The Age of Aquarius

You’ve heard about the fish. And the amphibians and the reptiles. How they’re changing their sex all the time. Like they’re from San Francisco. The Potomac is full of such transgendered vertebrates. How symbolic of our times. Such transmutations are natural, in certain species. Years ago I wrote a book on Evolutionism, encyclopedic in scope, in which for some reason I cited a type of fish in which the largest female of a group where there is no male will simply become male. Certain lizards can manage the same feat. How interesting. But the Potomac fish are a different kettle of, um, fish. The females are normal. Eighty percent of the smallmouth bass males, however, produce eggs instead of sperm.

At this same time, there is a sharp rise in reported cases on college campuses all along the Potomac of impotence and a lack of sexual interest by males. Hm. Being the unbelievable stud that I am, this seems an odd and strangely desirable problem to have. I am troubled by a surfeit of hormones, you see. And at my age. Poor little me. Perhaps I should get my drinking water from the Potomac, which is full of feminizing chemical endocrinal disruptors.

The soft female-like boys of this latest generation, however, cluster not only along the Potomac. We find them everywhere. Throughout the continental USA, in England, in Greenland, in Japan. All over. As for our human females, they are enjoying an early puberty, starting around age eight. That’s so hot.

Well? Male alligators in Florida are turning up with shriveled testicles and high female-hormone counts. The phenomenon has been linked to phthalates, which are used in clear plastic drinking bottles -- water, Coke, Pepsi and so on. The specific actor is polyethylene terephthalate, PET. When the bottle gets a bit heated, as in a hot car, and the liquid has a plastic taste, that’s PET. All those plastic bottles from Disney World end up in the watershed and affect the alligators. Hmm. PETs act like female hormones. Girls testing as having high PET levels tend to enter puberty early. See? Six times higher levels means eight-year-olds with large breasts.

I saw something of this when I taught fifth graders some few years ago. Little boys, and a handful of ten year old girls with fully developed breasts. It’s very different than when I was a kid, and most likely when you were. In those days the boys were behind the girls by months, rather than years. By thirteen the girls where through puberty and the boys were entering. Now the lag time is three or four years. It’s not just PETs. It’s a lot of chemicals. Endosulfan, for example -- a major commercial pesticide -- was shown in 2003 to disrupt the onset of puberty in boys, by blocking the effects of testosterone and other androgens.

The actions of these industrial chemicals are overwhelmingly feminizing, and hasten puberty in girls, and delay and distort masculine development in boys. Seems like a problem to me. The plastic in baby bottles, for example, has been shown actually to damage male neonate animal brains, specifically in memory and motivation functions focused in the nucleus accumbens. The same damage does not occur in females. The males demonstrate less curiosity about their environments, and their activity profile strongly resembles that of control females. Strangely, females exposed to the same plastic demonstrate heightened activity, environmental curiosity, and increased learning ability. Again, the only relevant variable here is the plastic.

Ah well. Increased ADHD in boys. Decreased testosterone and semen levels than in my generation, lower sperm count, and endemic infertility. Genital malformations are up by three times; pregnant mothers who drink phthalates are ten times more likely to have boys with undescended testicles, or subaverage penis-size, or hypospadias (misplaced urethra terminus). No, it’s not funny.

From these specifics we might derive any number of insights, environmental, political, sociological, ethnographic. I won’t bother to flesh it out. I could talk about us planting the seeds of our own destruction, for all that there are fewer and fewer seeds. I could suggest that the underdeveloped moslems are outbreeding the West not only because we choose to have smaller families, but because we are not capable of having larger ones. I could point out that the rise of modern liberalism, so self-loathing/blameful and disloyal and irresponsible, might derive as much from biology as from philosophy. I might call it the End of Days.

Why bother? Everyone talks about history, but nobody does anything about it. Is there a solution? Well, first, is there a problem? Maybe it’s a good thing? We become extinct and save the planet from our pollution and global warming? We remove our unclean presence and leave the world to the purity of a certain desert faith? What after all has freedom given us? Melting icecaps and mutant fish. Yin yields to yang.

On the other hand, we might choose not to use clear plastics to drink from. We might wash our vegetables (don’t think meat-eating is the answer -- animal flesh stores such chemicals at an even higher density). It starts with being aware of the problem. After that one can choose to care, or not. If biologically generated motivation from out of a healthy nucleus accumbens is insufficient to make us care, perhaps ethics and a commitment to some intellectual ideal might do it. How would I know what could move you?

But that’s why I eat the way I do. Health matters for so many reasons. One young fella made his standard joke today about how healthful meat-eating is. One suspects he does know better. But it’s all so emotional. Emotion is not a free pass.

As usual, mine is an appeal to rationality. These are the facts, some of them. Do with them what you will.

Does the title of this post seem impenetrable to you? We did not know what the New Age would bring. The triumph of hippie values is brought about by the very thing they rebelled against. Corporate chemicals -- as opposed to hallucinogenic ones. Their feminine ethos triumphs against masculinity at the cost of infertility. The New Age is bringing not love, love, love, but sterility, deformity and extinction. What is the point of saving the planet, if we fail to save the baby boys?


J