For certain men, ambiguity about the global sperm decline has only amplified its terror and underscored its implications
Illustration: Bráulio Amado There was something wrong, very wrong, with Israeli testicles. A few years ago, an army major named Hagai Levine began to be concerned.
This was just the sort of coverage Levine had hoped to get. While on a fellowship at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, working under professor Shanna Swan, he’d built a database of published research on average sperm counts, including numbers drawn from nearly 43,000 samples of ejaculate collected over 40 years in 50 different countries. When he plotted all these figures on a graph, the data formed a broad and speckled band that tilted downward to the right.
“I don’t think I’ve had this moment,” he continues. “We are not there yet. I hope we will never get there. But I do feel like this intelligence officer who said there are all the signs a war is coming, and no one listened.” Then, as now, the news arrived at a very tender moment for the human penis. In the early 1990s, a brand-new line of environmental research had begun to shift the focus of concern toward the groin: Whereas in the 1970s and ’80s, environmentalists had mostly worried over cancer-causing chemicals and nuclear waste, they’d lately started looking into hormones.
The time was ripe for it. Skakkebaek had first presented his data just days before Anita Hill described her sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas: “He referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal,” she testified. A parade of “men in crisis” moments shortly followed. In early ’92, the aging actor Jack Palance paused during his Oscars speech to do a one-armed push-up onstage and then comment crudely on his capacity for making babies; later on that year, the British writer P. D.
But in the years since, we’ve tipped into an inverse age of white-male fragility, when those in power feel outnumbered and exposed. The White Male Effect on risk perception now goes the other way, at least in some domains, seeding fears of Spermageddon, for example, in the darkest corners of the internet. “The hormone that makes men men is disappearing from the human world,” warned Daryush Valizadeh, a pickup artist and well-known chaplain of the manosphere, last year.
There have been some dire assertions on laptop use and cell phones, too, which could be frying up our sperm . And then there is the Sweaty-Balls Hypothesis, that men are overheating their testes, and depressing counts, by spending days in boxer briefs or sitting with their legs bunched up behind a desk. It’s also been proposed that human sperm are getting cooked to death not because of how we sit or what we wear but rather what we’ve done to our environment.
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