On the radio recently, I heard about Dr. Levine Hagai's meta-research on the reduced sperm-counts of Western males (Actually, I am not sure if Levine is his surname or first name).

So I emailed him as follows:

Did your meta-study find any significant association between sperm count and tightness of trousers or underwear, please?

This was a not particularly original idea of mine, but it sometimes seems as if academics are 1/3 ignorant, 1/3 stupid and 1/3 prejudiced, so I thought it worthwhile at least to ask the question.

He replied promptly but negatively, saying:

We did not check it.

There is some evidence for that but this could not explain the decline in Western world.

I followed up my original email to him (see below) but he did not reply again, doubtless being very busy.

I have no idea if the tightness of clothing has anything to do with the sperm-count, but I also have no idea why Dr. Levine is not interested in investigating this possibility. I guess that in places like Israel (and New Zealand) no academic is allowed to be openly critical of Feminism, so my mention of Feminism could have scared him off!

I am writing this short article because I don't want to find out later that he has investigated the issue, without telling me, and got a Nobel Prize or something for proving that this was the cause of the problem! Once, when I was studying Linguistics at York (UK), I told my Lecturer, Steve Harlow, that Nancy Woo's rules for Hokkien tone-sandhi didn't work, and he suggested I tell Geoffrey Sampson at the London School of Economics, which I did (by letter -- this was the 1970's). He replied that he wasn't surprised, and that was the end of our correspondence. Some years later (in Bangkok) I happened to read an article by Sampson in the journal Language, where he included a footnote saying that Nancy Woo's rules for Hokkien tone-sandhi didn't work -- without giving any details or saying who had told him that!