Sperm Counts Among Western Men Have Halved In Last 40 Years, Says Study (theguardian.com) 427
New submitter flote shares a report from The Guardian: Sperm counts among men have more than halved in the last 40 years, research suggests, although the drivers behind the decline remain unclear. The latest findings reveal that between 1973 and 2011, the concentration of sperm in the ejaculate of men in western countries has fallen by an average of 1.4% a year, leading to an overall drop of just over 52%. The study, published in the journal Human Reproduction Update by an international team of researchers, drew on 185 studies conducted between 1973 and 2011, involving almost 43,000 men. The team split the data based on whether the men were from western countries -- including Australia and New Zealand as well as countries in North America and Europe -- or from elsewhere. After accounting for factors including age and how long men had gone without ejaculation, the team found that sperm concentration fell from 99 million per ml in 1973 to 47.1 million per ml in 2011 -- a decline of 52.4% -- among western men unaware of their fertility. For the same group, total sperm count -- the number of sperm in a semen sample -- fell by just under 60%.
Wild guess (Score:4, Interesting)
Obesisty?
Re:Wild guess (Score:5, Insightful)
No...Blame the food. Whenever I go to those so called 3rd world countries, their fruits taste better, have an aroma and someone can tell that a neighbor is preparing beef or poultry from the perceived smell.
When one visits the fruit section of some of these so called healthy food stores, not an iota of smell/scent of fruit is perceived! Something is surely wrong here.
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This was my thought. Our food supply is becoming more plastic all the time and I don't meant he packaging.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think the FDA recently banned triclosan from consumer products, but that might be too recent to have an impact on long-term studies yet.
As far as smells in the grocery store, typically things aren't cooked in the store throughout the day, and when they are it's in a separate room with probably separate ventilation. "Rooms" and "ventilation" are things that don't exist
Re:Wild guess (Score:5, Funny)
I blame skinny jeans. I've been in boxers and loose pants for decades and have no issues. I see these young beta males running around in skin tight jeans and I just figure they never want kids or something.
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The increase in processed starchy foods and I would theorize perhaps too much reduction in saturated fats - which support male sex hormone production. In fact, while processed foods were eaten less, in favor of whole foods, including fattier meats, they were prepared with lard and tallow in place of hydrogenated vegetable oils. That fat is gone either way.
Ancel Keys [wikipedia.org] showed that saturated fat wasn't good for heart health, but we may have gone overboard and/or replaced it favor of crappy overly-processed sta
Re:Wild guess (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure if that is the cause, but the issue you describe is related to the fact that most fruits and vegetables these days are grown far away, and to save money on refrigeration, the fruit is picked green and allowed to ripen in transit. The downside is that the chemical processes are not the same as ripening on the tree/vine/etc. and you wind up with highly acidic produce lacking in some nutrients.
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No...Blame the food. Whenever I go to those so called 3rd world countries, their fruits taste better, have an aroma and someone can tell that a neighbor is preparing beef or poultry from the perceived smell.
When one visits the fruit section of some of these so called healthy food stores, not an iota of smell/scent of fruit is perceived! Something is surely wrong here.
So do we blame Monsanto for the GMFruit? In my youth, a Tomato was bright red, and juicy. Now the ones we buy (packaged on the vine), are pink, dry and bland.
Pretty soon there will be seedless tomatoes. I want seeds that I can put into my own backyard and grow the old juicy red tomatoes of yesteryear.
Re:Wild guess (Score:4, Insightful)
Citation needed! I can't believe this got +5 Insightful.
Where is the evidence supporting your claim? Has the nutritional value of fruits decreased since the 70s? You could blame anything that has changed since 1973. Why not the lack of lead in gasoline or Internet porn?
Before anyone blames it on any hormone like chemical found in plastics/fertilizers/pesticides/whatever, please show that our exposure has at least increased! For many nasty chemicals our exposure peaked in the 70-80s which increased awareness and regulations during later generations. Our exposure has decreased for many nasties, not increased. Lead being the obvious example but probably many other nasties like plastic softeners etc.
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hm. Watch films from the seventies. Notice how skinny everyone is.
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Watch films from the fifties. Notice how everyone is either black or white or Michael Jackson.
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Partially, PlayBoy and Internet continue to drain the resources?
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Smoking is a culprit as well. Smoking affects both the color and taste of semen. Uh, so I am told. So it might affect sperm count and motility as well.
Re: Wild guess (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Wild guess (Score:2)
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And where can we buy such a thing?
