The latest blatherings from Tucker Carlson about "tanning your testicles" is an irresistible topic, evidenced by comments and spoofs by late night TV hosts, as well as extensive coverage in all sorts of media.
Boosting a man's sperm count (I guess) is the goal of exposing testicles to specific light, and the goal is to produce "manlier men," whatever that means. The Fox News segment I have seen shows men engaging in all sorts of cliche "manly" behaviors, from splitting wood to fighting, ending with a naked man standing before some device that shines light on his midsection.
See why this little blip in our world is drawing outsized attention?
But first, the very idea that sperm counts are down needs to be verified, and Snopes.com has found that this claim is substantially true. In fact, Western male sperm counts are down by 59 percent in studies over the past 15 years of so. This is not true for other regions of the world, but that may be due to poor researching techniques and not enough data. It seems that average penis size is also declining a bit, which has little to do with ability to reproduce but might seem more alarming to some fragile male egos.
So we have some data that confirm lower sperm counts. Connect that data to some worries about the "feminization" of America and some odd longing for the "good old days" of men being men -- usually defined as aggressive and overconfident and dismissive of the weak (including most women), and you have a story.
My gosh, college is now dominated by females, a complete flip-flop from 50 years ago, when campuses were male bastions and society wondered just how much education a woman really needed to raise a family and support a man.
The problem with connecting two trends (or observations) is that correlation is not causation. Lower sperm counts may have nothing to do with societal trends, but Carlson supports the idea that men being asked by society to be less aggressive and angry and stressed and self-confident has led to the lower sperm counts. Or maybe not.
It might be the other way around, of course, with low sperm count producing less traditionally male behavior, which leads the Fox News commentator looking for a solution: tanning your testicles.
But most scientists believe there is a clearer cause and effect that begins with increasing use of pesticides and potentially harmful chemicals present in our drinking water and food supplies, and that those chemicals are the culprits. If we assume THAT is true, then no amount of tanning will reverse the "problem."
Unless we believe that certain light frequencies can reverse the effects of those harmful chemicals in our bodies. Technology to the rescue!
Bottom line: no one is quite sure what is causing lower sperm counts and some people might wonder just how big the problem is. Do lower sperm counts lead to fewer births, for instance, when we consider the age range of potential male sperm providers?
Estimates are that about 250,000 sperm are released in a single ejaculation, so a reduction of half leaves us with 125,000. Overall, that seems compelling. In individual cases, it's more murky. And I would want to know if sperm count changes radically between, say, age 20 and age 50, as well as knowing age distributions of those men whose sperm count was measured.
The ultimate cause and effect boondoggle is to take the lower sperm count trend and pronounce the future extinction of the human race. Yeah, that would be bad, but is that a likely result?
I take comfort in knowing that Tucker Carlson is here to save the species. How about you?
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