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Comment by compiskey | Hacker News Reader

But are they? https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/05/fears-over-fa...

> In addition, they argued that the design of the 2017 study relied on racist and colonial hierarchies and assumptions

This response sounds like real science for sure.

> “By proposing an alternative approach to sperm count data, we aim to contribute to the burgeoning discussion among reproductive health scientists and other researchers and clinicians about men’s health,” said Boulicault, lead author of the paper and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy and Linguistics at MIT

A Philosophy & Linguistics PhD - just who you should trust to analyze medical results!

Personally, I have a hard time putting much stock in the opinion of those who use exclamation points.

What a ridiculous statement.

I read both links. This one sounds like a bunch of woke people unhappy that mens health is getting attention. The other study sounds legitimate.

I thought you were being hyperbolic but the linked article and study does seem to miss the forest for the trees.

Surely it's possible to acknowledge the flaws of a measure without devolving into ideological and cultural warfare?

> In addition, they argued that the design of the 2017 study relied on racist and colonial hierarchies and assumptions because it categorized data as “Western” sperm counts or “Other” sperm counts.

> Further, the claims of decline were based on a “species optimum” of Anglophone developed nations of the 1970s, which the researchers argued was scientifically unsound. The GenderSci Lab team warned that this kind of Eurocentric focus has been used by alt-right, white supremacist, and men’s rights activists to argue that the health and fertility of men in Western nations is being threatened, particularly by feminist and anti-racist movements.

> Surely it's possible to acknowledge the flaws of a measure without devolving into ideological and cultural warfare?

When a professor of linguistics decides it is appropriate to write a paper criticizing a study about falling sperm counts, I don’t think that is a safe bet.

Yikes. What the heck is going on in academia.

Related, men are mass opting out of academia. It's so bad now that they have to have affirmative action for men.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-...

It’s going to be a real adjustment for a lot of these people to grasp that young American men are in really difficult situations socially, academically, and that it’s a key factor to underemployment, violence, etc… the concept of men’s health or men suffering feels like an attack to these people instead of a separate legitimate issue to other social topics they find important

Curious if you have sources for this. I agree wholeheartedly that there are some difficult issues affecting men, socially and academically, but always struggle to back that opinion up with any meaningful facts/figures.

As one of my friends said, "Positions of power are still predominantly held by men, but the average man is lagging behind the average woman". Not sure if this is necessarily true, but sometimes it feels true. It's also unfortunately a rather un-PC opinion to share.

Men have no reproductive rights at all. Women can rape underage boys and these boys are then forced to pay child support to their rapists including back pay for the missed years.

Men don't have a single federally funded organization positively helping them compared to 1000s for women.

Men/boys don't have bodily autonomy in US. They are forced to fight in wars and are genitally mutilated at birth against their will.

DV laws are anti male.

Custody laws are anti fathers.

Rape laws are gendered.

All the typical major indicators are favorable to women instead of men. Ex: age expectancy, education, drug addicts, suicides, homeless, police shootings, prison inmates...

The thing is, all of these issues stem from patriarchal systems.

(assumption) men will be employed (therefore) child support is their responsibility.

(assumption) men are strong independent (therefore) there is no need for assistance.

(assumption) men are made for war (therefore) men are to fight war.

(assumption) men are stronger, more aggressive [see war], etc (therefore) women [being weaker] must be the victims.

(assumption) fathers are severe and disciplinary (therefore) mothers are nurturing and better suited to child rearing.

(assumption) sexual intercourse is an act desired by and initiated by men who are defined by their ability to penetrate (therefore) women can only be penetrated [see also aggressiveness] and men who are penetrated are lowered in status to be nearer the category of woman.

The anti-male circumcision movement is overwhelmingly male, despite supposed opposition to male circumcision by feminists.

If we leave that issue up to Feminism, feminists, and their long tradition of embracing critical theory, we will have to endure this evil for a whole lot longer.

It will take a large, ultimately male movement to displace it. I simply do not buy that the traditional notion of "patriarchy" is even the most important component of why it continues to exist today.

Given how it massively impacts a mans ability to feel pleasure during sex, it seems like "patriarchy" would have removed it long ago.

What if some of the parts of the bible, or other religious texts, such as this one, weren't designed to be "patriarchal" but were instead created by people who hate pleasure, hate nature, and hate the sensual world? I claim this group of pleasure haters is shockingly gender neutral

Patriarchy hurts men too is a weak and out rightly laughable argument. Because that's not how oppression works, at all.

Let me give you some examples. White masters thought they were stronger than black slaves yet slaves had to do all the dull & dangerous work. Same with the colonial masters they thought their underlings were weak and pathetic so they doubled down on oppression and plundered even more wealth through additional taxation and other means.

All the laws were out rightly favoring the oppressors in every case except magically when it comes to patriarchy. Imagine if Nazi Germany worked like patriarchy. Aryans were the all supreme, the strongest and the most independent race so they would've had almost all laws in favor of Jews right? Nope instead they gassed millions of Jews.