Thanks in advance.
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See... and I assumed it was actually all the fapping to xHamster. Men in the west no longer have a chance to build up sperm count because it's constantly being shot out in front of a screen.
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Republicans and Liberals routinely misapply labels to others.
And some labels are just a waste of time.
Re:Wild guess (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly what I was going to post
Fat = more estrogen = less sperm
Not to mention the other parts of our diet.
Try the massive contamination of drinking water with estrogen from birth control pills as well as the estrogen mimickers such as soy products.
Every time Mr. Skinny Jeans gets a soy Cappuccino along with his Tofu smoothie, goodbye a little of the Mr. and hello a little more of the Ms.
I'm all for reproductive rights, but if you even mention the possibility that all those birth control pills are screwing up the hormonal balance of literally everything that uses water, at least in the U.S., holey moley, the feminists will scream bloody murder.
Repeat after me: "Nothing, nothing on Earth matters more than MY reproductive rights!! Not my health, not your health, not the frogs and fishes health. NOTHING!!!"
Estrogen [livescience.com]
Estrogen [scientificamerican.com]
Estrogen [www.cbc.ca]
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Try the massive contamination of drinking water with estrogen from birth control pills as well as the estrogen mimickers such as soy products.
You missed one major suspect: endocrine disruptors [wikipedia.org]
Re: Wild guess (Score:2)
Isn't the effect of soy small or nonexistent or positive? I eat a lot of licorice which is negative for a fact. But what about all of them in plastics? and such? Isn't that the real trouble. We definitely know they are in our environment.
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Now that I would believe, which is one of the reasons why my family only drinks RO filtered water (made by my RO filter under my sink). That and I prefer not to drink the chemical waste from the aluminum fabrication process (sodium fluoride)...
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These feminists sound like the worst. I mean, at least the ones that definitely exist and definitely said things that are characterized accurately by what you put in quotes. The articles you linked don't have any feminists saying anything like that, but the post is modded 5 informative so I'm assuming it's good information, and not jumping to conclusions. About feminism.
Re:Wild guess (Score:4, Informative)
Good points, notwithstanding the snark about hipsters being feminine (I mean, where do you go with lumberjack beard AND skinny jeans?).
Anyway, I think you're missing a huge culprit, possible the biggest one: PLASTIC.
It's in absolutely everything. These even if you're drinking raw tiger blood, if you're on Slashdot odds I daresay you're not out in the tundra killing it with your stone-tipped spear. That means organic or "conventional", vegan or meagan, it's been shipped in plastic, or you're consuming it in a plastic container, with plastic utensils.
Plastic is a known estrogen mimic:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
I'd bet on plastic over soy any day.
Though to be fair, soy is found in a fair wider variety of foodstuffs than anyone had imagine. Plus, when you get into questions of diet and the effect of different foods it gets really hard to figure out what the "natural" human diet is.
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I don't think GP suggested banning the pill.
Perhaps the issue could be lessened with different strength versions being available? You know, match the strength to your actual uptake capacity. It would be sort of tricky since you'd need to take pill and then measure the concentrations in the urine, and I doubt many people would do it.
Or perhaps we could stop selling pills and start marketing patches more aggressively? They work just like nicotine patches but stay on for a week. They work a lot better when it
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There's other methods of birth control which not only do not screw with the environment but are a lot safer for women. If you tried getting your standard version of the Pill through the FDA now, about the only thing that'd actually get it approved would be feminists claiming that it's getting blocked because apparently it's misogyny to insist that a medicine that's intended at least mostly for women stand up to the same level of scrutiny as any other medicine.
A surprising number of pharmaceuticals get dump
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Thanks.
Moron.
You didn't need to sign off on your post. We could already tell who you were from your response.
Re: Wild guess (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know. I'm no where near overweight (around 15% BF) and my wife and I are having some trouble with conceiving, so I got my sperm levels checked and they are quite low. Oddly my T-levels are on the high side of normal. I'm fit and run 30-40 miles per week. No grey hair and no guy at all.
145lbs and 37 years old.
You're probably too skinny. Too low a body weight also lowers sperm production [bionews.org.uk].
A man's fertility may be affected by his weight, a new study shows. Men who are either too fat or too thin may find that they have lower sperm counts, often low enough to be classed as 'impaired fertility'. The study, undertaken by researchers in Denmark and published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, could lend weight to the possibility that high levels of obesity in Western societies may be contributing to fertility problems.
The researchers studied 1558 Danish men, comparing their sperm count to their body mass index (BMI - a measure of weight in relation to height). They found that men with either a low or a high BMI had differences in reproductive hormone levels as well as lower sperm counts than men of the recommended weight. Men with a low BMI (below 20) were, on average, found to have a 28 per cent lower sperm count and a 36 per cent lower sperm concentration than men with a normal BMI. Men with a high BMI (above 25) had a 22 per cent lower sperm count and 24 per cent lower sperm concentrations.
So if you're already borderline, all that running will make it worse. Same as too high a level of testosterone will.
Also, what do you mean by "no guy at all?"
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I'm guessing he meant "no gut at all".
Re: Wild guess (Score:5, Funny)
Also, what do you mean by "no guy at all?"
Possibly you have identified the root cause of the lack of sperm count.
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Testicles need to stay several degrees below body temperature for proper sperm production, so wearers of tight pants are going to have serious fertility issues.
Natural selection at work - hipsters will become extinct. YAY!
Re:Wild guess (Score:5, Insightful)
A combination of obesity in men (besides not being able to spell) and the most highly educated women, those in academia, hating men
When did "women won't have sex with me" turn into "women hate all men".
Most of the women in academia that I know personally are in relationships. Bit of an odd claim that they hate men.
Re:Wild guess (Score:4, Informative)
When did "women won't have sex with me" turn into "women hate all men".
It's a coping mechanism. Rather than thinking that they are somehow inadequate or unlovable, they choose to believe that women simply hate men and are only trying to exploit them. That way not only isn't it a personal failing, it's actually a positive thing, unlike the poor cucks and betas getting used.
It started with the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement, and kind of developed into a philosophy until it was adopted by other groups like incels (guys suffering "involuntary celibacy", i.e. can't get a anyone to sleep with them) and simple misogynists too.
I have some sympathy for those guys, a lot of them have clearly had bad experiences, and relationships are very important to people. But reading some of the stuff on Reddit is pretty scary.
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How is "the most highly educated women, those in academia, hating men" supposed to lower the male population's sperm count?
That's one batshit crazy conspiracy theory.
And it's not even true. The biggest misandrists are men, the ones who go around calling others "beta" and "cuck" all day.
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That's a town in Guizhou. Did you mean baizuo [opendemocracy.net]?
Count THIS! (Score:5, Funny)
Extremely interesting... (Score:4, Funny)
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http://lmgtfy.com/?q=futanari [lmgtfy.com] (NSFW*!!!)
* probably NSFH either.
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Dr. Ian Malcolm: I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way.
Ripper was right! (Score:5, Funny)
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Joke's on them. We'll just produce twice as much!
It's Because Women are a Pain in the Ass (Score:2, Interesting)
That is the only logical explanation for this. Women are fucking impossible to deal with anymore. They cannot be satisfied no matter how much money you make, how much you work out, how much stuff you have, or how popular you are. You're never good enough.
It gets to the point that you don't even want to reproduce with them anymore, and so your body's like "whatever, Ima shut down this sperm factory down here and use my energy to get better at minecraft instead."
Not long ago a friend of mine and I were having
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Don't fret! The women asking the impossible is the very thing that drives the sexual selection. If they don't whip us all the time men will stagnate......as a man I don't like it but there it is....it's a feature, but indeed it can be a bug as well if taken to extremes.
Few years ago there was this fantastic documentary on the BBC about a guy with small dick. At a certain moment he invited 3 ladies to the studio. At first the ladies were sooooo dismissive and derisive about "dick fear" and were like "no size
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Few years ago there was this fantastic documentary on the BBC about a guy with small dick. At a certain moment he invited 3 ladies to the studio. At first the ladies were sooooo dismissive and derisive about "dick fear" and were like "no size is not that important; it is other men that made you fell inadequate because men make porn and porn is unrealistic". So he asked them to model from clay the perfect dick for them. Guess what - all 3 models were significantly above average both in length and girt. Talking about who instills inferiority complexes in men , eh :)
Those ladies probably don't care about size, at least consciously. The problem is that most people don't see a lot of genitals in real life, the majority are in porn. And they don't hire porn stars for their acting skills, and of course shaving pubic hair makes it look bigger too. So subconsciously they have an unrealistic image of what a normal size penis is like, and are influenced by what porn portrays as "ideal". They probably have similar ideas about the shape of the female body, due to airbrushed maga
Estrogen mimic plasticizers all over the environme (Score:3)
Estrogen mimic plasticizers are all over the environment. They're in your clothes, your bottled water, your food, the chairs you sit in, ETC.
