Inductivist

Thanks to Steve Sailer, I learned that the Coen Brothers were coming out last Friday with a new Western on Netflix. This scene split into two parts is the best I have watched in some time. I wish they started the first clip a couple minutes earlier, but you'll get the idea.  It's just so real, so un-PC, and reminds us how heroes used to be portrayed by Hollywood: fearless, capable, and chivalrous.   

Based on 185 studies (43k men), this meta-analysis documents the 1972-2011 drop in total sperm count among men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The decline was almost 60%.

The authors do not speculate about causes, but a GQ writer thinks it's due to an increase in plasticizers which are known to disrupt fetal testosterone (T). Perhaps it's due to increasing obesity which lowers T. The authors controlled for increasing age, so that doesn't appear to be the reason.

Anyway, I'm interested in the consequences. Assuming that a sperm count is a proxy for prenatal and adult T, young men strike me as being less masculine than in previous generations. They are certainly not shorter or smaller, but they seem more effeminate. And I'm not talking about dress or tastes. I mean in their faces and in their mannerisms.

According to the General Social Survey, the percent of men reporting they have sex exclusively with other men rose from 2.2% in the 1980s to 3.2% in this decade. This, of course, could be due to a greater willingness to admit the behavior, but there is a theory of homosexuality that claims it is due to inadequate prenatal T.

Subtracting out the 1984-94 gang wars and crack epidemic, the US homicide has declined since the late 1970s. Declining T? I'm just thinking out loud -- I might be crazy -- but it's an interesting idea.

UPDATE: By the way, the GQ author thinks the collapse in sperm count points to the end of the human race.

National Geographic reports on a study of proboscis monkeys:

I doubt that many Inductivist readers want to know how to predict which men have big penises, but what the hell. In a study of 3,762 college males, a list of characteristics reflecting the level of one's masculinity was found to be positively correlated with self-reported criminality. All these factors were also intercorrelated. Here are the correlations with penis length:

Correlations

Lower body strength      .386
Upper body strength      .378
Amount of body hair      .312
Strength of sex drive     .248
Physical strength           .248 
Masculine mannerisms   .231
Masculine body build      .222
Low-deep voice             .148 

So forget the stuff about big hands or big feet: Look for the strong hairy dude with the deep voice. But don't forget he might be a criminal, too.

This graph shows the percent of U.S. households that have at least one firearm (GSS data). From 1973 to 2010, the figure has dropped from 48 to 32 percent. Over the period, ownership has fallen by one-third. This is another indicator of the country's move in a liberal direction.

According to this 2010 study, less dominant men are more sensitive to physical dominance cues in other men. By dominance cues, the authors mean masculine features like a prominent jaw or brow. They conclude that this sensitivity is adaptive since it is more costly for a submissive man to misperceive the dominance of another man. Their findings are consistent with another study which showed that shorter men notice signs of dominance more than tall men.

I've detected in HBD World two contrasting images of a Real Man.

Here's one of them:





And here's the other:



I won't speak for the rest, but I vote for the first one.

Follow-up: Some readers don't think hunting is a good measure of masculinity. Let's use whether or not a person owns a handgun since it is less rural than hunting.


Logistics regression coefficients (N = 3,833)

Male -.542
Owns a handgun -.395
Belief in God -.363
Conservative politics -.448

All are significant at the .01 level. Possession of a handgun predicts opposing gay marriage, independent of these other factors.

Masculinity is associated with opposing gay marriage: Today's debate about gay marriage at Secular Right got me thinking about who, in my experience, seems to have the biggest objection to homosexuality. Of course, many churchgoing people oppose the behavior on religious grounds, but rarely have I personally witnessed animus coming from those kinds of people. Religious people I know talk about love and forgiveness, and tend to have a gentle, even feminine way about them. It often feels quite leftish. Look at Ms. California when she was asked if she had anything to say to Perez Hilton, the gay man who called her a dumb bitch and a c**t after she said publicly that she was against gay marriage. She answered that the first thing she would do is hug him. Yuck, I know, but you can't really say she sounds like a hater. (If someone called me that, my good Christian self would have told him to take his ugly ass and 'do and go f*** himself.)

It doesn't come through on this blog--obvious at the moment--but my personality is pretty damn mild. When I was a devout Christian in college, I had a tough-guy friend who was going on about how sickening homosexuality is. He was of the same faith. I told him that homosexual sex is just sin--the same as if he had premarital sex. Whether we like it or not, I said, God commands that we love everybody and that we separate bad behaviors from the person. He was shocked that I talked like that, but he knew that I was doctrinally correct and so dropped the topic. It seemed to me that his hostility came from his sense of masculinity, not from his belief system. I've personally heard perhaps 10 people say really nasty things about homosexuals. They were all men, and they were all tough guys.

Which leads to my question: Does level of masculinity correlate with opposition to gay marriage? I came up with two different measures: gender and hunting. Gender is an obvious indicator of masculinity, and hunting seems like a good one as well. Using GSS data from 4,146 Americans, I calculated logistic regression coefficients. The dependent variable is, do you agree that homosexuals have the right to marry. The third independent variable is belief in God.


Logistic regression coefficients

Belief in God -.462
Male -.644
Hunts -.687

All are significant at the .01 level with a two-tailed test. So, no not only belief in God, but being a guy and hunting independently predict opposition to gay marriage.

Some of the resistance to homosexuality and same-sex marriage seems to be a discomfort with guys acting like girls. Men seem to be saying, I want absolutely nothing to do with sissies. They are NOT joining my party.

At Secular Right, I was wondering out loud:

It is possible that gay marriage might delay and decrease the percent of men getting married, and it’s connected to modern fatherhood. I’ll try to find data on this, but I’m the kind of dad who’s always pushing strollers, playing with the kids outside, feeding them, changing diapers, etc. I often feel the glare of macho guys and sense that they’re thinking, “Damn homo.” Modern fatherhood, I suspect, is a problem itself in that it is making marriage look less attractive to very masculine men. Now, if these same guys see me pushing strollers with my married gay buddy, chatting away about how Johnny is saying a new word, I can imagine these macho types saying, that does it–I’m not joining the fag club.

UPDATE: Reader SFG makes a good suggestion to add controls for rurality and political views:

Belief in God -.343
Male -.422
Hunts -.673
Population size .000
Conservative politics -.399

All are significant at the .01 level, except for population size which is not significant. Hunting and gender still predict opposition to gay marriage.