MAN'S WORLD EXCLUSIVE: "IT'S OVER... WE'RE SO BACK"

An exclusive sneak peek, for paying subscribers, at my latest MEDITATION for MAN'S WORLD

Here’s an advance preview of my latest MEDITATION essay for MAN’S WORLD Issue 12, which will be dropping in a week’s time. (I won’t say it’s the biggest and best yet, but it really is.) From hereon, I’ll be using my Substack page to give paying subscribers advance previews of new content from MAN’S WORLD before the magazine “hits the shelves”, as it were. I’ll include a special writer’s commentary on each piece as well.

Commentary: I wrote this piece because of a Twitter thread about the estrogenic properties of… air. Yes, that’s right, the air is feminising you. People seemed to think that it was my intention to demoralise, when that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. So I wanted to clarify exactly what it is that I try to do with my health-posting, and especially the numerous tweets and threads and essays (and books) I write about the terrible effects of industrial pollution on our health and fertility. My intention is never to blackpill. There are things we can do, individually and politically, to protect ourselves and our loved ones, and I do my best to tell you what they are. I’ve been thinking of creating a central resource, or maybe even writing a book or short pamphlet, to let people know the most practical ways to reduce the the toxic burden they’re exposed to. If you think this is a good idea, let me know in the comments or take the poll embedded in the article.

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It was a Saturday afternoon, if I recall correctly, and I had been browsing PubMed as I so often do, covfefe in hand, looking for brand new studies to write about. I usually search by simple terms – “testosterone”, “microplastics”, “PFAS”, “soy manboobs” (“soy gynecomastia”, to use the technical term) and so on. On this occasion, it was “endocrine disruptors”, which, if you don’t know, are chemicals that interfere with the body’s natural hormonal balance.

I scrolled down the page, scanning each entry listed in chronological order. Not much. And then I saw it: “Can oestrogenic activity in air contribute to the overall body burden of endocrine disruptors?”, in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology.

Could it really be, I asked myself: is the air feminising us!? Can breathing literally make us less masculine!? I didn’t doubt it. It’s 2023, after all, and literally everything is gay. The food is gay. The water is gay. The culture is gay. So why not the air too?

I read the abstract with some excitement and then the full paper and, yes, it would appear that the air is contributing “to the overall body burden of endocrine disruptors” – which means, in short, that the air is feminising us.

Here’s what the study involved. Researchers in Italy took samples of particulate matter from the air in five different locations in the north of the country (an area of busy traffic, an urban area, a site near an incinerator and two separate rural spots). Samples were taken in all four seasons at each location. The researchers then measured each sample for cytotoxicity (toxicity to living cells) and estrogenicity (activity mimicking the effects of the hormone estrogen). The estrogenicity test was performed with the drug tamoxifen, a selective estrogen receptor modulator that’s used primarily to prevent breast cancer.

What the researchers found was that all of the samples exhibited significant estrogenic activity, in addition to heavy cytotoxicity. Chemicals of interest were benzo(a)pyrene and also pesticides, bisphenol A, alkylphenols, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, polychlorinated biphenyls and polychlorinated dibenzodioxins or dibenzofurans. These chemicals have nasty names for good reason.

Notably, there was a clear seasonal variation at all sites, with the autumn and winter samples showing the most estrogenic activity. This can be explained by the fact that, at lower temperatures, the chemicals identified are more likely to sit in the air as particulate rather than existing in a gaseous state, meaning there was more of them in the samples.