They would be my first guess as to the reason for many abnormalities, and certainly for something involving sperm counts.
I blame synthetic (Score:2)
underwear!
To paraphrase Chernobyl era Soviet Joke (Score:2)
If you want to be a dad, better wrap your balls in lead.
We do less male stuff. (Score:2)
We do less male stuff, plain and simple. Testosterone is down from sitting on the couch, getting fat, drinking to much beer, stimulating with videogames rather than real stuggles and not work harder physical labour as we used to. Porn feeds an epidemic of erectile dysfunction that has to play out into sperm quality and count at some point. And on top of that the guilt-show western males have to go through hamper true male heterosexuality - a very important aspect consistently left out of this shitty ongoing
Worry Not, Humanity, For I Shall Save You! (Score:4, Funny)
If the trend continues, there will be a day when Western Man is no longer able to produce sperm at all.
But fear not, humanity! Thanks to frozen sperm, bulls that died years ago are still fathering calves. With my high IQ and 6' 2" manly-man size, I am willing to contribute now to save First World Man from extinction.
Charlize Theron...honey...I'm afraid you'll just have to lean into the strike zone take one for the team. The future of the world will be in your hands. Literally.
Inbox me, honey. Let's get this done!
false hopes (Score:2)
I thought it said "spam" counts.
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Reminds me of the first 5 minutes of Idiocracy... the high-IQ couple with the fertility issue. Meanwhile the overall population is now 7.5Bn and still rising,,, Oh well.
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It is. But it just means we have to make up the quota with more orgasms.
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The Handmaid's Tale.
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Wait - why is it actually bad ?
We want less kids, no?
One does not follow the other. Testosterone is a major necessity for males, and is used in much more than sperm production.
So while it is a good idea to not breed like bunnies, only apocalyptic misandrysts can be happy about this.
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You comment makes not much sense. Infertile men, means neither females nor males are produced. Let's be honest men not having to sacrifice them selves to have children makes life a whole lot easier for men. They'll end up living in a home they own far sooner and they will own it for the rest of their lives if they want to. If fact the only way men gain substantive control over their own lives, is to remain single and non-reproductive, otherwise they must sacrifice a substantive portion of their lives for a
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More important question, are men with lower sperm counts more of less happy than men with higher sperm counts.
Weogh! That was a hard to parse as a Sarah Palin speech, so I'll just hit on the basics.
Your noting that a lot of men avoiding having children is part of another trend Men are becoming less interested in marriage, and oddly, women are becoming more interested than a few years back. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com] And given some other trends, the numbers might decrease yet more. Certainly given that college campuses are trending a 10 percent gape between female and male and growing, http://www.pewresear [pewresearch.org]
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Women went off marriage because it was a crappy deal for them. The strong expectation was to give up their career, become the main care giver for the kids. As that changed and marriage got more compatible with ideas of gender equality, they started showing more interest again.
I don't agree that there are convincing or rational arguments that marriage is a bad deal for men. Okay, there are some legal issues in some places, but the same thing is true for women and has always been (e.g. spousal rape laws, uneq
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Shit /r/RedPill and /r/MGTOW are leaking.
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One does not follow the other. Testosterone is a major necessity for males, and is used in much more than sperm production.
TFA doesn't mention testosterone being down.
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Re: Yes. (Score:2)
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And by "Interesting" I mean in the same why that {#politician_name} is a {#random_insult} with {his|her|it's} {#random_body_part} {in|up} their {#random_body_part}.
Re:Won't matter to some of us (Score:5, Funny)
Heck, my wife gets pregnant if I look at her too long.
I don't think so. You might want to get a paternity test done on "your" kids.
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It's almost as if it's implying men are getting together to count sperm!
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In a follow-up study, sperm counts amongst women remain precisely steady.
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One sperm is enough, doesn't matter if it's 100 or 50 million.
You flunked health class and sex ed, eh?
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I think contraceptives and family planning has something to do with it. These days, women get to decide when and with whom to have children. Producing an overwhelming number of sperm to outcompete other males' sperm seems to have little to no reward these days. Even if the lady has an affair, she's most likely going to be protected, so there's no gain from the male evolutionary perspective.
So those with low sperm count are just as likely to become fathers, and their genes just as likely to be propagate
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One sperm is not enough, unless you're making a test tube baby.
