In college, I roomed for a year with Jason, a math major who grew up on a farm in southern Georgia in a “town” that was entirely theoretical, a geographical fiction invented for the orderly delivery of mail. Jason was an eccentric, to put it mildly. He was a gun enthusiast, an amateur pickup artist, a fairly talented pianist, and a devotee of Ted Kaczynski, Ron Paul, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and Ayn Rand. He held the apparently contradictory beliefs that, on the one hand, an extreme form of free-market capitalism (taxation is slavery, etc.) was the only moral system of politico-economic organization known to man and, on the other hand, that modern technological society was a collective suicide pact in which humanity was slowly but surely abolishing the conditions of its own reproduction. I say “apparent” because Jason did not regard these beliefs as contradictory at all. Capitalism was moral because it meant absolute freedom. But since most people were stupid, vain, lazy, or selfish, freedom for the herd meant the freedom to self-destruct through bad decisions and poor impulse control. Only a select few, the aristocrats of the soul, could be expected to flourish in such conditions.
One thing that the aristocrats of the soul definitely did not do was drink beer out of a can. On this point, Jason was adamant. He explained to me that the resin used to line the inside of beer cans, which prevented the aluminum from spoiling the taste of the beer, contained bisphenol A, an endocrine-disrupting chemical that could lower your sperm count and increase your risk for various cancers. If I wanted to have children, he said, I should drink exclusively out of glass. Obviously, I thought he was nuts. How would the government allow brewers to package their beer in poison? Wouldn’t the media have reported on this? I started joking with him about chemtrails, UFOs, and communist plots to fluoridate the water. I asked him if there was DDT in Tostitos. I offered to make him a tinfoil hat. I showed him that scene from The Jerk. Later, when I lived in New York, people would sometimes ask me if the South was really as backward and strange as they’d been led to believe. “It’s mostly just like the rest of the country,” I’d say. “But get this. I once roomed with a guy who wouldn’t drink out of cans.” That was usually a hit.
As it turns out, Jason was right. BPA, structurally similar to diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen prescribed to pregnant women until 1971, when it was discovered to increase the risk of clear cell adenocarcinoma in the daughters of women who took it, was present in most canned foods and beverages until a few years ago and is still present in most receipt paper. A 2010 study of factory workers in China suggested that men with detectable levels of BPA in their urine suffer from higher rates of sexual dysfunction, including low sex drive and erectile dysfunction, than the general population and are four times more likely to have low sperm counts. Women with high levels of BPA have trouble getting pregnant and run a greater risk of miscarriage when they do, are at greater risk of polycystic ovarian syndrome and having poor quality eggs, and, if exposed to the chemical while pregnant, are more likely to give birth to daughters with shorter “anogenital distance,” which is correlated with reproductive problems later in life. Male monkeys exposed to BPA in the womb have been found to exhibit “more female behavior, such as clinging to their mothers and social exploration, after birth.” What’s worse is that BPA, as the Mount Sinai epidemiologist Shanna Swan details in her new book, Count Down, is just one of the many chemicals currently wreaking havoc on human fertility.
The statistics cited by Swan are sobering. In 2017, she and a team of other researchers briefly made headlines when they published a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies involving more than 42,000 Western men, which showed that total sperm counts had dropped nearly 60% between 1973 and 2011 — a trend that, if it continues, could put most men at risk of infertility by the mid-21st century. Her new book builds on the same material, but, as she makes clear, the problem is much bigger than sperm. In Europe and the United States, testosterone levels have been dropping by about 1% per year since 1982, and rates of erectile dysfunction among men under 40 have skyrocketed. (She doesn’t mention it, but grip strength is falling, too.) Similar trends are affecting women. Between 1990 and 2011, women’s risk of miscarriage increased by 1% per year, and scattered but suggestive evidence, including from fertility clinics, suggests rising rates of diminished ovarian reserve (or DOR, in which women have fewer and lower-quality eggs than expected for their age) and endometriosis, a painful uterine condition that can also reduce fertility. And in developed parts of the world, including the U.S., the average age at which girls enter puberty has been creeping downward, raising the risk for various cancers.
