In a bid to shore up its perceived strength as an ascendant global leader, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has banned effeminate men, which it refers to by a phrase in Chinese that translates roughly to “sissy men,” from the media.
The ban affects a spectrum of Chinese males, ranging from full-on transgenders to pop music stars with silky smooth skin and boyish charm.
It’s no exaggeration to say that East Asian “sissy men” are effeminate in the extreme. Exhibit A is the South Korean boy band phenom BTS.
I know, from hands-on, in-the-field amateur sociological research, that East Asian women, as a general rule, adore men who present in this way. The ultra-masculine ideal — assuming it existed at some point in Asia (which it surely did, for instance, in WWII-era Imperial Japan) — no longer does. So there is substantial social incentive for East Asian men to adopt this persona and appearance.
The problem here for China, as for the rest of the world, is that it’s going to need a lot more than censorship to combat the feminization of men. It’s the physical environment, not just the culture, driving the phenomenon.
For instance, the chemical atrazine, as I’ve explored elsewhere, is ubiquitous in the global water supply to disastrous hormonal effect in humans.
Via Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America:
Atrazine is the most commonly detected pesticide contaminant of ground, surface, and drinking water. Atrazine is also a potent endocrine disruptor that is active at low, ecologically relevant concentrations. Previous studies showed that atrazine adversely affects amphibian larval development. The present study demonstrates the reproductive consequences of atrazine exposure in adult amphibians. Atrazine-exposed males were both demasculinized (chemically castrated) and completely feminized as adults. Ten percent of the exposed genetic males developed into functional females that copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs. Atrazine-exposed males suffered from depressed testosterone, decreased breeding gland size, demasculinized/feminized laryngeal development, suppressed mating behavior, reduced spermatogenesis, and decreased fertility.
Testosterone levels have plummeted in recent years in China as they have in the rest of the world.
Recent research published via the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism has indicated a generational decline in testosterone among U.S. men — meaning that the average man of 1960, all other factors such as age being equal, “the testosterone in the blood of a 60-year-old in 1989 it was higher than that in a different 60-year-old measured in 1995.”
And Chinese men’s testosterone levels are even worse than American men’s, per clinical research.
So it’s not realistic to expect that merely censoring the problem under the rug, as is the CCP’s standard operating procedure, will produce any lasting desired results.
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