Are The Chemicals Of Modern Society Emasculating Men?

Has anyone besides proprietors of Le Chateau noticed the gradual feminization and masculinization respectively of the men and women of the SWPL class? Something is causing the sexual polarity to reverse in Western countries among the striver set. Is it cultural? Genetic? Biological? I’ve previously offered some tantalizing hypotheses, but none strike me as potentially paradigm-busting and significant as the theory that chemicals in our consumerist products are to blame for the gender bending of tomorrow’s leaders.

Findings from a new study suggest it may be your mother’s dietary exposure to bisphenol A (BPA).

Galea and Barha have all my attention now. Ever since my pregancy, I have been tracking studies on BPA’s subtle yet shocking effects. One of the most common chemicals in the world, bisphenol A is found in the stuff we use every day of our lives. Soup and soda cans. Water pipes. Computers. Cell phones. Thermal paper receipts. Paper money. Even some baby bottles—at least in the U.S., because they are not banned here.

Much of the trouble with BPA lies in its ability to fool estrogen receptors into thinking it’s estrogen. Imagine a man doesn’t know that the woman he’s marrying is really an alien in drag, and you have a sense of the danger here. BPA disrupts any process that estrogen normally mediates, affecting brain, body, and behavior. It also tinkers with the way genes express themselves, turning up those that would otherwise be turned off or down. BPA exposure has been linked to breast cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, attention-deficit disorder, increased anxiety, a decreased IQ in children and a low sperm count in men.

Curious? Wait til you hear the ramifications that BPA has for men.

There is evidence that BPA emasculates males and makes them sexually undesirable. Galea and Barha’s opening lines in PSAS are tongue in cheek—they are describing a new study at the University of Missouri on the effects of BPA on deer mice—but the application to humans is implicit. Adult mice whose mothers were fed a dosage of BPA equivalent to what the USDA deems safe for pregnant women, were, well, different from other males.

“One of the prominent effects of early BPA exposure is that it eliminates a number of sex differences in brain and behavior,” the researchers wrote. It turned out that BPA-exposed males have impaired spatial ability (can’t find their way out of a maze or to their nest, considered unattractive to females). They also suffer from decreased exploratory ability (incurious and easily lost), and overall reduced attractiveness to the opposite sex. They may even smell different from their peers—in rodents, a sign of unhealthiness. Females are disgusted.

Holy mojitos. The effluvium of hypercapitalism is neutering the Western man. And judging by the man-jawed dyke-ish freaks of femalehood now coursing through the veins of our civil institutions, it’s not a stretch to think that BPA is concurrently adding chest hair to the Western woman. We may now freely speculate what this means for the future of our downward spiraling nation.

On a population level, how might BPA affect us? Might boys in the U.S. grow up to have poorer spatial skills—and, because it’s linked, weaker mathematical ability? Might they have little interest in exploring the world, preferring to hang out at home? Might our national temperament become more placid? Because BPA is lined with obesity and heart disease, will we become fatter and more sedate? And what about our sex lives?

Take a look at human history through the lens of hormones, as Harvard University’s Daniel Lord Smail did in his fascinating book, On Deep History and the Brain. Smail introduces a new view in which physiology and culture evolve symbiotically in a process driven by brain chemistry. Caffeine stimulated the body and mind, driving the industrial revolution and the modern corporation. Tobacco help us to focus and be calm. These substances changed the character of society. Now we have environmental toxins such as BPA (and other hormone disruptors such as phthlates and PCBs) that may also change our culture in subtle but very real ways.

The stereotypes of the video gaming, pasty, unmuscled nerd, the spindle-armed, mincing, passive-aggressive hipster, and the flabby, manboobed feminist suck-up mangina might have their origins in an omnipresent chemical found in, among everything else, motherboards, iPhone cases and buttplugs. Oh, the irony. And where is the chemical emasculation of men leading us? Pathological altruism, that’s where. Hello, self-flagellation!

The good news is that the effects of BPA can be mitigated by a diet heavy in folic acid and B12. Think dark greens, eggs, beans and organ meats. And try cutting back on the masturbation. Full balls are hungry for release and will impel you to strongly seek out vagina. Empty, shriveled balls are the telltale sign of a “man” who proudly wears a “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt and pulls his micropud to a tepid, dribbling anti-climax on an hourly basis as tears stream down his face. Don’t be that guy.