What Steven Bartlett gets wrong about male fertility
The Diary of a CEO presenter says society should find a way to help incels pass on their genes. What about men with consenting partners?
I’m not the biggest fan of the Diary of a CEO podcast, partly because of its shouty headlines, and partly because of its presenter’s inability to cross-examine his guests. This week he’s come under fire for his suggestion that women should be forced to help men who “won’t pass on their genes” to procreate. But, I thought, what about the men who do have consenting partners, and still can’t?
This edition of the newsletter is free to everyone! But if you’d like to support us by becoming a paying subscriber, click the button below. It’s £3.50 a month.
Emma xxx
Say what you like about Steven Bartlett, but he must be doing something right. The presenter has rocketed into mainstream recognition in recent years, after his Diary of a CEO (DOAC to its friends) podcast stormed into the upper echelons of the podcast charts.
Is the green-eyed monster slightly involved when I say that I’m not a fan? Bartlett has released almost 800 episodes of the podcast, which originally talked about business. But recent episodes have covered everything from feminism to how to improve your microbiome. And all of them! Have! Lots of! Shouty exclamation marks! In their titles! I don’t love it, largely because there isn’t much cross-examination going on. It’s generally just him agreeing with increasingly red pill-coded guests.
Bartlett is no stranger to controversy, but in recent weeks he’s been pulled up for an episode he released about six months ago, speaking to a psychiatrist called Dr K, where the pair are discussing young men’s addiction to smutty videos (alas, if I used the actual p-word here, I would be sent straight to spam. So “smut” it is).
It’s actually quite an interesting conversation – Dr K in particular appears to have some interesting explanations for how incel and red pill culture has developed online, particularly since the pandemic. But then Bartlett asks the question that has enraged half the internet: should society “do something” about men – incels – who will never pass on their genes? The unspoken second half to that question is: should we force women to procreate with men who can’t get girlfriends?
I mean, it’s not a hard question to answer. No, obviously. Even Dr K is clearly uncomfortable with the question: he obfuscates, but Bartlett doubles down and asks again – twice more. Should we though, he says. Dr K looks uncomfortable. “Err. What is society?” is his response.
But listen, here’s a lesson I learned from the Handmaid’s Tale: even if we force women to procreate with men, it doesn’t always just happen like that. The problem in “society” is not, let’s be honest, that women aren’t consenting to procreate with men who make zero effort to attract them – it’s that many men who do have a loving, or at least consenting, partner with whom they want to procreate are also unable to procreate.
As Sean Greenaway, aka Knackered Knackers, aka one of the founders of the Nexys Fertility support community, points out, Bartlett’s conversation “perpetuates the notion that men can just turn their fertility on and off like a tap, and that our fertility doesn’t decline, isn’t at risk – which, as you and I know, is absolute nonsense,” he says.
Even now, infertility is regarded as a women’s health issue. “Very often, the male partner is referred to the andrologist only when no female causes for infertility emerge from the long, complex (and sometimes invasive) workup on the woman,” reports this paper from 2024.
It doesn’t help that we see a lot of older celebrities having children. “Mick Jagger was having kids when he was like 70 – you look at that and go, yeah, that’s cool. I’ve got loads of time in the bank.” Greenaway’s point is that Bartlett “missed an opportunity for education. Even if it was just a sentence.”
In the episode, Dr K shrugs that women now “don’t need men” to have children. “You just go to the sperm bank,” he says.
But as we continually say, non-traditional routes are tough, expensive ways to have children. Obviously, forcing women to procreate with men without their consent is an insane idea. If Bartlett truly wants to address the declining fertility rate, addressing the problem of male infertility might be a better way of doing it.
Oh, and another thing
This week Gabby has been writing about the Oscar-nominated short film Jane Austen’s Period Drama, which is a period drama about periods. As she writes, a film about periods feels “brave. But should it?” Perhaps not. Read more at The Persistent.
Injections are one of the worst parts of IVF – there’s something viscerally unpleasant about inflicting even a small amount of pain on yourself. Now scientists are developing a light-activated microneedle patch which could deliver hormones painlessly. Read more at Live Science
Thanks for reading! Our paid subscribers get weekly emails containing actionable advice and support. To subscribe, click the button below.