Microplastics are everywhere, even in human testicles. So will the patriarchy finally step in?

The Guardian

3 days ago

There is plastic in your balls!
Surely this should be headline news every day until the news breaks that 'there is no longer plastic in your balls', accompanied by photographs of celebration parades and ecstatic couples kissing in the streets.
It shouldn't require the 'angle' of a global plastic pollution treaty conference this week to edge it back into the media. It shouldn't oblige a report in medical journal the Lancet on Sunday revealing that the health effects of plastic in the environment are 'causing disease and death from infancy to old age' and are responsible for at least US$1.5tn every year in health-related damages.
It should only require you looking at your own balls or – with consent – the balls of someone you truly, deeply love and value, then realising, holy shit, there are microplastics in there. Of course, maybe you live your life balls-free – but perhaps you know a dog? If that dog has balls, then I have terrible news: the scientists who found microplastic particles in every single human testicle in their study found them in all the dogs' balls, too.
Patriarchy, not for the first time, you have seriously let me down.
Raised from birth in western society, I have been passively inculcated with a relentless message that protecting your balls was our most important collective priority. Freud insisted that male identity was so rooted in the symbolism of aggressively functional genitalia that 'castration anxiety' mobilised men into behaviours of dominance, control and whatever other compensatory masculine unpleasantness Donald Trump got up to this morning.
When the boss was 'busting your balls', it was bad. If a situation 'had you by the balls' it was bad. When a woman was a 'ball-busting bitch', she was unforgivable.
'Genital theft panic' is an actual term used by actual anthropologists to describe the social terror of something nefarious stealing function from your soft bits when you're not looking.
So, here I was thinking, 'Ah, yes, I don't expect the patriarchy to care that scientists have found synthetic plastics in blood, placenta and breast milk, contributing to placental dysfunction, ovarian atrophy, endometrial hyperplasia and fibrosis in women – because I'm a feminist with pattern recognition.
I don't expect the patriarchy gives much more thought to the plastic pollution of waterways, the poisoning of animals, or the fact that there has been a trash island named the North Atlantic Garbage Patch – now hundreds of kilometres across – growing in the ocean since 1972. But now that there are microplastics in your balls with considerable evidence suggesting they are reducing your sperm count, inflaming your tissues and affecting both your and our species' fertility, surely some good old-fashioned genital theft panic will kick in and patriarchy will aggressively – with much swagger – ride in to save what it holds dear.
I repeat – you've let me down. Because, given the opportunity to literally save your own balls, you've instead defaulted to a significantly less useful habit of 'bullying people who utter uncomfortable truths' at conferences whenever the plastic problem is mentioned.
Experts trying to communicate to the world that the projected tripling of plastic products by 2060 is a catastrophically dumbarse idea say they have been yelled at, harassed and intimidated by representatives of petrochemical lobbies and petrostates who make money from the ubiquitous fossil fuel-based pollution product.
This is the sixth attempt at a plastic pollution treaty since plastic started turning up in brains, livers, kidneys, blood, joints and your balls, and the UN decided 'hey, maybe this is a problem?' back in 2022. The previous five attempts have failed.
Well may some men fear that the radical humanity of feminism will deprive them of status, power and even identity – but it's not the sisterhood busting your balls, fellas. It's chiefly the fossil-fuel interests of usual suspects like China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US in the form of 460m tonnes of synthetic garbage spewed on to the planet every year.
Now microplastics are found everywhere from the peak of Mt Everest to the depths of the Mariana Trench. Lord Howe Island is a volcanic rock island about 600km off the Australian east coast governed under a conservation authority applying strict visitor controls, and if you squeeze the muttonbirds there (please don't), they are so full of plastic that they crunch.
They crunch.
Male persons, please consider the comparable fate awaiting your balls if the new treaty fails – because those universally plasticised testes from the aforementioned study that should have sent every red-blooded testicle-cherisher across humanity racing for a global ban and immediate cleanup operation were retrieved from people who had died before 2016. Even more plastic has been pumped into the planet since then – and for what? In the majority of cases, single-use plastics used for packaging, drink and food containers.
Less than 10% of plastic is recycled.
I want you to remember this, men, the next time you stare at a shelf of juicy shrink-wrapped capsicum at the supermarket. I want you to ask, 'what is the trade-off for this?', and to consider the global plastic pollution treaty, and your balls.
If patriarchy isn't coming to save them, then maybe you should?
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist.