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Chemical Pollution Is Destroying Masculinity
myrdos2 writes "A host of common chemicals is feminizing males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people. Many have been identified as 'endocrine disruptors' or gender-benders because they interfere with hormones. Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia, and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls as boys, which may offer a clue to the mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys. It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminized genitals. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone. And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per milliliter of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years."
The choice of playing with dolls, tea sets or cars is CULTURAL and not genetic. This have been proved in numerous scientific researches.
-- dnl
So will the religious right now be against pollution? I guess not, the religious right are also against science.
Thats not entirely true. They are against science that does not promote a given point they are trying to make. If it happens to agree with something they like the sound of, they generally quote findings as if the conclusion was known to them for quite some time.
So in this case it would constitute proof pollution is Gods punishment for everyone being gay.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Trust me. I'm married. You wouldn't. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happily married. But one thing being married has taught me -- women are complex, emotional creatures who need a whole lot of care and feeding (well, actually, I knew that before I got married, but you learn it better after you're married). Taking care of one spouse is difficult enough.
What you want is polyamory, not polygamy. That way you get to have sex with the other women, and you only have take care of one. ;)
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That depends on a lot of other factors besides government encouragement.
See it like this: Polygamy is here, today. Depending on your culture or country, it might be officially sanctioned (muslims if n=4, or mormons) or not (most of the west, anything else that's catholic). But reality is that it simply takes different forms. In the west, for example, the rich manager simply has an affair. More often with knowledge of his wife than you'd think.
The common factor is that requires the ability to financially support two wives. That's why in muslim countries, even though they can have up to four wives, the vast majority only have one. They simply can't afford a second one. And that's why in western society, a lot of rich men do have two (or more) wives, going by different official terms, because they can afford to.
So - you still happy? :-)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The religious right is against millions-of-years-ago storytelling that masquerades as hard science. As we all should be.
As opposed to thousands-of-years-ago storytelling that they take as gospel?
It goes deeper than that though - "attractive" meant "the guy who could kill or maim his rivals".
Look at animal species that are polygamous - even the "docile" herbivores engage in violence as the males compete for females. In species that engage in pair-bonding, violence is much less common.
Monogamy (enforced by law/church) was a way of reducing societal violence.
No you wouldn't, because you can only have sex so many times in a given day.
Two words: Coolidge Effect
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The XY zygotes could fail to develop into males (as described in other replies which actually understand biology), or they could simply spontaneously abort -- in which case, the parents would try again.
If XY has a higher failure rate, then from a demographic standpoint there is a batch of babies that "should have" been males, but were born females because the male embryos failed. In this case, it wouldn't be about one physical baby that should have been male, but was born female -- but one kind of "demographic slot" should have been filled by a male baby, but got filled by a female baby instead.
<irony>
It's clear from your neutral, non-emotionally charged and logical words and arguments that you are not at all pushing an agenda.
</irony>
Having been raised in a deeply catholic country and having studied science at an University along with some colleagues and even teachers which were both scientists AND Christians it never ceases to amaze me how the US seems to produce scores and scores of uneducated, anti-education, ignorant and even downright dumb "believers", incapable of reconciling religion with science.
Quick hint: it's perfectly possible to believe both in God and in the Big-Bang - they're not at all mutually exclusive as long as you look at the bible as a book full of allegories instead of trying to believe that the English translation is literally the word of Jesus.
The real downside is that women who live togather tend to have synchronised menstral cicles. Imagine your pain on that one weekend off when you get home to find 5 wives and nobody to screw.
Or worse. 5 wives with PMS all bent on "discussing" your failures with you.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
That really is it in a nutshell.
A lot of American atheists are fighting against that literal minded Fundamentalist thinking... and to be fair, the cultural environment has an awful lot of that. It was a a REAL eye-opener for me (years and years into my mush agnosticism) when I read an interview with some Anglican Bishop where he says something like "well, of course the stories about Jesus aren't literally true..."- that a high ranking member of the clergy of a very established Christian group could even say that took me aback.
So then you get into, why believe at all? Is it a pragmatic, useful stance for moral guidance? Or is there an inescapable supernatural element? And - and this is crucial - are the *other* books full of allegories about equally as true, or do you think that one specific one or group is special in its connection to the truth?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
That is absolutely not true. It has been long established they you can not "Treat" Homosexuality by playing with hormones. It had been tried for years with no real success. The "Treatment" the medical community used to give homosexuals was absolutely inhumane. If constant does of mind altering drugs, hormones, electroshock "therapy", and physical and verbal abuse can not change a persons sexual preference I'm of the opinion that nothing will.
Yeah, sorry for not differentiating the various small sects within one group of a specific subtype of one of the many abrahamic religions. Couldn't bother to. :-)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
As a gay man, I have already done some of this research, and I can tell you without a doubt that gay men are NOT physically more feminine in general than straight men. There are masculine and feminine men in both camps, and I don't see any masculine/feminine bias in either direction. And there is certainly no bias towards a smaller penis size in gay men.
I think the reason gay men act feminine at times has more to do with them letting go of the macho image that straight men try to portray, especially in the United States, which is why European men are often accused of "acting gay"; because they don't worry about acting "macho" as much as American men do. Europeans in general don't have such a deep seated fear of being branded as gay. This hasn't always been the case in the United States either. Watch some old B&W movies and note how much more "gay" the male actors tend to be than they do today.