A wee bit o' humor from The Onion. If you are easily offended, please move along - there's a lot of other good stuff on this blog.

Man Purchasing Pair Of Red Pants Better Be Ready To Put Up Or Shut Up

NEWS IN BRIEF • ISSUE 49•16 • Apr 21, 2013

KNOXVILLE, TN—According to sources, the man currently purchasing a pair of Nantucket red chinos at a local Banana Republic better be damn well prepared to put his money where his mouth is on this one. “Hey, all I can say is I hope this guy is prepared to go all-in here, because once he buys these pants and puts them on there’s no going back,” said onlooker Jim Hardy, noting that while it may have taken some chutzpah for the shopper to pick up the red pants and maybe even try them on in a fitting room, he’s going to need to sack up big time if he’s planning on sporting them to a social gathering, much less to the office. “Let me tell you, if this fucker’s not planning on going balls-to-the-wall with a white polo, navy blazer, and a pair of brown loafers with no socks, he better just put those pants back where found ’em, settle on some classic cords, and just move on already. This is the big leagues we’re talking about here.” At press time, the man had already proven he didn’t have the stones by asking the cashier about the store’s return policy.

April is nearly over, which means summer is just around the corner. With summer there are beaches, pool parties, and other situations where we might want to look good with our shirt off. There's not a lot of time to build new muscle, but there is plenty of time to burn off some body fat and add definition.

Adam Alexander at The Daily PT (Military.com's fitness blog), offers a quick and simple way to burn some fat in a hurry with three bodyweight exercises done for 100 reps each, with the goal of doing all of the reps within 20 minutes. It's harder than you might think.

M-​​100s — Insane 3 Minute Home Cardio Workout

ADAM ALEXANDER
MARCH 26, 2013

There is one key component to reaching your fitness goals, regardless of your current fitness levels. Consistency.

That may sound oversimplified but that doesn’t make it any less truthful. However, most people have lives that make this one component very difficult to obtain.

If you’re serious about your fitness goals, if you’d like to transform your body from the state it is in now to that of a modern day Spartan on the inside and out than what I’m about to share with you can help you achieve your goals.

Have you ever heard of the K.I.S.S. Rule?

Keep It Simple Spartan!

If you keep your workouts simple and short, than avoiding all of the pitfalls that keep you from training on a daily basis becomes a lot easier.

Bodyweight exercises are perfect for these types of workouts because they don’t require heavy or bulky equipment, you can workout where ever you are, and they can be just as effective as training in the gym.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Mike Chang, the lead trainer at SixpackShortcuts​.com. I asked Mike if he used bodyweight exercises in their training programs.

“This might shock a lot of people, but I built most of the ripped muscles on my body from doing just simple bodyweight exercises. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that lifting weights doesn’t work and I’m definitely not saying that I have great genetics. But when it comes to building muscle, and burning fat… bodyweight training is an awesome choice.

They are a perfect way to build a natural and balanced looking physique and it eliminates any excuses someone would have for not working out. Reasons such as not having time, no equipment, and no money for a gym membership simply do not apply.”

If you’ve been sitting on the fence this year, wanting to start your journey to meeting your fitness goals but you’re not sure how to get started or you’re running into some of the issues we mentioned, here is a short, intense and effective workout Mike recommends for his clients.

“If you want to build some serious muscle and burn off that stubborn belly fat, check out my M-​​100s bodyweight exercise routine that I personally used to help me build ripped muscle and get the six pack abs I’ve always wanted.”

The M-​​100s workout involves three advanced bodyweight exercises repeated in an effort to reach 100 reps.

Here are the exercises:

1. Burpees: Burpees are a full body exercise that increases strength, lean muscle mass and also burns a ton fat. This compound movement is a combination of a squat, pushup and a jump squat. Its a perfect exercise to to build endurance and a balanced physique. Some of the muscles worked during a burpee include traps, lower back, chest, shoulders, arms, legs and six pack abs.

2. Mountain Climbers: This exercise works the entire body and builds strength in the arms, shoulders, core and legs. It a very high intensity movement that really helps with building up your cardiovascular endurance and also awesome for burning belly fat. But the what mountain climbers are best know for is its effectiveness on sculpting six pack abs. With every lunge forward and lunge back, your abs are worked constantly throughout the entire exercise.

3. Double pump squat jump: This is an very advance form of the regular squat. Not only did we add in the jump, we also doubled up the squat movement. Your quads and hamstrings are your biggest muscles on the body and they also burn the most calories. By adding these additional movements, the double pump squat jump requires you to burn as much fat calories as possible with every rep.

I’d like to challenge you to start doing the M-​​100s bodyweight workout routine for one month.

The Plan: 4 workouts per week and repeat until you reach 20 minutes each session.

If you’re consistent and keep the workouts simple I’m confident you’ll see the results you’re looking for. I’m sure in a month you’ll see dramatic changes in your fitness level, and soon you’ll have the ripped athletic body you’ve always wanted.

If you want 3 more great bodyweight training routines that’ll get you ripped and muscular FAST, be sure to check out more videos with Mike Chang. This new video he just posted teaches you how to strengthen your core and get six pack abs at the same time.

Review - The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows by Brian Castner

Brian Castner's The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows is his memoir of three tours of duty in Iraq, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, and his life after coming home, dealing with "the Crazy."

Here are the first few paragraphs of the book:

THE FIRST THING you should know about me is that I’m Crazy.

I haven’t always been. Until that one day, the day I went Crazy, I was fine. Or I thought I was. Not anymore.

My Crazy is a feeling. It’s the worst, most intolerable feeling I’ve ever had. And it never goes away.

When you’re Crazy, you make a list of people you have told, the people you have come out to. My list is small. One best friend but not another. Jimbo and John and Greg, but not the other guys on the team. Your wife but not your mother. Those that you think will get it, will understand.

And now I’m telling you. That I’m Crazy, and I don’t know why.

The second thing you should know about me is that I don’t know how to fix it. Or control it. Or endure from one moment to the next. The Crazy is winning.

So I run.

I run every day, twice a day sometimes, out the front door of my peaceful suburban home, past sticky blast scenes of sewage, and motor oil, and bloody swamps of trash and debris, ankle deep, filling the road, sidewalks, shop and house doorsteps. I run through dust clouds, blown in off the desert or kicked up by the helo rotor wash. I run past the screaming women that never shut up, don’t shut up now. I should have made them stop when I had a chance. I run as fast as I can, as long as I can, my feet hitting the pavement in a furious rhythm, along the river near my home.

I run in the hottest part of the day, the full afternoon blaze, the heat of the black asphalt, baking in the summer sun, rising through my shoes and into my feet. I speed up, but the Crazy feeling is still winning. It overwhelms. Sweat pours down my flushed face, in my eyes. Albietz is chalk white skin and brown dried blood from head to toe.

Aside from Johnny Got His Gun, Catch-22, and Slaughterhouse-Five (all novels, although Vonnegut based his novel on his experience as a POW), I am not a huge fan of the war genre in literature, fiction or non-fiction.

Fortunately I am open to new things. A friend of mine highly recommended Castner's memoir last Friday, I bought it that same day, and finished it this morning. It is without doubt one of the most engrossing memoirs I have ever read, and with no ghost writer it is exceptionally well-written and constructed.

The sentences are often short, almost staccato, and Castner uses an image ("the foot in the box") as a hook throughout the text that seems at first part of his PTSD and then is revealed - in an unexpected way - that sheds light on the theme of the memoir.

There are a lot of action scenes set in Iraq, in the field, doing their jobs - all of which are riveting because of the imminent threat of death, and made even more so through the writing style. But there is also humor, brief glimpses of joy, yoga, and the daily battle with "the Crazy."

This is a book, in many ways, about men working with men in a predominantly male world. Yet I think the women who love men who have served in Iraq might better understand their men through this book.

