Compared to 20 years ago, being openly transgender was far more taboo, so it follows that people were less willing to identify as transgender for these kinds of surveys.
Maybe we'll know 20 years from now, because it is commonly accepted.
If the rate stays mostly flat, when it is acceptable, then we probably had no increase in the previous 20 years (from now).
If the rate of the next 20 years is trending up, then it is likely that it was trending up before it became acceptable.
Do you think being transgender is truly accepted now and there is no barrier to coming out as trans? The 20 years thing only makes sense if we are at "peak acceptance" - and it's easy to see that we are extraordinarily far from anything like that. Even for homosexuality, which has become much more accepted in the USA and many European countries in the last few years, there is still significant stigma associated with coming out in a large number of families and social groups - a minority, hopefully, but a very large one. Trans identities are nowhere near as acceptable as being gay, so any comparison will be heavily skewed by people's willingness to share, or even to accept this for themselves.
One of the reasons why those numbers seem to sharply change is that the environment became less hostile to these people. It's hardly surprising countries like Iran have seemingly low rates of homosexuality when openly gay men are being executed by the state.
It's absolutely possible there are other factors, but considering last year even Fox News produced a short positive report about a trans teenager in a conservative family[0] it's clear society has changed a bit.
There's some evidence that this happens in the western world too, though not forcibly imposed by the government, but guided by parents who would rather have a straight daughter or son than a gay son or daughter.
There is data. We can simply ask boomers if they are gay/trans. Though that doesn’t help in examining if the measurable change in the Zoomer generation is physical (nature) or social (nurture).
There’s obviously been an increase in self-identification of people as gay/trans as social acceptance has increased, but that doesn’t mean that the number of gay and trans individuals is actually greater than it was historically. We don’t know how many men worldwide were attracted to other men 1000 years ago. Period.
Many boomers grew up in places where coming out would have subjected them to forcible "conversion" practices, pariah status, criminal prosecution, or violence. To stay safe, many gay people of older generations were just people who "had a room mate" and/or "never married". Some of these people may answer differently today, but I don't imagine it is easy after living a life of being conditioned otherwise.
I also personally know boomers who are definitely bisexual, but they don't really accept or understand the concept of bisexuality, so they round themselves to straight or gay (mostly straight).
Asking boomers if they're gay/trans isn't a reliable way of getting that data. Just look at all the conservative Christian politicians who self-identify as straight, but then are caught in gay sex scandals.
We don't really know what the root cause is. There are some correlations that indicate possible environmental influences, and others that suggest it's related to other developmental conditions.
For instance, in https://archive.is/ODLZ4, a recent article on gender identity services in the UK, the author notes that:
"In 2000, the only clinical audit of patients ever carried out by Gids found that more than 25 per cent of referrals had spent time in care, compared with 0.67 per cent of the general population. Children referred to Gids were ten times more likely than the national average to have a registered sex offender as a parent, while 42 per cent had lost a parent through death or separation, and 70 per cent had more than five 'associated features' such as anxiety, depression, abuse, self-harm, bullying, eating disorders or suicide attempts."
But since so many health services switched to an 'affirmation-only' model, and transgenderism has been elevated to a supposed civil rights issue, there has been a distinct lack of curiosity in researching this further.
What increased rates of homosexuality and transgenderism? And why are you commenting this about an effect that likely doesn't exist all all (decreasing sperm counts), per the article?
Who knows ?
Homosexuality and transgenderism is way too politically charged to find real answers.
No gay gene was found, the closest model they have is a cluster of hormonal influencer genes. However we know parasites like Toxoplasmosis can induce polycystic ovary syndrome in women which causes hormone dysfunction (I know because I had POCS its why I don't allow cats near my kids now). Supposedly POCS is highly correlated in lesbians (supposedly emphasized).
Even identical twin studies showed nothing conclusive, sometimes one twin was gay and the other wasn't, sometimes both.
However granted we are biological beings, I strongly suspect endocrine disrupters like microplastics aren't doing anything positive for us.
Your comment makes no sense, and to me makes you seem like a naive bigot. Firstly is there increased rates of homosexuality or transgenderism? Please show me any data on this. Second what makes you think a low sperm count makes you a homosexual or transgender?
This is a sensitive topic and I think your reply is not well thought out.
There are a few topics such as reproductive health and medical health screening (i.e. Trans-women can get prostate cancer) where science has to study links and possible causation vs correlation without being silenced because it sounds similar to what bigots might say.
If medical scientists are too scared to study health issues around these topics because they are worried about being called a bigot then I can't imagine that will turn out well for everyone.
I have already acknowledged below, my comment was not well thought out, in that I could have caused offence to the original commenter with some words, but I absolutely stand by the rest of it.