Strange things are happening in the animal kingdom, too. There are “more reports of male turtles humping other male turtles.” According to Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley, atrazine, a popular herbicide used in corn and soybean agriculture, has a “feminizing effect” on wild male leopard frogs, “leading to gonad abnormalities such as the presence of eggs in their testicles and testosterone levels that are lower than in normal female frogs.” Intersex fish are everywhere. When freshwater guppies were exposed to 17β-trenbolone, an androgenic steroid used to beef up cattle, males became more aggressive toward other males, less likely to engage in consensual courtship rituals, and more inclined toward “sneak” mating attempts, which “involve the male sneaking up from behind … and thrusting his gonopodium towards the female’s genital pore in an attempt to mate coercively.” Females “spent less time associating with males” and became “less choosy” in picking a mate. Fathead minnows exposed to antidepressant and anticonvulsant pharmaceuticals in the water supply “have exhibited neurological disorders that resemble autism.”
As the list of chemicals in the above paragraphs suggests, Swan believes that the major culprit behind rising sexual abnormalities in humans and animals is the proliferation of toxins that interfere with our endocrine system, which is responsible for, among other things, “sexing” infants in the womb, inducing puberty, and regulating the balance of hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone, that are critical for our sexual and reproductive health. The number of endocrine-disrupting chemicals is dizzying, as is the list of ways in which we are exposed to them every day. For instance, phthalates are a class of EDC that are often “antiandrogenic,” meaning that they interfere with the normal functioning of masculinizing hormones such as testosterone. Due to this testosterone-blocking effect, male infants exposed to phthalates in the womb are more likely to exhibit female-typical behavior after birth, have smaller-than-average penises, and suffer from poor fertility or infertility as adults. Yet phthalates can be found in plastic products and vinyl, floor and wall coverings, medical tubing and medical devices, children’s toys, and personal care products, such as hair spray, nail polish, and perfume. Other EDCs include the pesticides and herbicides used on produce, the hormones and antibiotics given to food animals, estrogenic compounds in soy, and chemical flame retardants added to foam, upholstered furniture, mattresses, carpets, electronics, and children’s pajamas.
In fact, it’s hard not to become a bit paranoid when reading Swan’s book. Even allowing that some of the science she relates is speculative and inferential and that some of her findings are more established than others, the overwhelming sense one gets from Count Down is that one is being slowly poisoned every single day. It’s a classic horror story in that it highlights what is sinister and threatening in the seemingly mundane. Our food, toiletries, furniture, and other innocuous consumer goods are, apparently, arrayed in a vast conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Swan does, to her credit, attempt to allay despair by including a list of tips on how to avoid the worst environmental pollutants. Don’t smoke. Get exercise (I’d recommend barbell training, but whatever floats your boat). Buy organic produce and hormone- and antibiotic-free meat. Never heat food in plastic. Dust your home regularly. Check the labels on any personal care products. Throw away the vinyl shower curtain and rip up the wall-to-wall carpeting. Don’t touch your receipts. (Swan also recommends a Mediterranean diet, but my own forays into quasi-conspiratorial diet advice lead me to believe that red meat is fine as long as you opt for grass-fed and organic.)
What’s clear, however, is that the scale of the problem requires some sort of collective solution. The answer cannot be for us to turn into a nation of neurotics, forever worrying that purchasing the wrong shampoo from CVS is going to prevent us from having children, and devil take the fool who doesn’t realize that the diethylhexyl phthalate in his air freshener is sabotaging his swimmers. Swan recommends moving toward a precautionary-principle style of chemical regulation similar to the European Union’s — under which manufacturers must prove that a chemical is safe before bringing it to market rather than removing it from market after it has been proven to be harmful — and revamping how the Food and Drug Administration evaluates the toxicity of chemicals, which typically focuses on whether they cause cancer while ignoring less obvious harms such as hormonal disruption. Those sound to be good ideas to me, but I’m a culture editor with a degree in history, and I presume that such changes could have far-reaching economic consequences beyond my understanding. I’ll humbly punt on the question of what, exactly, should be done.
What I will say is that this is exactly the sort of issue that should be ripe for Left-Right cooperation. The politics of fertility are tricky, largely because the causes of the low fertility are in part the result of macro-level social, cultural, and economic changes — the sexual revolution, later marriage, rising income and educational attainment among women, secularization, etc. — that tend to divide people along partisan lines. Fertility as such is mostly a concern of the Right. The Left, meanwhile, tends to regard the subject as creepy and distasteful, smacking of “Great Replacement” racial fantasies and Handmaid’s Tale dystopias in which women are reduced to breeding stock, not to mention Alex Jones’s assertions that some amorphous “they” — globalists? Jews? — are “turning the frogs gay.” Well, the frogs aren’t turning gay, exactly, but the same chemicals that are entering our bodies every day are turning some frogs intersex. After a year in which we’ve shut down much of ordinary human life in order to stop the spread of COVID-19, taking some precautionary steps to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to us shouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility.