Highly recommended - this was an Amazon Best Book for 2012.

For those who want more of a review, here are some links.

New York Times – August 19, 2012
Dallas Morning News – July 27, 2012
The Boston Globe - July 20, 2012
The New Yorker – July 12, 2012
USAToday - July 12, 2012
The Daily Beast – July 2, 2012

Here is a segment from NPR's Fresh Air that aired last summer.

'The Life That Follows' Disarming IEDs In Iraq

July 08, 2012

Listen to the Story

Fresh Air from WHYY
44 min 17 sec

Download
Transcript
Read an excerpt of The Long Walk

The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows

by Brian Castner

Brian Castner arguably had one of the most nerve-wracking jobs in the U.S. military. He commanded two Explosive Ordnance Disposal units in Iraq, where his team disabled roadside IEDs, investigated the aftermath of roadside car bombings and searched door to door to uncover bomb-makers at their homes.

"We would disassemble the IEDs when somebody else found them; we would go on route-clearance patrols with the engineers to trip the ambushes before they would hit our convoys; and we would do the post-blast investigations," Castner tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "Hopefully we would find weapons caches and dispose of a lot of this bulk ordnance before it would be used as an IED. ... But there was no getting rid of all of the bombs."

Sometimes those bombs would go off and Castner's team would be responsible for investigating the gruesome aftermath.

"You would show up and the loved ones would already be picking up bodies or pieces of bodies and they're already loading the destroyed car onto a flatbed, and it's bad enough that you're out there doing this but they're getting in the way of you doing your job," he says. "We could be there for 10 minutes. Because the longer you're there, the more chance you have to get shot at or have a mortar dropped on your head. So you get out as quickly as you can."

In his memoir, The Long Walk, Castner chronicles his three tours in Iraq and the life that followed when he returned home as a different man, unable to forget what he saw or experienced in Iraq. He describes his experiences as "Crazy" — a term that is often repeated in the book.

"You don't want to be a caricature of yourself but that's what it felt like I was turning into," he says. "And I needed a word [for it]. And if you're nauseous, you know you're about to throw up and if you have a headache, that's called pain. But I had a physical symptom that I didn't have a name for. ... So 'Crazy' was the best way to describe it."

Castner also had physical symptoms in addition to the problems in his mind. He began experiencing cognitive side effects related to his close exposure to blast attacks. In recent years, he was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. Long-term-memory problems, hearing issues and sleep apnea have plagued his body.

"The one that really bothered me, by and far, is the long-term-memory loss," he says. "I've got some sections of when my kids are younger and when my wife and I met and really the first three-quarters of my marriage that I simply don't remember. ... That was part of what I was working through [when I wrote the book]. Why can I remember the day of six [car bombs] so well but I can't remember my kids being born?"

Brian Castner served as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer in the U.S. Air Force from 1999 to 2007, deploying to Iraq to command bomb disposal units in Balad and Kirkuk in 2005 and 2006. Joey Campagna/Courtesy of the author

Interview Highlights

On transitioning to home life

"The stakes were all too low suddenly. Whether I did the dishes or not didn't seem to rise to the challenge of what I had done before. When nothing is important anymore, everything is important. Little things start to become too important and you start to become obsessive over the details. And that obsessive part of my brain that kept me alive in Iraq went into overdrive and it became the hindrance. It got in the way."

On why soldiers tie their ID and blood type around their feet instead of their hands

"It turns out that you put your blood type and your NKA (no known allergies) on my foot and you stick a dog tag in your laces because it's the part of you that's most likely to survive if you get blown up. We found feet a lot. If you're going to find a part of the bomber or victim, you might find their head. It's a better chance that you're going to find their hands and feet."

On arriving at the scene of an IED after it went off

"You become numb to it eventually. But I would never call it business as usual. And in fact, the post-blast mission is one that only really developed as the war went on. When I initially went through EOD school, there was no section of the training that was called post-blast investigation. On my first trip to Iraq in 2005, the first time I did one, I had to ask, 'Well, what does that even mean? What do you want me to look for?' "

On the long, lonely walk that was also portrayed in the 2008 film The Hurt Locker

"I put guys in suits all the time and I gave them the approval to put on the suit and go down nearly every day. And it is certainly the longest, loneliest walk that you will ever take. For an EOD guy who is used to being in control and accomplishing the mission, it is certainly more terrifying to be the one in the suit. But not having the sense of control to be the one used to just drive me nuts — to watch them walk down. Neither I nor anybody else can help them in that moment."

On giving the command to shoot a man who he thought might be triggering an IED

"It does not weigh on me because we made a mistake because mistakes happen in wartime. Everybody's just doing the best they can to survive every day. And so I don't regret it from that perspective. I felt like I wanted to give Trey [who was in my unit] the cover to do what he needed to do [which was disarm a potential bomb in a car] because I felt like that was my responsibility. If something bad happened, I wanted to have whatever was going to happen land on me instead of him. If there was an investigation or if there was some sort of wrongful death inquiry, I wanted them to come talk to me.

"But what really bothered me about that situation was [that] I had told myself that what we were doing in Iraq was keeping everyone alive. We kept U.S. soldiers alive, we kept Iraqis alive, we took apart every single bomb and it didn't matter who the target was — it didn't matter if it was going to blow up an Iraqi school or a U.S. convoy. You take them all apart. And in this situation, we were going to use our explosives to kill somebody instead of making Iraq just a little bit safer."

Web Resources

• Brian Castner: Fever Dreams (his blog and website)

Men Higher in Testosterone Are More Easily Threatened, Respond with Masculine Overcompensation

This press release from Stanford University highlights some new research showing that men with higher testosterone levels are more likely to feel their masculinity threatened. They tend to respond with overcompensating displays of masculinity. Clearly, this does not apply to all men, but it is a broad generalization that applies to a lot of men.

Stronger reaction to masculinity threats tied to testosterone, Stanford sociologist says

Professor of sociology Robb Willer says men overcompensate when their masculinity is threatened. Willer's new research suggests that the higher the man's testosterone level, the stronger the reaction.

BY BROOKE DONALD

Men with higher levels of testosterone are more easily threatened, engaging in masculine overcompensation in response, says a Stanford sociologist.

We've all heard it before: if a guy is made to feel less than manly, he'll act even more macho to make up for it.

Now, new research suggests that this behavior may have something to do with how much testosterone a man has.

Robb Willer, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford, has been studying masculinity since he was a graduate student, lending empirical data to the popular beliefs about emasculation.

In one of his first inquiries into the subject, back in 2005, he found that men whose masculinity is threatened express more masculine traits and behaviors. For example, Willer has found that threatened men show stronger support for war and greater interest in buying an SUV – attitudes and behaviors culturally associated with masculinity.

Willer's new research follows up on that earlier study, finding that men higher in testosterone are more easily threatened, engaging in masculine overcompensation in response.

Willer describes the results in "Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis," published in theAmerican Journal of Sociology.

The paper includes four studies examining the theory of male overcompensation – that men react to the undermining of their masculine status with bold demonstrations of strength and masculinity. The most recent study investigates testosterone’s role.

To conduct the study, researchers enlisted 54 undergraduate men at the University of Iowa. The men took a gender identity survey in which they were asked questions about their assertiveness or other qualities typically associated with masculinity or femininity.

They were then given feedback that the men believed was based on the survey but in fact was random. Some of the men were told their answers indicated more feminine traits. Others were told the answers indicated more masculine behavior. Then they were surveyed again on a variety of political and cultural views.

The men’s saliva was collected at different points in the study allowing their testosterone levels to be measured.

The research revealed that men with higher levels of testosterone show the strongest overcompensation response, Willer said. Higher testosterone men showed greater increases on masculine attitudes like support for war and negative views of homosexuality after being told their answers indicated more feminine traits. Lower testosterone men showed no effects when similarly threatened.