Educational attainment is going backwards for boys, while girls are doing great and have far surpassed them. I think they passed them some time back in the very early '00s, IIRC, but it's been a while since I looked at that stuff—this is all mainstream, they've been talking about it in education-academia for quite a while and it's uncontroversial, it's openly discussed among teachers et c., though proposed solutions aside from "try to hire more male teachers" are thin on the ground—bizarrely, "restore all that recess you cut over the last decades, in the name of more butts-in-seats time" doesn't seem to have much traction, and, call me crazy, but if I were in charge, that's the first thing I'd try.

Boys/men in general are exposed to a far higher likelihood of worst-case outcomes in a variety of ways, and there seems to be little societal attention to improving that. If women had the incarceration rates, the "successful" suicide rates, or the lagging lifespan that men have, it'd be all we'd hear about. Instead we figure that's just how men are, so, whatever.

I've got two girls and a boy and I'm a lot more worried about the boy's future than the girls', for sure. Seems a much finer line he'll need to walk to avoid a downward spiral, with fewer off-ramps available from such a spiral. Like, I reckon he's 75% of our risk of one of the three having a very-bad outcome, without even seeing any especially bad problems with him yet.

There is an important distinction here:

Girls on average get higher grades. The modern education system is by and large assembly line busywork, or child daycare. From my personal experience the grade gap should be attributed to the average female being more willing to play the systems game, while the average male calls bullshit

Nearly 6 women enroll in American colleges and universities for every 4 men.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/young-men-...

Stupid ask: Why was "3 for every 2" not used?

Positions of weakness are also predominantly held by men: the prison and the homeless populations are overwhelmingly male.

Within my extended family and larger social orbit, I've watched maybe 20 kids grow up. The girls are uniformly successful and seem to have significant support from family, school, and society. The boys have been struggling and have experienced limited support to a degree that I find shocking. Perhaps half will never achieve regular employment, and sadly several seem destined for addiction and early deaths.

This is just anecdote, but for me, I'm inclined to believe 20 data points I can personally observe.

I'm not sure exactly how new this is. Even decades ago, my experience of growing up male is that to a fair degree it's like being thrown off the dock. "Hope you learn to swim before you drown!" The idea that boys are privileged over girls seems like a cruel joke.

Society made religion optional through scientific inquiry. It can make America optional too as no theory of science suggests it’s existence is immutable law.

It’s going to be a real adjustment for you to accept a lot of people are without sufficient this or that in our society and you’re not really going to bat for them.

You have freedom to choose without coercion. Nothing makes your sensibilities sacrosanct to anyone else.

Nice job proving the parent's point.

As a young American man myself, I am constantly being told that my problems either don't matter or aren't real. I don't need anybody to go to bat for me, but how about just acknowledging that young American men do indeed face real problems instead of saying "we don't need Americans, actually."

"The extraordinary biological claims of the meta-analysis of sperm count trends and the public attention it continues to garner raised questions for the GenderSci Lab, which specializes in analyzing bias and hype in the sciences of sex, gender, and reproduction and in the intersectional study of race, gender, and science,” said Richardson, director of the GenderSci Lab, and a professor of the history of science and of studies of women, gender, and sexuality."

"In addition, they argued that the design of the 2017 study relied on racist and colonial hierarchies"

I get that everyone has their biases, but this sounds like it's up there with the feminist approaches to rocket science that claim rockets are shaped the way they are for Freudian reasons. The only specific claim your linked article is making against the actual studies/data is that there is not nearly as much data for Asian, African, and South American countries as there is for Europe and North America. Which is a great point, we need more data, but it doesn't really undermine or debunk any of the other claims being made.

That article is not saying sperm counts are not dropping, but arguing that that is not linked with dropping fertility (and that the original study is racist for only including western countries or something).

To be fair I think it is kinda racist to categorize sperm as either "Western" sperm vs "other" sperm. They couldn't do the bare fucking minimum and at least separate by continent or wealth? Health?

It is really weird the original study decided to categorize it this way. Especially because there are potentially drastic environmental differences between say the US and Australia. Same goes for the "Other" category. How are China and Brazil similar?

Maybe it's not the bare minimum? Maybe they had limited funding, largely access only to "Western sperm" (which actually is a reasonable category I would argue because we share a lifestyle to a greater or lesser degree), maybe they had sparse data that covered simply "not the West".

If they had access largely only to "western" sperm then they could separate it out by country, or income, or something more sane. It's not like the rest of the world shares a lifestyle!

If you have sparse data, then maybe you shouldn't be making grand comparisons or trying to make claims about the entire world?

Not a biologist, but that kinda makes sense: you only need one single healthy sperm to reach the egg in order to fertilize it, so even men with pretty bad sperm counts are probably still able to have children. So the average sperm quality may drop for some time without a corresponding drop in fertility. But then the drop in fertility will be all the worse...

>Study aims to quell fears over falling human sperm count

At least they are open about the fact that they have determined the conclusion beforehand.

>This framework is designed to take into account a wide range of locations, individual conditions, and other data that can contribute to changing trends in sperm counts.

So, just count everyone and diminish the geographical factor in a problem. OK, let's ignore the problem until everyone is affected. Seems pretty un-legit.

A study not written by a scientist to oppose scientists. Allowing literature/philosophy people to publish on everything is as bad as allowing antivaxxers everywhere.

It's not saying the study is flat-out wrong. It's critiquing specific aspects of its reasoning and categorization. Not at all comparable to antivaxxers.

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