For years, and by years I mean literal generations, I think society operated according to the general principle that getting pregnant was easy, and that’s why high school sex-ed was so fear-driven (that and other reasons), and that if a couple couldn’t get pregnant, it was either some type of divine sign from God or a female issue. A few funny things happened on the way to the 2023 forum, however: men started working more sedentary jobs, people married older, people are more crap and were generally unhealthy, and we started undoing some of the burdensome yokes of being female in general. As a result, now there are some, albeit less, discussions of male infertility, to the point that we have a term for it: Spermageddon.
You can find hundreds of articles about this online, and much hand-wringing. I myself am part of this quilt. I came home one day in 2021, a little bit buzzed from lunch with a friend, and decided to do some laundry. My wife and I had been married for maybe three-four months at the time, and were “trying,” which is a fancy middle-class white person way of saying “having sex on schedule,” and it wasn’t “working,” which is a fancy middle-class white way of saying “not the right symbols on the stick.” As I’m dumping stuff into the washing machine, my wife calls me and tells me that apparently based on some testing we did, my stuff is low and slow. That’s good for brisket (yum), but bad for sperm. That was almost three years ago this winter. Still no baby or anything. Still no moment of “I’m pregnant.” Just a bumpy ride through male infertility for about 34 months.
In the grand scheme of things, these are first-world problems. I feel much sorrier for kids in cancer wards, or people living in poverty, or thousands of others than I feel sorry for myself. It sucks to essentially not be able to provide a woman with one major defining characteristic of women. You wear that burden every single day, and it’s very hard and it can challenge you emotionally and, TMI, it can challenge your desire to even feel sexual in some moments.
But this is a “me” problem — it’s not a “you” problem. So if you sired three bouncing baby Bradleys, how much should you care about “spermageddon” and generalized male fertility?
Maybe more than you think or realize.
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