"Masculine overcompensation in men appears to be driven by men with moderate to high testosterone levels," Willer said. "Their levels of support for war and homophobia practically doubled on the scale that we measured them on, where lower testosterone men were unaffected by threats."

Willer said the results do not suggest that men with higher testosterone levels are always more aggressive or dominant. The relationship between testosterone and macho behavior shows itself when triggered by a threat or provocation, Willer said.

"There appears to be a very strong effect when a high testosterone man's status is threatened," Willer said. “However, when not threatened, we saw no differences in the attitudes of men with different testosterone levels.”

Willer said there is still more to be done to unravel the reasons men overcompensate, including whether it's behavior to reassure themselves or prove to society their manliness. He said future studies should also look cross-culturally, and examine whether the same theory could materialize for women in certain contexts.

Co-authors include Christabel L. Rogalin of Purdue University, North Central; Bridget Conlon of California State University, Fresno; and Michael T. Wojnowicz of the University of Washington.

Media Contact

• Robb Willer, Sociology, willer@stanford.edu
• Brooke Donald, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, brooke.donald@stanford.edu

Men Easily Attune to Other Men's Feelings, But Struggle Attuning to Women

The headline of this article surely comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever been in an opposite sex relationship. A study like this might lead a moron with a diploma mill degree to conclude that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. He'd be painfully wrong of course, but most Americans are desperate to understand why communication between the genders can be so challenging sometimes, so they will buy his book, which probably bears a similar title.

The hidden problem with a study like this is that they are claiming adult males are hardwired to be more attuned to other men and less so to women. But these are adults - we cannot say they are hard-wired at birth, since there is no way to ascertain that information. But there is considerable evidence from interpersonal neurobiology that social interactions and relationships shape the developing brain in profound ways.

For example, most boys grow up playing with other boys, not girls. This ongoing relational experience is going to wire their brains to be more attuned to male emotions because those are the people closest to them most of the time. But then these boys become teens and young adults and start hanging around with females (for the sake of this argument, the boys are heterosexual), and strangely, these female humans are emotionally quite different from their male friends.

Likewise, these young women have grown up mostly spending time with other women, and so their brains have become more attuned to female emotional expression. When they start dating young men, it may seem as though these young men are an alien species.

A study such as the one below does not take into account the socialization of men in all the years prior to their participation in the research study.

Here is the abstract and citation for the original study that is summarized below.

Abstract 

Men are traditionally thought to have more problems in understanding women compared to understanding other men, though evidence supporting this assumption remains sparse. Recently, it has been shown, however, that meńs problems in recognizing women’s emotions could be linked to difficulties in extracting the relevant information from the eye region, which remain one of the richest sources of social information for the attribution of mental states to others. To determine possible differences in the neural correlates underlying emotion recognition from female, as compared to male eyes, a modified version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test in combination with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was applied to a sample of 22 participants. We found that men actually had twice as many problems in recognizing emotions from female as compared to male eyes, and that these problems were particularly associated with a lack of activation in limbic regions of the brain (including the hippocampus and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex). Moreover, men revealed heightened activation of the right amygdala to male stimuli regardless of condition (sex vs. emotion recognition). Thus, our findings highlight the function of the amygdala in the affective component of theory of mind (ToM) and in empathy, and provide further evidence that men are substantially less able to infer mental states expressed by women, which may be accompanied by sex-specific differences in amygdala activity.

Full Citation: 

Schiffer B, Pawliczek C, Müller BW, Gizewski ER, Walter H (2013) Why Don't Men Understand Women? Altered Neural Networks for Reading the Language of Male and Female Eyes. PLoS ONE 8(4): e60278. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060278

Study: Men Struggle to Read Women’s Emotions

By Bill Andrews | April 12, 2013

In a paper sure to please lazy stand-up comics and beleaguered husbands everywhere, scientists say that men do indeed have a hard time understanding women. Recent results show that men have a significantly harder time recognizing women’s emotions than they do men’s, and that men seem to use different parts of their brain when ascribing intentions and feelings to women versus men.

Previous experiments had suggested that men are naturally wired to be more intuitive toward other men’s mental states and emotions. Eager to figure out why and how this could be, the researchers studied the brains of 22 male participants as they received a version of a well-known empathy test called the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.” (You can take a version of the test online here.) As the name suggests, the test consists of snapshots of pairs of eyes. Pairs of eyes were shown in succession to each participant, who had to determine either the gender or the emotional state of the person pictured. This all took place within an MRI machine, allowing the researchers to see which parts of the brain were active while participants made their determinations.

Participants were about equally good at guessing the gender of male and female eyes, but the men did significantly worse at recognizing the emotions of the female eyes. They correctly interpreted about 87 percent of men’s eyes but only about 76 percent of women’s eyes. Participants also took longer to judge women’s emotions—about 40 milliseconds longer on average. Thus, in effect, men can “read” other men’s eyes faster and better, the researchers report in PLOS ONE.

The MRI data also showed for the first time that this difference is linked to different areas of brain activity. Men inferring other men’s mental states showed much more activity in the right hippocampus and the anterior cingulate cortex than men reading women’s emotions. Those two brain areas are involved in the acquisition of emotional memories, and so it may be that men were drawing more strongly on their own remembered experiences when imagining others men’s emotions.

The authors speculate that, evolutionarily, it would have been most useful for men to quickly and accurately interpret other men’s facial expressions, since males were more heavily involved in violent activities like hunting and territorial battles. Of course, just because “men are less able to infer mental states expressed by women,” as the authors put it, doesn’t mean that men find women completely inscrutable. The results show noticeable, but still generally subtle, differences. Plenty of men have still been known to lead long and happy lives (mostly) understanding women.

Image courtesy Dave Clark Digital Photo / Shutterstock

Masturbation as a Failure of Masculinity?

This is an interesting article, and in general I agree with the premise that frequent porn use and/or masturbation (they go hand in hand, so to speak) is detrimental to healthy intimate relationships for most men. But some of these guys - the new (to me) term is NoFappers - seem to take it to an extreme, for example the title of this post is a quote from the article describing how some of these guys view maturbation - I added the question mark.

But is maturbation really a failure of masculinity? Or is it a basic animal drive (many animal species, or mammals at least, also masturbate)? Is it okay to masturbate when one is single, but not in a relationship?

In my experience in working with porn addicts (and I think this is the REAL issue here), if they can give up porn for 30 days, but are still allowed to masturbate, they discover a rich fantasy life they did not know they possessed - and most find that much more rewarding than porn.

The best part of using fantasy rather than porn is that when a guy does get into a relationship, the fantasy life can potentially generate a lot more creativity in his love-making.

Hands Off

Why are a bunch of men quitting masturbation? So they can be better men.

By Emily Witt
Published Apr 14, 2013

(Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine)

Traditionally, people undergo a bit of self-examination when faced with a ­potentially fatal rupture in their long-term relationship. Thirty-two-year-old Henry* admits that what he did was a little more extreme. “If you’d told me that I wasn’t going to masturbate for 54 days, I would have told you to fuck off,” he says.

Masturbation had been part of Henry’s daily routine since childhood. Although he remembered a scandalized babysitter who “found me trying to have sex with a chair” at age 5, Henry says he never felt shame about his habit. While he was of the opinion that a man who has a committed sexual relationship with porn was probably not going to have as successful a relationship with a woman, he had no qualms about watching it. Which he did most days.

Then, early last year and shortly before his girlfriend of two years moved to Los Angeles, Henry happened to watch a TED talk by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo called “The Demise of Guys.” It described males who “prefer the asynchronistic Internet world to the spontaneous interactions in social relationships” and therefore fail to succeed in school, work, and with women. When his girlfriend left, Henry went on to watch a TEDX talk by Gary Wilson, an anatomist and physiologist, whose lecture series, “Your Brain on Porn,” claims, among other things, that porn conditions men to want constant variety—an endless set of images and fantasies—and requires them to experience increasingly heightened stimuli to feel aroused. A related link led Henry to a community of people engaged in attempts to quit masturbation on the social news site Reddit. After reading the ­enthusiastic posts claiming improved virility, Henry began frequenting the site.

“The main thing was seeing people who said, ‘I feel awesome,’ ” he says. Henry did not feel awesome. He felt burned out from work and physically exhausted, and his girlfriend had just moved across the country. He had a few sexual concerns, too, though nothing serious, he insists. In his twenties, he sometimes had difficulty ejaculating during one-night stands if he had been drinking. On two separate occasions, he had not been able to get an erection. He wasn’t sure that forswearing masturbation would solve any of this, but stopping for a while seemed like “a not-difficult experiment”—far easier than giving up other things people try to quit, like caffeine or alcohol.

He also felt some responsibility for what had happened to his relationship. “When a guy feels like he’s failed with respect to a woman, that’s one of the things that causes you to examine yourself.” If he had been a better boyfriend or even a better man, he thought, perhaps his girlfriend wouldn’t have left New York.

So a month after his girlfriend moved away, and a few weeks before taking a trip to visit her, Henry went to the gym a lot. He had meditated for years, but he began to do so with more discipline and intention. He researched strategies to relieve insomnia, to avoid procrastination, and to be more conscious of his daily habits. These changes were not only for his girlfriend. “It was about cultivating a masculine energy that I wanted to apply in other parts of my life and with her,” he says.

And to help cultivate that masculine energy, he decided to quit masturbating. He erased a corner of the white board in his home office and started a tally of days, always using Roman numerals. “That way,” he says, “it would mean more.”

For those who seek fulfillment in the renunciation of benign habits, masturbation isn’t usually high on the list. It’s variously a privilege, a right, an act of political assertion, or one of the purest and most inconsequential pleasures that exist. Doctors assert that it’s healthy. Therapists recommend it. (Henry once talked to his therapist after a bad sexual encounter; she told him to masturbate. “Love yourself,” she said.)

And despite a century passing since Freud declared auto­eroticism a healthy phase of childhood sexual development and Egon Schiele drew pictures of people touching themselves, masturbation has become the latest frontier in the school of self-improvement. Today’s anti-masturbation advocates deviate from anti-onanists past—that superannuated medley of Catholic ascetics, boxers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Norman Mailer. Instead, the members of the current generation tend to be young, self-aware, and secular. They bolster their convictions online by quoting studies indicating that ejaculation leads to decreased testosterone and vitamin levels (a drop in zinc, specifically). They cull evidence implying that excessive porn-viewing can reduce the number of dopamine receptors. Even the occasional woman can be found quitting (although some women partake of a culture of encouragement around masturbation, everything from a direct-sales sex-toy party at a friend’s house to classes with sex educator Betty Dodson, author of Sex for One).

(Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine)

One of the unintentional pioneers of the current wave of anti-masturbators is Alexander Rhodes, a 23-year-old college student and actor who lives in Pittsburgh. On June 20, 2011, after coming across a study conducted by Hangzhou Normal University in China that found that testosterone levels peak after seven days without ejaculation, Rhodes started a “NoFap” forum on Reddit, where he announced various challenges for those who wanted to abstain. (Fap is onomatopoeic Internet slang for masturbation.)

When it first launched, the forum received 20,000 visitors a month. There was no shortage of mutual encouragement, with badges awarded for milestones like going a week, a month, or a year without fapping, and a counter tracking exactly how many days a person has abstained. NoFap’s popularity has now ballooned to nearly 400,000 unique visitors per month, and posts have grown in diversity. Some threads tout the perceived benefits of no-fapping (“found my first girlfriend”). Others recommend self-­improvement books or revel in a newfound sense of perspective (“I was able to notice birds chirping, which I haven’t done in years”), or engage in what can best be described as penis monologues (“Today I was sitting on the toilet and I looked down and I saw my penis and I kinda just stared at it, then I asked him ‘What is your purpose penis?’ To which he replied ‘I dunno lol’”).

But perhaps the most noticeable shift within the forum is how NoFappers have begun to characterize their short-term challenges as long-term lifestyle ­choices—one discussion is literally titled “NoFap isn’t a challenge. It’s a way of life.” In the thread, ­Aterazideme posted: “I desire to be a person in control of his desires. Each day of NoFap brings me close to that ideal.”

And that “ideal” is defined pretty consistently, at least to ­“fapstronauts,” as they call themselves. In short, it means being more masculine, which in turn leads to success in other aspects of life. Take the example of 19-year-old Redditor Ojdidit123. After 70 days without masturbating, he wrote, he went from being a virgin to meeting a woman on his flight, getting a “raging boner,” and having sex with her in both the plane and an airport hotel. The confidence he got from that encounter, he said, not only helped him perform well at a job interview later, and secure a job at a hedge fund for the summer, but also enabled him to call a long-simmering crush and ask her out. “All that shit happened in the span of 48 hours,” he posted. “It was pretty fucking crazy.”

The vehemence with which some users espouse the benefits of anti-masturbation surprises Rhodes, who says that he never intended the forum as a self-help initiative. “I saw it as a fun challenge to test your willpower, to put yourself against your instincts and see if you could do it,” he says. Rhodes is also quick to clarify that he thinks masturbation is a normal and healthy human activity.

“I’m less extremist than a lot of NoFap members,” he says. “There are a lot who blame every problem they have on masturbation,” echoing a disclaimer on the NoFap board: “Please do not look to fapstinence to cure all your social and physical ills. If you have other problems that have nothing to do with your sexual habits, they’re still going to be there when you’re done with a NoFap challenge.” I ask if his counter, which reads 40 days, is accurate. He laughs and says no. “My girlfriend’s away in a different state for a few more days. I might have even masturbated before you called me.”

Last August, comedian Greg Barris began talking about his ­masturbation hiatus in his stand-up routines. He started with a regime not unlike that of a pregnant woman, giving up booze, weed, and caffeine. He also gave up porn. A year later, when a woman he was seeing left town, “like gone, forever,” he decided he would give up sex. “But not trying to have sex, you know?” he says. “Not accidental celibacy.” Masturbation came next. He set a goal of 60 days. As the days passed, he made jokes about his progress online:

“30 days celibate. Hot on Tesla’s tracks. Have created wireless energy out of my humidifier and now my whole apt is off the grid.”

“43 days totally celibate. If you see me and hug me don’t squeeze me too hard.”

“60 celibate today. 60 days no masturbation today. Anyone else?”

Halfway through his experiment, he felt more energy and mental clarity. Throughout the process, “I kept saying, ‘I’m resetting my dick and my brain,’ ” he says. “If you’re on sex mode, then your brain is probably running like a couple of hundred programs, where it’s like looking for sex somehow.”

Comparing the body to a computer is a common analogy among those in the anti-masturbation community, a subset of which includes the self-proclaimed “biohackers” and “quantified self” enthusiasts who collect data regarding the input and output of their bodies. If the body is a series of systems, the thinking seems to be, then whatever problems exist can be repaired like a piece of hardware. Wilson, the guru of “Your Brain on Porn,” suggests that dopamine receptors will regenerate and dopamine levels increase after a withdrawal period of “flatlining”—total uninterest in sex. Some anti-masturbators even use video-gamespeak when they talk about abstaining on “hard mode,” which means declining sex with a partner as well as with oneself.

There’s also the particularly poignant demographic whose sexual lives are so inextricable from their computers that giving up masturbation is a way of unplugging and reentering the world. “I never really had to get out there,” says a 24-year-old law student in California whose longest streak of not masturbating was 105 days (he did have sex with his girlfriend during this time). Though he started limiting masturbation because it fixed the erectile problems he experienced during sex with his partner, it was also about trying to more actively engage with life. “I was not a troll who lived in my room and played World of ­Warcraft all the time, but I didn’t really develop fully socially,” he says.

