With media headlines such as “Urgent Action Needed on Disturbing Male Fertility,” the findings of Levine et al. (2017) received wide press coverage, including in alt-right online forums. And yes, we went to the dark web so you don’t have to. Here we document and analyze discourse on alt-right threads on 4CHAN, Reddit, and Twitter following the publication of the 2017 Levine et al. study that the GenderSci Lab critiques in our new paper.

In this Q & A, we ask Professor Stern more about the specific ways in which the alt-right animates fears of white male decline, revives biologically essentialist ideas about gender, and insinuates the authority of legitimate scholarship, in particular through appeals to science. We also invite her reflections on how interdisciplinary feminist science studies scholars can responsibly engage with the alt-right’s deeply problematic claims.

This post will dive deeply into what can be gleaned from these early studies comparing sperm quality across geographical regions within Europe for contextualizing current high-profile claims about the decline of sperm around the world . . . . “West” and “Other” are not tenable categories, and an analysis of their boundaries from multiple angles sees their geographic and demographic architectures crumble.

In this blog post, I’m going to walk through how sperm statistics are made by analyzing the 2017 paper by Levine et al., wherein the authors argue that sperm counts around the globe are dropping–but most particularly in “Western” countries and not “Other” countries. I highlight some key methodological choices that Levine et al. and others made while trying to gain insight into the state of global sperm counts.

Counting is usually assumed to be a pretty simple activity; it is, after all, one of the very first things that we learn at school . . . . In this blog post, I examine the ways in which sperm count is less straightforward than it might appear, and consider what this means for scientific research on global sperm count decline.

We wanted to understand whether sperm counts were truly declining and whether evidence supported the authors' claims of imminent danger to fertility, health, and the environment. That analysis led us to be skeptical of claims of dramatic global sperm decline leading to an imminent crisis in male fertility and health. We think the patterns hinted at in Levine et al.’s meta-analysis rather offer compelling evidence that sperm count can vary both pathologically and non-pathologically under different conditions and environments.