In the normal method, you need plenty of sperm to reach the egg and smash down the gates before a single sperm can get inside.
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It does depend on how much STR and DEF the egg has.
Re: So what? (Score:2)
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You missed the important part, no doubt on purpose: it doesn't matter if it is 50 or 100 million.
SRSLY? Just out of curiosity, are you a pediatrician or OB/GYN and if so - or even if not so, give me the cites to illustrate that which you are so certain of. The idea that a male producing half of the sperm of another especially 50 million per ejaculate is as fertile goes against everything I have been taught and experienced. Your expertise in this matter is requested.
Thank you in advance for providing this information. Here is something that I know, and am awaiting for your debunking of the Mayo Clin
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Nice weasel attempt, but all you have to do to prove your claim is correct is cite the plummet in conception rates.
Can you show me where I claimed the conception rates have plummeted?
But let's talk about conception rates since you fixate on it. We'll ignore that it isn't used too often in humans, it seems to be of maximum interest in bovines.
In humans the term pregnancy rate is used. It is also used a lot for IVF, which has a much lesser success rate than normal sex, so it's a bad term overall, and not a very good measure of sperm count and it's relationship to pregnancy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Rega
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He is correct, or haven't you noticed that nobody is claiming that the conception rate has plummeted?
The number of sperm released in ejaculate is directly related to fertility. There is a process called the acrosome reaction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
While only one sperm performs the actual fertilization, it requires a lot more of them to prepare the egg.
Not happening without those other sperm.
Re: So what? (Score:2)
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Again, no change in birth rate proves you are wrong.
One of the things I learned a long time ago was that arguing with people like you is pointless. I gave citations, and you just sit there and take an unrelated point and bandy it about
If you actually have the balls, take my citations and prove me and places like the Mayo clinic wrong.
Re: So what? (Score:2)
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"Millennials have this really disgusting complexion"
Maybe, but you can't actually tell because of their tats.
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Another e.g. - I see you say how "fat" he is etc. - do you KNOW that for a fact or are you projecting your own issues onto him?
From the Slashdot page on my website.
There are 10 kinds of people on Slashdot.
Those who see my picture, go back to Slashdot and leave a comment, "You're a fat retard."
And everyone else.
https://www.cdreimer.com/slashdot.html [cdreimer.com]
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You're a fat retard and everyone else.
Did I do that correctly?
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Who'd you outright sizzle w/ facts so badly?
The prick who posted dick pics with my info on Russian image websites. I'm turning that into a YouTube video project.
https://github.com/cdreimer/how_to_takedown_dick_pics_from_russian_image_websites [github.com]
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I appreciate the amount of work done in this project so far and how regularly commits are made so we can watch the progress. Seriously, it looks like an empty shell that is just another place to post links to advertise your "sideline businesses" so, your big wheel of links can go round and round.
Cheers,
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And they've got a LOT of people. More than twice as many as all North America. More than all the Americas. Barely a bit less than China. They're going to surpass both China and India soon enough.
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I agree, masterbating is very bad. Masturbating, on the other hand, is enjoyable.
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This is a likely hypothesis - ubiquitous exposure to trace level synthetic chemicals. Many synthetic chemicals have shown estrogenic effects (including a number of plastic ingredients), and cumulative exposure to tiny quantities may be driving this. It is difficult to test though - the exposure is everywhere, and effects may be delayed many years. Is it prenatal exposure, childhood exposure, adult exposure, all of the above?
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Don't forget plastic in our food [bluemaize.net].
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Hello Dave,
don't bother coming back after your vacation.
Signed,
your boss.
Re: Pthalates and bromides. (Score:2)
In other words it makes little practical difference if it's inherited as it derives from circumstances which walk hand-in-hand with heredity.
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Actually Chuck Norris died 10 years ago, but the Grim Reaper shits vertebrae at the mere thought of coming to get him.
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very minor effect compared to the feminine hormone analogs emitted by body fat. The major culprit is obesity.
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hilarious the posts blaming plastics for a minute amount of estrogen equivalent when we have tons of actual estrogen being dumped into the water supply via women's birth control pills
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Protocol here is to (1) cauterise both ends of the severed vasa, and (2) perform a sperm count 3 months after operation, before authorising the cessation of the contraception already in use.
That strongly suggests that your practitioner wasn't using any sort of cauterisation, which does have a significant failure rate. If you informed the second practitioner of the failed first vasectomy (they'd have seen the scar