The Reproductive Panic That Wasn't; Globally, Sperm Counts Still On Avg 3X WHO Baseline

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These were just the foreshocks, though. In the summer of 2017, when Levine put out his own study of the problem — a grand and global survey of the state of human semen, the biggest ever done — news of Spermageddon would propagate into the U.S. media. That September, Newsweek ran a cover story on the research, “Who’s Killing America’s Sperm?” More recently, the New York Times reported on “The Dawning of Sperm Awareness,” GQ followed up with a nerve-racking résumé of what it calls “the truth behind the shocking drop in sperm counts,” and Vox responded with “Seven Questions About Declining Sperm Counts You Were Too Afraid to Ask.”

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. It was a noisy signal, sure, but the trend was unambiguous: The quality of semen had been dropping over time, with average sperm counts in the West falling off by more than half in 40 years. Human sperm was drying up.

But if this was evidence of a mass unmanning, one could also find some reasons not to flinch. Sperm counts (and concentrations) have at best a weak relationship to male fertility, and even as things stand for Western men today, according to the research — with an average and deflated concentration of 47 million sperm per milliliter of ejaculate — we’re not yet in the ballpark of a Children of Men scenario or a reproductive crash. The level is still three times higher than the World Health Organization’s lower bound for normal semen, and the no-more-natural-babies nightmare remains, at the very worst, many years away.

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Here’s a sad and scary spoiler for this article: The trend that Levine and Swan identified isn’t really new — it’s been known about, or at least suspected, for at least a quarter-century, and still we haven’t figured out its cause: technology or climate change; pesticides or plastics (this was the GQ theory); overeating or overmedication; too much masturbation or insufficient exercise. It may be that all these factors have caused sperm counts to drop, or some of them, or none. The resulting danger to humanity could be cataclysmic, or it could be a trifle. But for certain people — certain men — ambiguity about the sperm decline has only amplified its terror and underscored its implications: The world is changing, and we don’t know how; masculinity is under threat from forces we can’t explain. “This is something that Alex Jones and InfoWars have been talking about for years,” YouTube personality Joe Biggs has said, responding to the sperm-count research. “We’ve seen this feminization really kicking it up a notch over the last ten or so years, where we’ve seen men going from being alpha males to essentially being cucked-out, skinny-jeans–wearing, man-bun–having, feminized little girls … Men are dying, and with that, women don’t want to hook up with feminized men, which means we’re not procreating and the death of Western civilization is at hand.”

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https://www.thecut.com/2018/10/why-is-everybody-freaking-out-about-declining-sperm-counts.html