Chemicals in personal care and household products typically raise more concerns among women, because they tend to use more of them and studies have shown a risk of passign the effects on to unborn children. But environmental activists say that men should also think hard about chemicals and their reproductive health. And they're trying to hammer home the message, using, for example, sports analogies.

Members of the Alliance for a Clean and Healthy Maine perform a skit highlighting dangers chemicals used in household and personal care products.

"Pass Interference! The chemical phthalates are causing hormone havoc!" This is the set of a skit that the Alliance for a Clean and Healthy Maine is filming at a Portland food store, a skit that they plan to post online. Steven Taylor of the advocacy group, the Environmental Health Strategy Center, wears a referee outfit as he storms in on a handful of guys watching sports.

He chastises one of them for putting on deodorant. "Many personal care products like body sprays and lotions contain phthalates, which cause hormone havoc by mimicking estrogen. This can threaten reproductive health, especially in men. That can mean altered genital development, small or abnormal testes, undescended testicles, lower sperm counts, even sperm that is damaged and can't swim properly."

Twenty-three-year-old Andrew Richter is the actor who is applying the deodorant. He's with the organization Boys to Men, a mentoring group for adolescent boys in Portland.

He says that young men need to have a heightened awareness about chemical build-up in the body. "I think guys tend to think they are invincible sometimes, and just the chemicals that they put into their body are not going to affect them, when in reality they're not going to affect them today but they're going to affect them down the road."

Richter says he keeps an eye out on labeling when he's shopping. "There's a lot of products out there, body washings, body sprays, toothpastes, that have all these chemicals in them that you would never know, but there's a whole multitude that advertise themselves as being BPA-free and those are the products I look for."

When Richter says BPA, he's referring to Bisphenol-A, a chemical found in reusable water bottles and canned foods that's been linked to decreased sperm and testosterone production.

But the manufacturers who use these chemicals dismiss the research as inconclusive, even as they eliminate ingredients such as BPA from certain products.

"I think it's more a reaction to adverse publicity -- I think one of the real misperceptions, especially for Bisphenol-A, is that there is somehow an adverse effect associated with it," says John Bailey, chief scientist with the Personal Care Products Council. He points out that federal regulators have deemed the current level of chemicals in products as safe.

Bailey says activists are trying to alarm men by bringing up reproductive problems. "Sex sells. It's a hook that is used and works in other venues but I think in his case it's also the hook that says that sex scares and they're trying to use this to scare people and get attention to what they think is a public health issue."

Bailey says activists can't blame low sperm count, for example, on chemical exposure. "It could be lots of other things, not the least of which would be lifestyle, obesity. To say that this is being caused by your deodorant or aftershave or something like that is really missing an awful lot of possibilities that maybe we should be focusing on."

But concerns raised about hormone-disrupting chemicals by groups such as the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, have only bolstered activists.

Matt Prindiville is with the Natural Resources Council of Maine, one of the dozens of groups that are part of the Alliance for a Clean and Healthy Maine. "When you've got these mainstream medical societies and you've got mainstream peer-reviewed scientific literature saying it's time to make the switch from these toxic chemicals to safer ones than I think the regulators need to pay attention and do that."

The alliance says it hopes that the Maine Legislature will make sure state regulators have the resources needed to implement a law that identifies the most dangerous chemicals in consumer products and require manufacturers to use safer alternatives. It also wants Maine's two Republican senators to support federal legislation that would require that more chemicals be tested.