Are Men an Endangered Species?
In November, 2001, the prestigious British Journal of Medicine published an editorial written by Siegfried Meryn, M.D. titled “The future of men and their health: Are men in danger of extinction?” The average person might laugh at the suggestion that men are in decline. Aren’t men at the top in the world of politics and business? Don’t men run the world? Maybe this was true in the past, but not now. Not only are men no longer masters of the universe, but an increasing number of serious scientists believe that we may be facing the most significant extinction in last 3 million years-the end of men.
Dr. Meryn is not some “pop-psychologist.” He is a medical doctor with a world-wide reputation in the field of men’s health. He is professor of medicine at the University of Vienna, chairman and president of the World Congress on Men’s Health, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Men’s Health and Gender. “Although there is still a long way to go in most societies around the world, it is clear that women can perform (and on most occasions outperform) pretty much all the tasks traditionally reserved for men,” says Dr. Meryn in his editorial.”
But we’re not just talking about men’s roles being in danger, but we may be in danger on a much more fundamental level. Our balls may, literally, be on the line. Devra Davis is one of the top health researchers in the world. Her specialty has been the relationship between health and the environment. She is now Visiting Professor of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School and Senior Advisor to the World Health Organization. In her recent book, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution she devotes an entire chapter to the serious decline in male reproductive viability that seems to be caused by our destruction of the environment.
In the chapter “Save the Males” she notes that men are having increasing difficulty fathering children and males are actually in decline. “Now it looks like something is wrong with baby boys,” she cautions. “Fewer boys are being born today than three decades ago, and more of them have undescended testes and effects in their penis. More young men are getting testicular cancer than as recently as the early 1990s, and they are developing it at younger ages. Some trendy magazines have even suggested that male health is an oxymoron.”
Dr. Bryan Sykes is one of the world’s preeminent geneticists. He is professor of genetics at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University and has been doing research on the future of the Y chromosome. What he has found is not heartening for males. In his book, Adam’s Curse: A Future Without Men. He tells us that the Y-chromosome, that unique piece of genetic material is makes us male, is suffering from increasing decay which is affecting fertility. “Male infertility is on the increase,” Sykes tells us. “Under the microscope a high proportion of human sperm from what we would consider a normal human male are already visibly deformed. Sperm counts are falling dramatically, though there are other contributory causes as well as Y-chromosome decay. The human Y-chromosome has been decaying for a very long time and will continue to do so; and we have to expect a progressive decline in male fertility as these injuries accumulate. One by one Y-chromosomes will disappear until eventually only one remains. When that chromosome finally succumbs, men will become extinct?”
Of course, Sykes doesn’t think men will become extinct anytime soon. In fact he estimates that guys have another 125,000 years. “Not exactly the day after tomorrow,” Sykes says, “but equally, not an unimaginably long time ahead. Very roughly, in fact, as long into the future as our species has been going so far from its beginnings in Africa.” So we might say we are at mid-life. But there is a relentless anxiety that begins to occur when we reach the apex of a cycle and begin down the other side. Whether it is the peak of oil production, “middle-age,” or the remaining time males have on the planet, when we recognize that we have more behind us than ahead of us a kind of corrosive depression takes over in the psyche.