ARE MEN IN TROUBLE?

 

Recently, comedian Bill Maher (who's work I used to enjoy, but who now seems to be drifting more and more rightward) gave a spoken editorial about the state of men in America, and how men are losing their masculinity because women are forcing them to repress it.  Fox News host Tucker Carlson also did a recent special on his network entitled "The End of Men", in which he also lamented the end of masculinity in America, and recommended testicle tanning(!), among other things as a possible solution. The root of these arguments (and others like them) is that men in America have been too emasculated; that fear of toxic masculinity and rise of women as leaders in both politics and the workforce have turned men into girly men.  There's also a clear implication that the rise of gay rights in the past few decades and the acceptance of trans people have also somehow delegitimized classic heterosexual manhood.

Like a lot of political arguments, there is a core truth here, but's it layered under lies.  Whether testosterone levels are dropping is hard to measure, but it does appear that sperm levels are dropping in men around the world. (Although most of that drop was recorded in one study put out in 2017 that has its critics.)  Assuming that this trend is real, it's a serious problem that could increase the number of miscarriages and unhealthy children being born.  

But is a society run by castrating women to blame for this problem?  No.  While it is true that as human beings have more and more moved away from our primitive ancestors we've had less and less need for masculine strength to protect the species.  But our move to a more civilized world  doesn't account for the potential drop in sperm count.

The real root of the problem may be something far more sinister: the rise of the use of chemicals in products that act as endocrine disruptors.  Shanna Swan, a leading scholar of reproductive health, recently wrote a book called Count Down about this serious problem, and in it she bluntly states that “...our modern world is threatening sperm counts, altering male and female reproductive development, and imperiling the future of the human race.”  Even more depressing is her assertion that those endocrine disrupters are found in literally thousands of different products, with little to no mention of them given on the labels.  (And if you want more proof of how this isn't because of society, she also points out that animal species exposed to these same kinds of chemicals also have the same kinds of problems). 

Other countries in Canada and Europe have moved to regulate these chemicals, but, not surprisingly, America's love of the free market has lead to little or no regulations here.  Just like tobacco companies, manufacturers of lead based products and the fossil fuel industry, chemical companies have gotten away with slowly poisoning the public with their products by lobbying politicians into ignoring the dangers of  those products.  And that has nothing to do with nagging women.