The goals for all these men, regardless of their personal lives or relationship statuses, seemed to be similar: to return to a more charged, natural self. It’s a throwback notion—virility as integral to manhood—but many of these anti-masturbators regard it as truth. “I feel like a man again” is a common refrain. One NoFapper referred to his 90 days without masturbation as “a passage into manhood.” They see masturbation as a failure of masculinity—not because it’s shameful or forever associated with adolescence, but because, on a fundamental, even chemical level, it’s draining their true potential.

The medical profession isn’t convinced. Every doctor and psychologist I spoke with informed me that “there’s no evidence” to link masturbation to sexual performance, and that it’s an over­simplification to think that frequent masturbation is the cause of delayed ejaculation. According to ­Stephen Snyder, a sex therapist in Manhattan, it’s “most often not the case.” Darius Paduch, a professor of urology and reproductive medicine at Weill ­Cornell Medical College, went so far as to say that ejaculation leads to greater fertility. “In our practice, we pretty much make men achieve an erection at least three to four times a week,” he says. Paduch also cited studies that found that men who ejaculated multiple times a week faced less risk of erectile dysfunction later in life. There’s also the body’s natural process of elimination: Many anti-masturbators start having wet dreams.

But none of that matters to the abstainers, including Matt, whose longest stretch without masturbation was 280 days. He has also encouraged a friend to join the experiment (and is keeping a spreadsheet to chart their ­progress). “Maybe part of it’s placebo,” he says. “But I’ve become more articulate and more confident. People can even understand what I’m saying better. I’ve become a very different person in a lot of ways.”

Henry went out to California. For two months, he lived with his girlfriend. Their relationship felt strong, the sex was great, and everything seemed to be on track. Then work and family compelled him to return to New York. They remained a couple, and Henry maintained his efforts. He says that his abstention, along with daily meditation and no porn, made him feel confident and grounded. He recorded his voice on his iPhone and claims it had deepened. Perhaps it was all in his mind, but he noticed other benefits, “like when you walk down the street and you make eye contact with a woman, and she smiles. And there’s no darting with the eyes, or no staring creepily, just a more natural exchange.”

He compares the feeling to being on antidepressants: “It was like a buffer, little things didn’t bother me.” He also began feeling more alert. And younger. And he found himself far more attracted to women—not in a furtive or uncomfortable way, but in the sense that the world around him felt more charged. Something totally banal—the before and after pictures of a Weight Watchers commercial, for example—suddenly had meaning.

“It felt like it did when you were in puberty or in college,” he says. “Women became more salient.” For 54 days, he did not masturbate. Then, over the phone, the relationship ended, and so did Henry’s campaign. “I didn’t have any desire,” he says. “I could totally not have done it, but I was like, ‘Fuck it.’ ”

Jaclyn Friedman - Toxic Masculinity

This article from The American Prospect appeared last month shortly before the conclusion of the Steubenville rape trial, in which the two teen males were essentially found guilty of rape. Although the article is a month old now, the points Friedman makes are relevant today, and next month, and next year - until we do something to change the culture of masculinity within which young men are raised

Toxic Masculinity

JACLYN FRIEDMAN
MARCH 13, 2013

If we want to end the pandemic of rape, it’s going to require an entire global movement of men willing to do the hard work of interrogating the ideas they were raised with.

Judge Thomas Lipps listens to arguments in Jefferson County Juvenile Court in a case involving two Ohio high school football players charged with raping a 16-year-old girl.

Last summer, two young football players in the Ohio town of Steubenville carried the unconscious body of a local girl from party to party, violating her in ways you’d probably prefer not to think about. (I’m not pretending this incident is merely “alleged,” because there’s video and this column isn’t a court of law.) Today, she’ll face her attackers in court for the first time. It’s a brave act, as she surely knows she’ll not only be facing down the boys who did this to her, but also the adults whose jobs it is to blame her and call her a liar. Only she can know what will make this sacrifice worthwhile: Is it enough for her to be heard in court? Will it only be healing if the boys are convicted? Whatever it is she needs, I hope she gets it.

But rape prosecutions are argued on behalf of the state, not just the victim, and there’s a good reason: Rape doesn’t just harm one person. It tears at the fabric of our communities. And if we treat this trial as simply the story of what a couple of kids did to another, we’re missing the point. This isn’t an isolated incident, and the incident itself didn’t happen in isolation.

This rape is like most in that it was enabled by a deeply entrenched, toxic masculinity. It’s a masculinity that defines itself not only in opposition to female-ness, but as inherently superior, drawing its strength from dominance over women’s “weakness,” and creating men who are happy to deliberately undermine women’s power; it is only in opposition to female vulnerability that it can be strong. Or, as former NFL quarterback and newly-minted feminist Don McPherson recently put it, "We don't raise boys to be men. We raise them not to be women, or gay men." This starts in childhood for many boys, who are taught young that they’ll be punished for doing anything “girly,” from playing with dolls to crying, or even preferring to read over “rough housing” outside.

Toxic masculinity has its fingerprints all over the Steubenville case. The violence done to the victim was born out of the boys’ belief that a) sexually dominating a helpless girl’s body made them powerful and cool, and b) there would be no consequences for them because of their status as star athletes (If you want to see stomach-churning first-hand evidence of this, check out this video of one of their friends gleefully talking about how “raped” and “dead” the victim was). The defense is basing their entire case on it, arguing that this near- (and sometimes totally) unconscious girl’s body was the boys’ to use because “she didn't affirmatively say no." The football community’s response—by which I mean not just the coaches, school, and players, but the entire community of fans—is steeped in the assumptions of toxic masculinity, treating the athletes and the game as more important than some silly girl’s right to both bodily autonomy and justice. Steubenville residents have been quick to rally around the team, suggesting that the victim “put herself in a position to be violated” and refusing to talk to police investigating the assault. The two players who cooperated with police were suspended from the football team, while the players accused of the rape have been allowed to play. The coach even went so far as to threaten a New York Timesreporter asking questions about the case. (No surprise there: When it comes to male-dominated sports, toxic masculinity is the rule, not the exception.)

But sports is hardly the only breeding ground for toxic masculinity. Witness the recent, vicious bullying of Zerlina Maxwell by fans of Fox News. Last week, Maxwell was on Hannity and dared to opine that the best rape prevention isn’t about what women can do to protect themselves, but instead focuses on raising men who don’t rape. She also personally identified herself as a survivor of rape. What followed was a nearly inconceivable onslaught of misogynist and racist attacks, including repeated threats of rape and death. All because a black woman insisted that the work of stopping rape—“women’s work” if there ever was such a thing—requires men’s labor. Under the influence of toxic masculinity, the logical response to a man being forced or even encouraged to do something coded “female” is always violence.

The U.N. is in the midst of its 57th Commission on the Status of Women, this year focusing on gendered violence, a global pandemic made all the more urgent by growing evidence that social change leads to increased violence against women. Why? Because destabilizing established social order—even in the interest of what we might agree is progress—can leave people feeling vulnerable. And when men feel vulnerable, toxic masculinity teaches them the way to reassert their power is by dominating women. There’s a pall hanging over the proceedings, a real risk that this year’s commission may wind up like last year’s, failing to come to any policy agreements thanks to the obstructionism of a handful of patriarchal countries who claim that their traditional and religious customs would be infringed upon if they had to take action to end gendered violence in their countries. You can bet that any customs that require impunity for violence against women are built on toxic masculinity.

It’s time for a serious intervention in masculinity. It’s not enough to not be a rapist. You don’t get a cookie or a Nobel Peace Prize for that. If we want to end the pandemic of rape, it’s going to require an entire global movement of men who are willing to do the hard work required to unpack and interrogate the ideas of masculinity they were raised with, and to create and model new masculinities that don’t enable misogyny. Masculinities built not on power over women, but on power with women.

This is going to take real work, which is why so many men resist it. It requires destabilizing your own identity, and giving up attitudes and behaviors from which you’re used to deriving power, likely before you learn how to derive power from other, more just and productive places. There are real risks for men who challenge toxic masculinity, from social shaming to actual “don’t be a fag” violence—punishments that won’t ease until many, many men take the plunge. But there are great rewards to be had, too, beyond stopping rape. Toxic masculinity is damaging to men, too, positing them as stoic sex-and-violence machines with allergies to tenderness, playfulness, and vulnerability. A reinvented masculinity will surely give men more room to express and explore themselves without shame or fear. (It will also, not incidentally, reduce rape against men as well, because many rapes of men are committed by other men with the intention of “feminizing”—that is, humiliating through dominance—their victim.)

These interventions start with a “feminine” activity: introspection. What did you learn about “being a man,” from whom? How are those lessons working out for you, and for the people you love and your communities? Taking action can be as simple as men publicly owning their preference for “female” coded things, whether that’s child-rearing, nonviolence, feminism, or anything else—and being willing to suffer the social consequences. It can be more formal, working with established organizations like Men Stopping Violence. As more men take responsibility for the work, it will surely also take on forms no one has yet envisioned.

Obviously, the mouth-breathing troglodytes who hailed hate down on Maxwell aren’t going to be interested in this project. And there’s strong evidence that most rapes are committed by repeat offenders who may not call what they’re doing by the r-word, but know full-well they don’t have their partner’s consent. Remaking masculinity isn’t about sweetly beseeching those guys until they don “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” t-shirts. It’s about two much more practical things: 1) raising new generations of boys much less likely to grow into rapists and/or Fox trolls, and, meanwhile, 2) undermining the social license to operate which allows the current generation of assholes to keep trolling and raping with impunity.

In other words: What if misogynist trolling got you shunned by their friends and family? What if raping someone was actually likely to result in your expulsion from your team, and your conviction in court? If the rest of us shift our relationship to masculinity, ideas like “she was asking for it” or “don’t be a pussy” won’t make sense anymore, and the guys who try to cling to them will find themselves isolated, facing serious social and legal consequences.

There’s already some sign that this can work, and that the work is underway. Vancouver’s new initiative placing the focus on preventing offenders, not victims, is showing early promise. The Feminist Wire just launched a “Masculinities Forum” to create a more explicit dialogue on just these issues. And the organization Breakthrough has launched a global "Ring The Bell" campaign that is poised to take the lead on this very issue, calling for one million men to take concrete action to end violence against women.

It’s not a moment too soon. Just as putting the onus on women to prevent their own rapes on an individual basis is both wrong and ineffective, so to is putting the onus on women to stop rape as a social phenomenon. It’s time to “sack up” and step up, men. I promise it will hurt you a lot less than it’s hurting me.

Editor's Note: On May 17, the two young football players were adjudicated delinquent of rape, comparable to a guilty verdict in adult criminal court.

Ego in Service of the Higher Self

Here's a little wisdom from The Daily Om, a bit woo woo but still good stuff. The desire to jettison ego in so many spiritual circles is unrealistic and destructive. We need ego, but it should not control us - it should function in our service.

The Ego: Serving The Higher Self

April 15, 2013
by Madisyn Taylor

As long as we are in touch with our higher selves our egos are not a threat, rather a tool in service of the spirit.

In most spiritual circles, the ego gets a pretty bad rap. The reason for this is that the ego, to some extent, is the principle in our psyches that separates us from one another, while spirit is the principle that shows us that no such separation exists. Sometimes the ego is depicted as an almost demonic figure that keeps us from realizing our true nature. But at its most basic, the ego is simply a tool that helps us organize the various aspects of our personality so that we can function in the world. In this sense, the ego is simply a way for us to understand and attend to ourselves at the same time as we understand and attend to the world around us. The ego is a tool that we use to navigate the world.

Perhaps the problem is that the ego sometimes gets out of control. This happens when the higher self loses control of the psyche. The psyche then falls under the leadership of the ego, an entity that was never meant to lead. The ego is meant to be definitively in the service of the higher self. When this relationship is functioning, the ego is a useful intermediary representing the whole self but not thinking that it is the whole self. Then, it is almost as if the ego is the self playfully pretending to be the separate entity called “I.” Like an actor, the ego plays the roles that the world asks us to play in order to be part of the program. In this way, the ego can be a tool enabling us to be in the world but not of it.

As long as we are in touch with our higher selves, our egos are not a threat. They are simply useful tools in the service of spirit. We keep our egos in check when we continually nurture our awareness of who we really are. Then our egos are free to serve without trying ineffectually to rule. It is healthy to have ego, but like all things in life, ego functions best when it is in balance and harmony with your whole self.

What do you think?
Discuss this article and share your opinion

UTNE Reader - Masculinity Crisis: The [Biological] End of Male

Rather than the drivel passing for cultural commentary that often proclaims the end of men, or the crisis in masculinity, or whatever may be the phrase of the day, this article looks at the real crisis for men - xenoestrogens (endocrine disruptors) and their impact of men and male sexuality.

Since the 1990s endocrinologists have issued warnings on the future of male reproductive health—“penis and semen,” in Moore’s words. In 1992, Danish scientists published a meta-analysis of 61 studies on semen quality from around the world, concluding that the average sperm concentration had declined by nearly 50 percent over a 50-year period, from 113 million to 66 million sperm per milliliter. “Every man sitting in this room today is half the man his grandfather was,” reproductive biologist Lou Guillette told Congress in 1993. “Are our children going to be half the men we are?” 

An increasingly solid—but by no means conclusive—body of evidence links low sperm density and other problems in male reproductive health with a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, which are present in everything from pesticides to plastics to beauty products. First identified in the 1990s, endocrine disruptors are named for the way they mimic hormones and tinker with the signals sent between cells. These include news-making plastic components like bisphenol-A and phthalates, recently banned from use in baby bottles and children’s toys, respectively, but still present at low levels in the blood and urine samples of more than 90 percent of the U.S. population.

I've been speaking to this issue on this blog for years. A quick search under labels for "xenoestrogens" or "endocrine disruptors" should bring up several articles from the last few years.

The article below doesn't offer solutions, but this article from Cy Wilson at T-Nation offers a few suggestions that are useful:

Here are some tips on how to avoid exposure to the compounds mentioned earlier:

• Use water-based paints to avoid alkylphenolics
• Make sure that the teething toys you have are PVC-free. Otherwise, they could contain phthalates.
• If you’re really concerned with certain fruits or vegetables being contaminated with pesticides, opt for organic food instead. Other than that, washing the fruit or vegetable thoroughly can help too. Still it doesn’t guarantee complete elimination.
• Plastic utensils, baby bottles and even things like beakers that are scratched can leak chemicals like Bisphenol A. Replace those that are damaged with new products.
• Perfumes and air fresheners, along with other scented products may contain parabens. Luckily, perfumes should list their ingredients, so you can check for parabens and choose a product that doesn’t contain them. Other than that, try cutting down on air freshener usage.
• One last thing that may work would be to use some type of anti-estrogenic compound like clomiphene or tamoxifen. Isoflavonoids have been shown to block environmental estrogens from inducing any growth in humans breast cancer cells.(56) Since these weaker compounds can provide some protection, it stands to reason that clomiphene or tamoxifen should do the same.

I’d actually rather see these two latter compounds used instead, as there are some studies suggesting that many isoflavonoids (NOTE: DIM [3,3′-Diindolylmethane] is one) can induce protein transcription after binding to alpha receptors.

Something along the lines of 25 mg of clomiphene every day to every other day might well do the job. In other words, it wouldn’t require a very large dose. Besides, clomiphene would help to combat not only the risk of breast tissue growth and cancer, but it can help prevent the xenoestrogen-caused reduction in Testosterone.

Getting a doctor to provide you with clomid (clomiphene) or tamoxifen is not likely, unless s/he is VERY progressive. However, the use of DIM and resveratrol will help limit the build-up and toxicity of these environmental endocrine disruptors.

Masculinity Crisis: The End of Male

May/June 2013
By Zak Stone, from Tomorrow Magazine

As a gay man, I welcome the growing irrelevance of old-school masculinity. But a creeping masculinity crisis, one that’s biological, affects me just as much as any frat boy or military officer.

On a Thursday in August, I walk into a budget health clinic in downtown Los Angeles. At the end of a maze of pistachio-colored hallways, I find a room marked LabCorp—it’s essentially a storage closet full of folded cardboard boxes, a jumble of plastic tubs, a bin marked “Dry Ice,” and a few desks and chairs. It’s reminiscent of where the janitors at elementary school would hang out, only with microscopes. I’ve paid $129 to have a test done: “Semen Analysis, Basic.”

There is no waiting room. I stand in the doorway until Maria—a lab-tech with a sweet-looking face, long black hair, and a pink shirt sprinkled with fine black polka dots under a white coat—acknowledges me. She hands over some forms and a plastic cup.

“You have to ejaculate everything inside, and when you’re finished put it in here,” Maria says, pointing at a box next to me crowded with plastic cups in baggies. “The bathroom’s out the door, a quick left.”

I enter the handicap-accessible bathroom. The walls are a chalky shade of blue. A knot of toilet paper drifts around the toilet bowl. An overworked plunger sits in the corner. I can hear someone unfurling a roll of duct tape beyond the door. There is no porn. There is no chair. I do my thing. I return to the office and put the cup into the box. I avoid Maria.

In my rush to leave, I forget to hand in my paperwork. When I revisit Maria, she tells me they’ll measure volume and concentration here on the spot. Then the sperm will travel south, to another lab in San Diego, where a technician will analyze their shape and size, and how well they swim. I’ll get the results—a password-protected PDF—a few days later.

I signed up for a fertility test not because I’m trying to have a kid (please) but as a barometer of my maleness, in its most medieval, distilled sense. Admittedly, it was a ridiculous thing to do. But I was curious. As you may have heard, male anxiety is on the rise in 21st-century America. Employers no longer value our strength to lift or make things (we sent those jobs overseas). Society is sick of our risk-taking bravado (that’s what crashed the economy). Women don’t need our financial support (matriarchy is the new patriarchy). Every week there’s a new think piece or cover story ripping holes in the trappings of traditional manhood.

As a gay man, I welcome the growing irrelevance of old-school masculinity. I’m less likely now than at any point in history to be impeded by my failure to conform to traditional notions of manhood. I can be the CEO of Apple. I can be a drag queen. Whatever I choose, I’m still a man.

But a creeping masculinity crisis, one that’s biological, affects me just as much as any frat boy or military officer. Around the world, male fertility is sharply declining. Birth defects afflicting the penis and testicles are on the rise. So is testicular cancer. Scientists expect that these problems will plague future generations even more than ours.

Whether you’re RuPaul or Paul Ryan, functional genitals matter—and contribute to an understanding of your maleness. “When you boil it down to it, the essence of masculinity might be a hard penis and semen,” says Lisa Jean Moore, professor of gender studies at Purchase College-SUNY. Specifically, semen dense with healthy, tail-wagging sperm.

It’s a reductive idea, but maybe that’s why it’s valuable. Cultural understandings of masculinity are always shifting, after all. They’re temporary. Cock and balls are forever. Or at least they’re supposed to be.

Since the 1990s endocrinologists have issued warnings on the future of male reproductive health—“penis and semen,” in Moore’s words. In 1992, Danish scientists published a meta-analysis of 61 studies on semen quality from around the world, concluding that the average sperm concentration had declined by nearly 50 percent over a 50-year period, from 113 million to 66 million sperm per milliliter. “Every man sitting in this room today is half the man his grandfather was,” reproductive biologist Lou Guillette told Congress in 1993. “Are our children going to be half the men we are?”

An increasingly solid—but by no means conclusive—body of evidence links low sperm density and other problems in male reproductive health with a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, which are present in everything from pesticides to plastics to beauty products. First identified in the 1990s, endocrine disruptors are named for the way they mimic hormones and tinker with the signals sent between cells. These include news-making plastic components like bisphenol-A and phthalates, recently banned from use in baby bottles and children’s toys, respectively, but still present at low levels in the blood and urine samples of more than 90 percent of the U.S. population.

“They’re not all identical and they have different actions. Some interfere with estrogen; some with androgen, the male hormone,” explains Philip Landrigan, an epidemiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “It’s a mixed lot, and very complex.” Wildlife biologists first identified them in connection with birth defects and decreasing populations of birds and fish. “For the first few years, the concept of endocrine disruption was treated with a lot of skepticism outside of environmental circles. But in the last four or five years it’s moved very much into mainstream medicine,” says Landrigan, particularly as study after study suggests connections to the contemporary decline in male reproductive health.

In 2000, American researchers not only confirmed results from the original Danish semen quality study, they found sperm density in the United States and Europe to be falling at an even faster clip: by 1.5 to 3 percent per year. And last summer, an Israeli study noted a steady decline in semen quality at one local bank over the past 15 years. A full 38 percent of all sperm-donation applicants are now rejected, up from one-third prior to 2004. That year, the bank lowered its minimum sperm count for acceptance to widen its net for donors. Under those more stringent standards, 88 percent of contemporary samples would have been rejected.

Sperm-bank rejects aren’t necessarily infertile. But if the downward trend continues, by 2030 the researchers predict that even above-average men will reach “subfertility” levels. Globally, an average of 15 percent of men are considered infertile, up from 10 percent 20 years ago.

Psychologists have shown that men who get an infertility diagnosis “feel isolated, they feel lost,” says William Petok, a psychologist who specializes in treating infertility. “One of the things we often see is a feeling that in some ways they are a failure sexually, because there’s a conflation between being fertile and being potent.” Indeed, two-thirds of infertile men say they worry about their “physical potency.” This conflation is especially visible in non-Western cultures, or ones where structural economic disadvantages mean men are unable to fill traditional roles like provider or protector—which is where Hanna Rosin, in her book The End of Men, says we’re headed. “I think a man considers his sperm far more an annunciation of his identity than a woman considers her egg,” Petok says. “It’s visible. Every time a guy has an ejaculation it’s evidence of his capacity to produce a child.”

The masculinity-fertility relationship is reified in the sperm bank industry. When I called up the Cryobank in Los Angeles, California’s largest sperm bank, director of client experience Scott Brown told me what an accepted donor looks like. He’s a “college graduate or student. Average age is probably 22 to 25. Altruistic in nature, successful in life. Healthy. Tall.” A real catch, but only for the ladies: he can’t have had sex with another man in the past five years. Like the FDA prohibition on blood from gay donors, it’s “a leftover prejudice from the days of HIV and not understanding how it’s transmitted,” conjectures Brown, even though all sperm is tested for disease.

How does one man end up making more, better sperm than another? Endocrinologists believe a man’s capacity for sperm production is capped by the time he leaves the womb—so, maybe he’s born with it? But with an increasing body of evidence implicating chemicals found in everything from carpeting to cosmetics, the more crucial question becomes: Maybe it’s Maybelline?


It’s a relief when I get my lab results back the next week: I’m fertile. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. I’m 25; I don’t regularly take drugs, linger in the sauna, ride a bike, or huff gasoline fumes. But my sperm count shows up on the low side of normal: with just 33 million sperm per milliliter, it’s right above the lab’s cutoff of 20 million per milliliter.

I am guilty of lifestyle choices that could lower my count: I spend my days at a desk; I’m prone to stress; I’ve recently experimented with tighter underwear styles. But it’s possible the explanation goes back much further, to the chemicals that infiltrated my mother’s womb.

It was the ’80s. My mom applied hairspray liberally. She didn’t seek out pesticide-free food or use glass instead of plastic. Yet there’s no way to prove that endocrine disruptors affected my or anyone else’s development, according to Niels Skakkebaek, a pediatric endocrinologist in Copenhagen. “You can’t do experimentation in humans.”

You can document the patterns, though. Skakkebaek was one of the first researchers to highlight the connection between endocrine disruptors and a variety of problems in male reproductive health, starting with testicular cancer. The disease became commonplace in the 20th century—1 in 100 Danish men were getting it—and as a young doctor in the 1970s, Skakkebaek set out to determine why. “You can’t see such an increase in one or two generations just due to genetic factors alone,” Skakkebaek says. “It had to be an environmental problem.”

Skakkebaek’s research showed that the signs of testicular cancer—which strikes after puberty—are present in the womb. In the testes of miscarried fetuses, he found cells similar to precursor testicular cancer cells. In his clinical practice, he observed a spate of birth defects like undescended testes. Meanwhile, semen-quality studies in the 1980s revealed surprisingly low sperm counts among working-class Danes.

Skakkebaek started to connect the dots. “I noticed that infertile men—they more often had undescended testes and other childhood abnormalities,” and were at a greater risk for testicular cancer, he says. Another observation: The precursor cancer cells were more often found in men with birth defects. He started reviewing semen-quality studies, which led to his landmark meta-analysis in 1992 that found sperm density was half as high as it was 50 years ago.

His work coincided with environmentalists’ growing concerns about endocrine disruptors. In 1991, World Wildlife Federation zoologist Theo Colborn held the first major symposium about the possible effects of environmental toxins on animals’ sexual organs and behavior. Researchers presented data showing how pesticides in Florida swamps appeared to raise the levels of estrogen in male alligators to unusually high levels, shrinking their penises to three-quarters the usual size. Lesbian seagulls had been outed in Southern California. Later, fish turned intersex in the Potomac.

The evidence was starting to pile up that “we all might be—without knowing it, unintentionally—exposed to chemicals that had hormonal effects,” Skakkebaek says, “which at that time was completely new for me.” And it posed a possible explanation for the problems he was finding among men.

Researchers began replicating these environmental conditions in the lab, exposing rodents to a variety of endocrine disruptors, including phthalates. Male rodents exhibited malformed prostates, undescended testes, and other problems. In 2010, male frogs introduced to the herbicide atrazine started producing eggs, copulating with other male frogs, and giving birth to healthy young. They were seven times as likely as the unexposed frogs to display homo-sexual behavior.

Why would all of these problems affect males more than females? The answer is sexual differentiation: Before hormones kick in, male and female fetuses are mostly indistinguishable. If left alone, gonads become ovaries—it takes androgens to command them to morph into testes. During gestation, “the reproductive organs and other organs are undergoing rapid development,” says Landrigan. “The price of that rapid development is extreme vulnerability.” In lab animals, the tiniest difference in hormones or hormone-mimicking chemicals—a teaspoon-sized drop in an Olympic-sized pool—can permanently undervirilize the male reproductive system and brain. The testes may not fully descend. The urethra might not reach the tip of the penis. The sperm count could be permanently lowered.

In 1993, Skakkebaek co-authored a paper advancing an environmental theory for the decline in semen quality he discovered the previous year. And over the course of the next decade, he built an argument about the relationships between testicular cancer, birth defects, and infertility.

Recent research has shown a strong association between these conditions in men and one type of endocrine disruptor in particular: phthalates, the anti-androgen chemical used to soften plastics and found in the food we eat, water we drink, and dust we inhale. Male rats whose pregnant mothers were fed a diet of phthalates were shown to be at risk for reproductive problems, “undescended testes and so on,” explains Shanna Swan, a biostatistician at the University of Rochester. Moreover, the distance between the anus and the genitals—normally twice as long in male as in female rats, and longer in human males as well—was shorter in the exposed rats, a sign of prenatal feminization.

“This measure of ano-genital distance”—AGD, as it’s called—“has been used in animal studies for a long time, but almost never in human studies,” Swan says. She decided to measure it in children, and in a groundbreaking paper in 2005, she made a significant reveal: Boys whose mothers had higher levels of phthalates had shorter AGDs than normal, not to mention impaired testicular descent. The paper is perhaps the strongest evidence we have that “phthalates may undervirilize humans as well as rodents.”

A shortened AGD has been linked with the birth defect hypospadias, when the urethra opens on the penis’s underside. Data cited by the Centers for Disease Control showed hypospadias doubled in frequency between the 1970s and the 1990s. Affecting about one out of every 100 men, it’s among the most common abnormalities males are born with. But unlike autism or cleft palates, it’s rarely discussed.


In the decades since Skakkebaek started asking questions about declining fertility in Denmark, research has coalesced around the association between fetal exposure to endocrine disruptors and feminized male genitals. Now a few researchers are starting to ask: Do these toxins also affect men’s brains?

In 2009, Swan studied 145 preschoolers whose mothers had relatively high levels of phthalates in their urine. Parents were asked to fill out surveys about how their children played. Did the boys gravitate toward gender-typical toys like trucks and guns? Were they “rough and tumble”?

“Now, I have to stress that these studies are small. They were the first studies,” Swan says. “And you know we can’t obviously randomize people to be exposed to phthalates or not, so we have a lot of limitations.” But initial results showed that boys exposed to higher levels of phthalates were more likely to exhibit feminized behavior—a correlation, not conclusively a cause.

Still, I can’t help but ask if the study implies something bigger. “I actually don’t know the answer to that question,” Swan responds. “Behind your question is the question I get a lot: ‘What does it have to do with gender identity?’ ”

It’s probably unanswerable. And it feels offensively reductive—a vestige of the tired nature-versus-nurture debate that seeks to find a cause for complicated differences in gender and sexuality. Scientists take seriously the hypothesis that endocrine disruption affects behavior, but when I asked them about gender, one by one the experts steered the conversation toward other studies linking the toxins with ADHD or autism—behaviors that are more diagnosable and less controversial.

If endocrine disruptors are indeed feminizing males, it’s a health problem in humans only insofar as it affects fertility and the functioning of sex organs. Feminine and gay men obviously still reproduce. Will the feminized boys in Swan’s study end up infertile? Will they end up with testicular cancer? Or will they just end up gay? It’s certainly possible that this type of research will pathologize male differences, lumping in gender variation with real health concerns. But it could also push the question of gender identity to the foreground, forcing a broader dialogue about the need for more accommodating notions of maleness (at a time when male reproductive organs seem to be changing, nonetheless).

Swan is gearing up for another study with a bigger sample size of about 800 children. “If we see this again in the second study, then I think it will be really convincing,” she says. “I think the fact that we took animal data, we formed a hypothesis, went to test it in a human population, and found what we had predicted also strengthens our original findings. But it’s not conclusive.” And perhaps that’s a good thing. Plenty of experts, whether they’re scientists or psychologists or queer theorists, deny linkages between sex, gender, and the role of hormones. Gender isn’t something someone has; it’s something someone does. There are all sorts of people—those who are transgender, say, or intersex—who don’t map onto one set of norms.

How—and why—we “do maleness” is incredibly complicated, and seems to be getting more so. Phthalates are among the most common chemicals on earth; billions of tons continue to be produced annually. What does manhood look like in a future where men are less likely to be able to reproduce naturally and far more likely to be born with imperfect sex organs? The questions will linger in our minds, just as long as the chemicals permeate our bodies.

Zak Stone is a Los Angeles-based writer and editor, a staff writer for Fast Company’s Co. Exist website, and co-founder of Tomorrow Magazine, a crowdfunded publication about politics, culture, and lifestyle, from which this article was reprinted.