Thank you for the original post.
Gary Cross, a Penn State University Historian, wonders: " Where have
all the men gone?"
His book, "Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity", argues that
"the culture of the boy-men today is less a life stage than a
lifestyle."
Men and women from foreign nations frequently remark disparagingly on
the emasculated
nature of American men who have been degraded out of fear, obedience,
and the shame of being men from our women, who have made us feel
guilty for just being men.
Effeminate and feminist men have become de rigeur while their
rejection of the masculine culture is welcomed, nourished,
safeguarded, and considered "politically correct" in American society
and in the eyes of the law.
Manly behavior is not.
There has been a recent uptick of books, articles and research studies
documenting an endocrinological (or hormone) decline in the general
male population. Recent analysis shows average testosterone levels
receding in men of all ages. In addition, average sperm quality,
quantity and even testicle size has seen a market reduction. Although
many theories are presented to why this is happening, from endocrine
disruptors to the feminist movement, to evolutionary biology,
researchers ultimately concede that the reason is still unknown.
For a healthy male, typical seminal fluid analysis values should be:
Volume: 2-6 ml
Density: 20-200 million/ml
Motility: greater than 60% motile
However, according to the ever-increasing literature on sperm counts,
these "normal" values are steadily decreasing and only a minute
proportion of males will have semen values in today's Western
industrialized countries. Not only are sperm counts decreasing, but
also are the average sperm volumes which contain a greater proportion
of deformed spermatozoa that have reduced motility's.
13. Travison , T. Araujo, A., O'Donnell, A. Kupelian, V. and Mckinlay,
J. (2007). " A Population-Level Decline in Serum Testosterone Levels
in American Men" (
http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/
92/1/196.abstract). The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism
92 (1): 196-202. doi:10.1210/jc.2006-1375 (
http://dx.doi.org/
10.1210%2Fjc.2006-1375).
http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/92/196.abstract.
14. Dindyal, S. (2007). " The sperm count has been decreasing steadily
for many years in Western industrialized countries: Is there an
endocrine basis for this decrease?" (
http://www.ispub.com/ostia/
index.php?xmlFilePath=journals/iju/vol2n1/sperm.xml). The Internet
Journal of Urology 2 (1): 1-21. http://
www.ispub.com/ostia/index.php?xmlFilePath=journals/iju/vol2n1/sperm.xml.
Professor Niels Skakkebaeck, a Danish scientist, first alerted the
world to the possibility of a substantial fall in male fertility
levels in 1992. He did this by showing that sperm counts in health men
appeared to have dropped by more than half in 50 years. Professor
Skakkebecks's work attracted worldwide publicity at first-and then
ridicule. He and his team in the Department of Growth and Development
in Copenhagen University had reviewed 61 international studies
involving 14,947 men between 1938 and 1992. They found that the
average sperm count had fallen from 113 million per milliliter in 1940
to 66 million in 1990. Critics who reanalysed the Danish data pointed
out a fundamental flaw in the calculations which, they said, ruled out
any significant decline.
Subsequent studies have confirmed and strengthened Skakkebaek's
findings. A survey of 1,350 sperm donors in Paris found a decline in
sperm counts by around 2% each year over the past 23 years, with
younger men having the poorest-quality semen.
In another another study at the University of Helsinki led by Jarkko
Farajarinen, testicular tissued was examined at post-mortem from 528
middle-aged Finish men who died suddenly in either 1981 or 1991. Among
me who died in 1981, 56.4% had normal, healthy sperm production. By
1991, however, this figure had dropped dramatically to 26.9%. The
average weight of men's testes decreased over the decade, while the
proportion of useless fribrous testicular tissued increased.
Adamopoulos et al in Athens examined 23,850 men between 1977 to 1993
(17 years) and found similar results to Farjarinen.
In Edinburgh a recent study by Irwin saw a 25% decrease in sperm over
20 years, the results are shown in table 1 below. The worrying thing
about this downward trend is that a sperm count less than 20 million
sperms per ml is interpreted as being infertile. If this downward
trend of counts were to continue then values less than this will be
the average in the next millennium.
Year Average Sperms Count per ml
1950 100 million
1970 75 million
1990 50 million
Table 1: