Sperm Count Zero

A GQ article actual men may want to read here. Excerpt:

'Men are doomed. Everybody knows this. We're obviously all doomed, the women too, everybody in general, just a waiting game until one or another of the stupid things our stupid species is up to finally gets us. But as it turns out, no surprise: men first. Second instance of no surprise: We're going to take the women down with us.

There has always been evidence that men, throughout life, are at higher risk of early death—from the beginning, a higher male incidence of Death by Mastodon Stomping, a higher incidence of Spiked Club to the Brainpan, a statistically significant disparity between how many men and how many women die of Accidentally Shooting Themselves in the Face or Getting Really Fat and Having a Heart Attack.

The male of the species dies younger than the female—about five years on average. Divide a population into groups by birth year, and by the time each cohort reaches 85, there are two women left for every man alive. In fact, the male wins every age class: Baby boys die more often than baby girls; little boys die more often than little girls; teenage boys; young men; middle-aged men. Death champions across the board.

Now it seems that early death isn't enough for us—we're on track instead to void the species entirely. Last summer a group of researchers from Hebrew University and Mount Sinai medical school published a study showing that sperm counts in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have fallen by more than 50 percent over the past four decades. (They judged data from the rest of the world to be insufficient to draw conclusions from, but there are studies suggesting that the trend could be worldwide.) That is to say: We are producing half the sperm our grandfathers did. We are half as fertile.

The Hebrew University/Mount Sinai paper was a meta-analysis by a team of epidemiologists, clinicians, and researchers that culled data from 185 studies, which examined semen from almost 43,000 men. It showed that the human race is apparently on a trend line toward becoming unable to reproduce itself. Sperm counts went from 99 million sperm per milliliter of semen in 1973 to 47 million per milliliter in 2011, and the decline has been accelerating. Would 40 more years—or fewer—bring us all the way to zero?

I called Shanna H. Swan, a reproductive epidemiologist at Mount Sinai and one of the lead authors of the study, to ask if there was any good news hiding behind those brutal numbers. Were we really at risk of extinction? She failed to comfort me. “The What Does It Mean question means extrapolating beyond your data,” Swan said, “which is always a tricky thing. But you can ask, ‘What does it take? When is a species in danger? When is a species threatened?’ And we are definitely on that path.” That path, in its darkest reaches, leads to no more naturally conceived babies and potentially to no babies at all—and the final generation of Homo sapiens will roam the earth knowing they will be the last of their kind.
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So perhaps that's the solution: As long as we hover somewhere above Sperm Count Zero, and with an assist from modern medicine, we have a shot. Men will continue to be essential to the survival of the species. The problem with innovation, though, is that it never stops. A new technology known as IVG—in vitro gametogenesis—is showing early promise at turning embryonic stem cells into sperm. In 2016, Japanese scientists created baby mice by fertilizing normal mouse eggs with sperm created via IVG. The stem cells in question were taken from female mice. There was no need for any males.'

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Comments

Personally I think the fewer children men father, the better. They get used against us by women and the state. What is more disturbing for us is the attendant health problems that come with this poisoning-by-plastics.

As for assisted reproduction - fat chance there. How many babies do you need to churn out to keep up the population? A lot. Remember "Attack of the Clones"? The Empire had to churn out clones at a high rate for who knows how long to get enough to create an army of any size.

OK wait. I am now referring to science fiction as if it's actually the real world. OK. Gotts step back here. :)

You get the idea. Besides, WHO wants to create kids anyway when all you do is pay for them? Most people become parents less because they REALLY want to but because they really like to fuck and if they get preggers well then so be it, fine, we'll have a kid. Now take that let's-fuck factor away. I am about as inclined to go to the local IVF center to create a kid versus barebacking some chick and figuring well fuck it I'll just breed her and say what the fuck as I am to cut off my own johnson.

The article closes with the idea that female-female cross-fertilization is possible (BTW so is male-male) and that if that is pursued indeed we will see a "No Men Beyond This Point" kind of future. But again... how many new humans will that approach produce? Let's just say theoretically that the future is a world where men cannot have kids. That future will not last long since we'll all die out, leaving nothing but women who fuse their eggs together to have kids who will always be female. Yeah they'll line up to do it. Yep.

Balls.

EVEN IF every single woman in this future is a lesbian and except for our utility as garbage collectors has no other use for men, how many will happily and willingly get their eggs fused to make a liability in the form of a kid -- esp. since it will now be on THEM to pay for said kid vs. the kid's father?

I am guessing very few, relative to the number of women who today want to have kids. And that number is a lot less than what it used to be already.

To wipe out a species you need not kill every individual in it. You need only kill most of them. Nature takes care of the rest. Look at the hundreds of species that are dying out DAILY because their numbers have been so lowered that Nature does the rest of the job herself. In the case of humanity among breeds/ethnic groups of humans, a major example is the American Indian as an ethnic group. Diseases from Europe killed off about 90% of them. Still that left 10 million of them. Now they got forcibly relocated or killed in battles or slaughters courtesy of the US, France, Mexico, et al., which as a total process was probably responsible for about another 5 million of them killed off. Now that left about 5 million, say, by 1900. Now look at the pop'n of American Indians. Most have inter-mixed ethnically with all manner of other folks so that the number of so-called full-blooded Indians is likely well under 1,000,000. My SWAG puts it at about 100,000.

I just KNOW *someone* is going to take my discussion of the American Indian as RACIST and God knows what else. To this do I say fuck off, lighten the fuck up, deal with it, stop being a pussy. Shove off and cram it. I don't care if you like my writing style or my example. Blow me.

So even among breeds of humans you need not actually kill off ALL of a class of person. Hitler knew this too. He knew if he could just kill *enough* Jews or whomever he was after killing that day, the rest would just attrit away. And where DID old Adolf get his ideas about just *how* to conduct a genocide? You guessed it, he took it right from US history! He used what happened to the American Indians as a template for what to do with Jews and anyone else he didn't like. It was a remarkably 'effective" approach. Jesus H. Christ. What a fucking planet we live on. Someone wake me up from this fucking nightmare.

So my point here is that the author seems to be trying to end on a hopeful note. I rather think that isn't very justified -- assuming it's as ALL BAD as the article says it is.

Personally, I don't think it is. Besides humans are very adaptable. One way you increase the number of motile and viable sperm in a female is you breed her in serial. For you folks of either, both, or some other sex not in the loop on these things, serial breeding at a good old fashioned "breeding party" is when multiple men take turns banging and nutting inside the same woman. This is also known as "running a train" on a female. One man after another donates his semen into her uterus by blowing it directly into it. Sloppy 10ths. It is also known colloquially as a "buttered bun party". Any woman seeking to actually have a child without going to pay for IVF may do so simply by finding some number of men to get together with over the course of a week on a daily basis and let them pass her around like a cheap whore and do her in serial until she pees on a stick and it turns whatever color it has to to indicate she is knocked up but good.

As for who de daddy? I am guessing by the time women seeking to have a child are openly arranging breeding parties for themselves (and possibly others - there may be a franchise opportunity like selling candles or Avon or something like that here for some enterprising hausfrau), they will no longer give a fuck who de daddy is and probably won't care about collecting child support for after all if they want a baby so bad they'll let 5 or 6 guys breed them daily for a week they probably are ready to forego the payday.

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