I also do not agree with the remainder of your what you say, and a bizarre comment in brackets I won't repeat. There are plenty of times today and throughout history Science has been bigoted or naive, and as such should not be free to explore any subject uncontrolled or deemed insensitive to society.
I was criticising you but didn't mean to offend. I was sure that my bracketed comment was a real thing that doctors have to be aware of and was an example of where science and medicine need to be able to treat a person properly even if they have transitioned. You have really confused me and now I'm worried that this medical issue is taboo or I'm mistaken?
There was nothing wrong with your bracketed comment. The prostate gland does remain intact even for those males who have fully transitioned with cosmetic genital surgery. Though there is also some indication that those who take anti-androgen therapy and estrogens have a somewhat lower risk of prostate cancer. It's still an open area of research due to there not being much data.
I am really confused. Specifically regarding whether you disagree with my general points which I would 100% totally understand or the bracketed statement which would leave me doubting my understanding of any of this topic.
I'd like to say the statement I'm querying is really relevant to my career as I work on back-end systems and my understanding is that it is really important for medical databases to be expanded so that doctors can schedule the right type of medical screening for somebody based on their body. I'm also aware that in certain parts of the world people might not want information stored in databases because they fear persecution based on that stored data.
Hi also I work in software and manufacturing but like most of us on here have an appreciation for Science and its methods, as well as other topics not in our domain, it's what makes HN great. Im confused now also.
We should all be careful and sensitive to issues effecting others, and I think by your response you agree with this, well done, lets all keep it up, the world will become a better place for minorities of any kind. This post was more active for me than I expected, really due to an offensive comment I made about the original commenter so I thought I should correct where I made a mistake but also defend my general point of view in my original comment, our discussion got caught up in the rest which was unfair to your point of view.
I am going to contradict my original comment to you:
I absolutely agree with you on 'There are a few topics such as reproductive health and medical health screening ... where science has to study links and possible causation vs correlation'
I do also think unless we are experts in the domain, we need to be careful in referencing an example because any issue can be complex and varied individual to individual, we can also cause offence with such, without realising it. so I agree my 'bizarre; comment was not the correct way to explain this.
I also agree broadly with 'If medical scientists are too scared to study health issues around these topics because they are worried about being called a bigot then I can't imagine that will turn out well for everyone.'
However I also think Science does need oversight and agreement from society on what is acceptable or not, as history has often shown left uncontrolled bad things can happen. There's bigots in Science right, same as anywhere.
Thanks for questioning me, pleasure talking with you.
> However I also think Science does need oversight and agreement from society on what is acceptable or not, as history has often shown left uncontrolled bad things can happen.
I'm curious as to what you mean by this. Are you talking about avoiding doing or publishing research that could have undesirable social effects? E.g. in the hypothetical world where it had been discovered in 1980 that there was a gene that made African Americans less bright than white ones this research should not be published?
Or is it that you are worried about biased scientists faking results to harm disadvantaged minorities?
Do you not think Science needs oversight and agreement from society on what is acceptable or not?
Don't get me wrong this agreement from society is not always balanced, correct and often Science has to disagree and argue the point, but this oversight must still exist, surely?
There's a formal methodology, a social practice, a set of results, a perceived canon...
Is it the problem of lawbreaking experiment side effects you're interested in? E.g. infecting a bunch of people with syphilis to see disease progression?
Agree with you 100% now. I think I should have followed the general rule of keeping quiet in sensitive sub-threads unless you're really adding something to the topic.
Picking up a good few downvotes for this, usually that tells me something is wrong in what I said, looking at my comment, naive bigot may be a little strong, even if before it I wrote 'to me makes you seem'. I thought the comment was out of context, could cause offence to some, and not backed up by any data.
No offence intended, to nonethewiser.
I don't think the original question conveyed anything negative about homosexuality or transgenderism. Only that they were interested if chemicals could have altered human sexuality.
It was asked without the care one would normally use when approaching such a topic and perhaps that reflects badly but I find the question interesting.
What if we are so controlled by the environment around us? Are our likes and dislikes something we have control over or is it just a result of the world around?
HN has a bit of a blind spot around homophobia. If you dig through comment histories, you’ll find that a lot of the people who are “just asking questions” have a definite axe to grind when it comes to gay and trans people. As a gay person I probably have more of an instinct for these sorts of red flags. But for better or worse, anything short of explicit homophobia falls within the HN guidelines, and any criticism of superficially polite posters for repeating the talking points of anti-gay and trans activists does not. Hence this rather disgraceful subthread, where far right panic about gay and trans liberation (clothed in pseudoscientific garb) is being seriously debated without any regard for the gay and trans users of this site. Fortunately there is more to HN than this kind of thread, but it is a repeated occurrence that I am becoming throughly sick of. It’s awfully difficult to complain about this without being flagged into oblivion; but the moderation mechanisms that are supposed to stop discussion veering off in this sort of direction simply don’t work when it comes to homophobia and transphobia.
