“MOBILE phones are cooking men's sperm,” screamed Monday's headlines, over ghastly warnings about the drooping cell counts and flaccid motility levels caused by the over-use of mobiles and, in particular, by the male fondness for carrying said items in the front pockets of their trousers.
The research was published in the journal Reproductive BioMedicine, which you won't find at RS McColl but you will find on the reading lists of the world's top fertility experts. In other words, it's kosher.
It's also rather ironic given the, er, stimulating effect a phone with a camera seems to have on a great deal of men, particularly those getting-on-for-middle-aged ones whose job description says Politician or Celebrity or Used To Play For Chelsea. As the bishop would have said to the actress if he hadn't been frantically deleting his Twitter posts: “You're only ever one mini-bar blowout away from a tabloid sexting scandal”.
Anyway, there you have it. More men are carrying phones on their person and, as a result, more men are suffering the consequences in terms of their ability to reproduce. In macroeconomic terms, that affects national birth rates and that in turn affects virtually everything except the weather. But maybe that too.
Of course the fashion industry doesn't help much here. It's been about a decade since they started adding mobile phone-shaped pockets onto everything, and many brands of jeans now offer designs with phone receptacles built in. One American label even makes them with a special hidden pocket for spare battery packs, so there's no excuse for ever having the thing turned off.
And don't think things are any better when you're out of your clothes: American designer Tom Turner has produced a pair of swimming trunks with a dry bag pocket so even when you're splashing around in the sea you can still be on call.
More recently a new idea has surfaced which is taking the whole thing one terrible step further: “wearable tech”. These are garments which have all sorts of electrical devices built in to them in an Internet of Things sort of way. The logical end point to all this is that pretty soon even M&S will be selling trousers so digitally connected and microwave-tastic that the phone won't be in your pocket, it will be the pocket.
Mind you there is hope, because it's only a matter of time before the distaff side cottons on to this. Transistor radios are supposed to have gone out of fashion in India in the 1960s because they were offered as an inducement to men to have vasectomies. The popularity of mobile phones could fall away for the same reason if the first thing a woman starts to look for in a potential partner is not how clean his fingernails are or whether he puts the toilet seat down but how close his two favourite handheld devices are to each other.
So here's a thought: forget the return of vinyl, let's see the return of the payphone. Want to give a girl a ring? In the future, real men will do it in a call box.
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