Fashion victims: How skinny jeans lower sperm count

By Gardy Chacha | 8yrs ago | 3 min read

Made of spandex, or denim, the trousers wrinkle on release – like crumpled paper. It may be tough times economically, but that still doesn’t justify why the manufacturers use very little linen on them. Personally, I loathe them. They remind me of an elephant’s snout. Don’t get me wrong – the animals of course deserve protection against poachers.

The trousers, I am told, requires that a lady eats well if she hopes to pull them up to the waist. My first reaction was: “Why all the hassle? Why squeeze through something that gives a lot of discomfort and nothing in return?”

But then again, I am just a scribe; what do I know. A girlfriend (not of that type) offered that girls want to feel sexy. As you may all guess, in 2015, sexy is a tight thing that accentuates the derrière and curves out well pronounced hips, meaning the flesh is in a constant tug of war with the tensile strength of fabric.

Skinny jeans, they call them. They epitomise haute couture in this century (have you ever doubted the levels of sobriety when fashion chaps declare anything to be ‘stylish’?). Maybe it’s just me.

Well, the so called stylish skinny jeans would be the reason an Australian woman was wheeled into the Emergency Room. The 35-year-old spent four days in hospital on a drip after her skinny jeans caused her to collapse in agony, CNN reported.

Helping a family member to move houses, she had been squatting “for a protracted period of time” emptying cupboards while wearing the tight trousers. The jeans became increasingly tight and uncomfortable through the day. Later in the evening, she reported feeling numb in her feet and couldn’t walk. That is when she tripped and fell. It is only four hours later that she would be found, lying on the ground. At the hospital, doctors had to cut off her pants to remove them from her distended legs.

That is not a situation you want to find yourself in – as a Kenyan. Australia may have state-of-the-art healthcare, but we don’t. Plus, what are the chances that the Good Samaritan who picks you from the roadside will offer the right first aid. Ripping the trousers off may be misconstrued as sexual harassment.

“It is only a matter of time before the leg could be declared dead (and then an amputation follows),” offered Dr Thomas Kimber, an Associate Professor at University of Adelaide.

Speaking on CNN, Dr Kimber said that prolonged squatting (while wearing tight trousers) may reduce blood supply on calf muscles. “When blood supply is cut, and the nerves are pressed, the muscles lose function,” he said.

The resulting condition is referred to as ‘compartment syndrome.’ The blood supply to the deprived areas can be reestablished once the trousers are cut off from the patient – assuming that nerve and tissue damage are yet to occur.

Compartment syndrome, the medic explained, occurs when the tightness of trousers combines with postures that force constriction of blood vessels and nerves.

However, skinny jeans have previously been linked to meralgia parasthetica – numbness caused by pressure on a nerve running from your pelvis to the thigh. Individual occurrences, spaced out in length of time, may not portend serious danger. However, doctors warn that repeated episodes can cause permanent nerve damage. One more thing: the tighter the trousers, the deadlier it is.

In men, skinny jeans have been determined to cause more harm than just compartment syndrome, such as low sperm count or infertility.

A survey of 2,000 British men, whose results were published in 2012, revealed that one in 10 men reported side-effects as a result of wearing skinny jeans. The study, published in the medical journal Human Reproduction, also concluded that men who often wear tight briefs had a low number of healthy sperms.