Since you seem to care strongly about this would you be able to share why discussing potential causes of homosexuality/trans should be off limits?
Unrelated, what do you think are the causes? Gene mutations in child? Womb environment disruption? Pollutants? Pathogens? God just deciding "I'm going to make this one trans"? Social pressures (wat)?
I wish I was the one who cared strongly about this. The people who care most strongly are the ones who like to bring up this topic, and endlessly debate it, even in comments on articles (such as this one) that have nothing really to do with it. You yourself seem determined to provoke a discussion on the subject, here and elsewhere, even though it’s not particularly relevant to my comment or to the article.
I agree that no topic is off limits in principle (and in fact I did not say that this topic should be off limits, contrary to what you suggest). However, some topics attract an overwhelming majority of bad faith participants in the discourse. I have already seen quite enough dispassionate debates on HN on the subject of what exactly is wrong with gay and trans people. I have no wish to fan the flames of another one.
It would be more interesting to debate the causes of heterosexuality. (It’s interesting, for example, that people tend to suggest ‘gene mutations’ as a possible cause for homosexuality but not for heterosexuality, even though any genes underlying human sexuality have presumably mutated many times over our evolutionary history.)
> It would be more interesting to debate the causes of heterosexuality.
Well the cause of heterosexuality seems obvious enough. Making males want to fertilize females will cause babies which spreads the "make male want to fertilize female" mechanism creating genes. So a mutation that makes genes that cause such a feeling will spread.
It's a fairly direct linkage so one could see how genes causing it could reach fixation (and indeed, variations of this desire reached fixation hundreds of millions of years ago).
Conversely, genes that result in, say, mice being sexually attracted to cows wouldn't reach fixation, leading to them being very rare in the mouse population. So most animals will be most attracted to things that have the highest chance they can make healthy offspring with.
That's an evolution 101 explanation of why heterosexuals are not extinct, which is fine as far as it goes. It's not a causal explanation of what makes people straight.
In fact, no-one knows what makes people straight, gay, or otherwise. So there is not much to talk about, from a purely scientific point of view.
But anyway, that was an aside. You haven't responded to the main point of either of my comments. If you really are only interested in having a debate about the causes of homosexuality, I'm not the person you're looking for (and the comments on this article aren't the place for it).
I think debate on the causes of being gay or being trans sets off alarm bells for a lot of people because it feels like medicalization of it. Sure, it might be interesting to know why in a pure intellectual curiosity way, but more often than not veers into people talking about wanting to "treat" it: many gay and trans people are proud in their identity and just want to be accepted for it.
To a libertarian like me people should be allowed to do whatever they want with their bodies, including changing it as they wish or declining other people's attempts to change it (via a "cure"), but I understand this isn't universal.
To me, a discussion on whether homosexuality has a pathogenic trigger is intellectual curiosity, to someone else it's like a Jew overhearing a couple of bald rough looking fellows talking about how there are too many Jewish movie producers and someone should do something to make there be less of them...
Its a different question, if asked; or as we're talking about the subject, my opinion is it has more to do with acceptance of such things today that in the past would not be discussed, hidden. or oppressed.
Your question assumes something that is unlikely to be true (increased rates of homosexuality and transgenderism), and then asks if it may be linked with something to which there is no plausible link at all, even if your assumption were true - since lower sperm count is obviously not going to increase the rate of homosexual women.
"Just asking questions" is not a plausible defense when the question is this leading. It's like asking "Is women being dumber than men possibly linked to lower testosterone?" and claiming that you are just being curious.
> Your question assumes something that is unlikely to be true (increased rates of homosexuality and transgenderism),
Why would this be unlikely? I'm struggling to think of a cause that would result in both a constant rate of these things AND a rate of several percent (de novo mutations aren't anywhere near common enough to get you constant rate given that gay uncles arent going to be doing 2x as much parenting as fathers and theres only like 40 mutations per generation).
There's also the evidence of people answering "yes" more to "Are you a man attracted to men? Have you had sex with men?" type questions. Yes, there are other explanations like people being more comfortable answering yes, but it's still evidence.
Because homosexuality and transgenderism are known to have been constants throughout history all over the Earth. While we don't have any kind of reliable numbers, it's a priori unlikely for such a well-trodden low level phenomenon to have suddenly started increasing.
Also, given the huge stigma associated with both until extremely recently, a significant increase in survey responses has such huge confounding factors that it's entirely irrelevant. There are even today numerous people living in heterosexual relationships unhappy with their sex life and not realizing, or daring to admit even to themselves, that they are in fact gay.
So you're positing that around 6% of people are gay and 1% trans (the Gen Z rates), but that this had such a small effect on reproduction rates that it didn't get selected against strongly enough to offset the new ones introduced by mutation? It just seems implausible to me that a gay man would be as motivated to court a woman as a straight one. The gene fitness reduction would have to be incredibly small (less than a thousandth of a percent) to offset the fact you're only getting a few dozen new mutations per generation in a giant genome where very few of those mutations will make you gay...
Why are you assuming that being gay or transgender would be selected against? Transgender people can have children (especially historically, when HRT wasn't available). Genes can be passed on without relying on procreation of the gay individual - if gay family members increase the overall reproductive success of a family, for example, then genes related to being gay can be passed without the gay persons ever reproducing directly.
Since gayness is prevalent through the animal kingdom, one of two things must be true: it either helps in group environments (whether you choose to interpret that as group selection or "selfish gene"-style counterintuitive effects) ; or perhaps genes related to gayness happen to be deeply tied to some other very important genes that get easily passed on.
Either way, what is your proposed alternative? Do you think 6%+1% is too large a number for historical proportions of gay+trans people?
By the way, 1% for trans people seems to match pretty well the number of Hijra people in India (10M+ out of 1.4 billion). Another piece of evidence that suggests these rates are relatively constant across the world in vastly different cultures.
> There are even today numerous people living in heterosexual relationships unhappy with their sex life and not realizing, or daring to admit even to themselves, that they are in fact gay.
This indeed is something that every gay man knows through experience but I suspect that many straight people may not. In many parts of the world (including many parts of the US and Europe) the majority of men available for gay sex do not identify as gay and are not open about their same sex attraction.
Investigating the possibility that environment factors such as plastics and pollution led to a rise in homosexuality/transgenderism doesn’t invalidate the living experiences of these people. Thinking that they need to be corrected because of this is where the bigoted lies. There isn’t really much to be squeamish about environmental factors interfering with sexuality (although I understand this often becomes fodder for right-wingers with an agenda).
But I think a more fundamental issue lies under this squeamishness: the thought of dividing “gender” and “sex” (or more broadly “culture” and “nature”, or even the Cartesian notion of “mind” and “body”), whereas the two cannot be separated in reality. And I think this monism is probably something that trans people would actually understand by intuition far better than me, because changing your sex requires a lot of physical and hormonal changes inside your body that interferes with every other social aspect of their lives (and the social pressures in return create substantial changes in their bodies). Sex isn’t just socially constructed, they’re also biologically formed, it’s just that the dynamics surrounding them are just far more complex than what typical right-wingers think of (a clean separation between man and woman).
It’s worth noting that a trans person is just someone whose gender identity doesn’t match the identity they were assigned at birth. Not all trans people have gone through (or plan to go through) any kind of medical ‘transitioning’ or ‘sex change’ procedure.
Yup I’m obviously not talking about the full range of trans experiences here, but most of the people I’ve heard anecdotes so far have done some kind of medical decision (usually hormonal therapy) because of gender dystopia. I was just saying that in general trans people would be the ones who would understand the physical/biological mechanics of gender in its full capacity.
That's just not the kind of goal natural selection is capable of optimising towards. Natural selection instils the execution of adaptations which on average have historically demonstrated increased reproduction rates. It does nothing else. (Humans, of course, have other goals orthogonal to those of natural selection, and are capable of optimising in favour of them, but natural selection is a blind idiot god that wants precisely one thing and will always aim dumbly at it to the exclusion of all else. We're fortunate that it is so dumb and slow, because it leaves us with plenty of room to do our own optimisation with our brains.)
Can you name any other time natural selection has optimised for the pleasure of a mammal at the explicit expense of reproduction?
You're right, there is no way evolution can do it, especially within single or two generations. It optimizes for adaption and survival, not a pleasure.
The germ line doesn't care about the soma's feelings. If the best way for your genes to propagate was for you to be in horrible agony all the time then that would be the case.
Evolution is not an optimizer in the same sense as a minimization algorithm.
Evolution is simply the differential survival of individuals with different genetic makeup, survival of the fittest. What counts as fittest depends on both the general environment and on the interactions with other members of the same species.
And, of course, without pregnancy there can be no evolution at all.
Anytime it looks like we're going extinct, then we should prioritize finding wtf is happening. People should be freaking a lot more given this is trending to kill us before climate change.
> "After ejaculation, sperm count decreases and takes a while to build back up again; if your community’s ejaculation frequency is changing (eg people have gained access to online porn), that will change its average sperm count."
If one wanted to, one could claim that the sexually frustrated society of the 1950s was resulted in the high sperm count samples from that era, and that sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in people having sex more frequently, hence the lower sperm counts in submitted samples.
Of course, there are about a half-dozen other confounders one could cherry-pick so that's not a valid conclusion either. All in all the trend doesn't seem to be very well-supported, compared to other studied trends like the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel combustion, the decrease of oxygen in the deep ocean due to warming and fertilizer inputs, an increase in heavy metals in the environment due to centuries of coal combustion, etc.