Protecting the Package

Rodger Morrow

Editor & Publisher, Beaver County Business

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When I was at Yale in the 1970s, my classmate Bob Edwards, who was pre-med, studied what warm temperatures did to the fertility of rats. Whatever the rats made of it, Bob was alarmed. He switched to cotton boxer shorts.

It struck me as an unusually practical use of a Yale education. The rest of us were learning how to explain why the country was being run incorrectly. Bob had found something he could do before breakfast.

I thought of him recently while watching Dr. Paul Saladino talk about polyester and fertility. There are subjects a man can hear discussed online without inspecting his wardrobe. This was not one of them.

Saladino’s concern centered on studies in which dogs were fitted with underwear. Somewhere, someone had the job of putting underpants on dogs. Whatever your own career has brought you, it helps to keep perspective.

In 1993, the researcher Ahmed Shafik reported that male dogs in polyester pants suffered falling sperm counts. Dogs in cotton did not. The pants were cut loose to keep the scrotum from warming, and testicular temperature barely changed. Most of the affected dogs recovered once the pants came off. Two still had low sperm counts.

In a later study of thirty-five female dogs, eight of the fourteen wearing polyester or polyester-cotton blends had reduced progesterone and failed to conceive. Once undressed, all eight eventually did. Shafik suspected static electricity. That was a hypothesis, not proof that the laundry basket is interfering with the succession.

Shafik also tried it on people. In 1992 he reported that fourteen men fitted with a specially made polyester scrotal sling stopped producing detectable sperm, then recovered when it came off. A custom sling worn for a year, however, is a long way from a three-pack at the department store.

So: small studies, mostly of dogs, mostly by one man. They deserve something between dismissal and a midnight evacuation of the underwear drawer.

Heat is firmer ground. Nature placed certain essential equipment outside the main building to keep it cool, an architectural decision that deserves respect even if it complicates bicycling. A study of fifty volunteers found tight underwear ran warmer than loose, and none at all ran coolest. Sitting was warmer than walking. This is science’s latest finding against afternoons in a chair, a subject on which my knees have already filed a report.

In 2018, a study of 656 men at a fertility clinic found that those who usually wore boxers had sperm concentrations 25 percent higher, and total counts 17 percent higher, than

men who wore other underwear. That is association, not proof. Nobody assigned men to boxers or briefs and waited for the birth announcements.

And a study of 501 couples trying to conceive found the man’s underwear made no significant difference in how long it took. A good lab number and a baby are not the same thing. Nature still signs the final paperwork.

None of this establishes that polyester is sabotaging civilization, or that cotton has special powers. Fit, fabric, temperature, and fatherhood are four separate questions, however tempting it is to answer them all with one purchase.

What I admire about Bob is his modesty. He didn’t demand a federal commission. He bought roomier shorts.

Women may wish to do their own research. I am not qualified in that department, and the female dogs give me no license to instruct women, whose patience with male expertise is being tested in enough other fields.

For myself, loose cotton boxers seem a reasonable precaution. They are comfortable, require no subscription, and leave room for further developments.

We insure the house, rotate the tires, and lock up the good silver. Surely the family jewels deserve as much consideration as a set of radials.