Slashdot Mirror
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."
Y-The Last Man
Go read it before they turn it into a horrible movie.
Y: The Last Man is a comic book series by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, about the only man to survive the mysterious simultaneous death of every male mammal on Earth. The series was published in sixty issues by Vertigo, and collected in a series of 10 paperback volumes. The series' covers were primarily by J. G. Jones and Massimo Carnevale.
So will the religious right now be against pollution? I guess not, the religious right are also against science.
Xenoestrogens. Look it up.
I've read a number of articles in the last few years regarding a widespread decline in men's testosterone levels in industrialized nations.
The difference in men over the last 30+ years isn't just a cultural shift, it's likely physiological as well.
If it was ever to be the case where polygamy became the norm because of the lack of males, nothing would change!
Womens selection criteria would still be the same except that now men who had previously been unaviable are avialable.
If anything this reduces your chances.
No, it means males are now competing for females WITH females.
Have you ever considered the possibility that the cultural difference may be predicated on a genetic/physiological base? Say, culture states that girls do X therefore I, identifying as a girl, will also do X? And, if physiology allows for obvious physical dimorphism, why should there be no behavioural dimophism? It's clear enough in animal studies and from farming. Check out the word 'freemartin' in relation to cattle sometime. Humans are fundamentally different why?
I became fully aware of this problem in the past year, after the birth of my son. I think that the guilt for children contamination is shared by:
- the chemical companies
- the "green" anti-chemical organizations
- the governments and other regulation boards.
In a nutshell, my wife an myself gradually outlawed most of the creams that are needed to avoid nappy rush, most washing gels, and we even changed the bottles once in order to reduce exposition to bad chemicals (BPA).
Unfortunately, every step in this direction was unnecessarily difficult. The problem is that information comes from 2 sources: chemical companies and the "green" organizations. Both sources tend to be extreme in conclusions, and the government (even in "socialist" France) does not play its moderating role.
On one hand, plastics and cosmetics producers would have me use their products even if they are outright toxic. OTOH, the "green" organizations would have me re-build my house in a very expensive way. At some point I started to suspect that environmentalist propaganda is used to promote some luxury products, such as linoleum flooring (5-10 times more expensive than PVC).
Yes you're right the monogamy is much better if all the first tier attractive males become taken then women will reduce their selection criteria and select second tier etc.
This is the realization that church leaders (read religious nerds) came up with when they outlawed polygamy. If someone like them was ever gonna get some the attractive males had to be unavailable first.
How can a boy though with one Y-chromosome become a girl? Does the chromosome change??
Sorry, your understanding of biology won't be tolerated here.
Just kidding - sometimes I wonder how the people who publish these articles even graduated high school. For what it's worth, some of the studies they cite have been demonstrated to have no statistical validity, including the ones that claim that exposure to a particular chemical (phthalates) cause guys to have small junk. Also, they try to make these unifying claims that "chemicals" cause these problems, when each chemical has very different properties that affect people in different ways. The stuff on PCBs is solid, but then they get vague.
I'm all for less pollution, but I don't think it helps the cause when the people leading the charge seem to not understand chemistry or biology very well.
Precisely.
I went to Elizabethtown College (PA) and even though there were 2 girls for every guy, I still found it difficult to gain entrance into that "sanctuary" known as the female dorm room. I think the women tended to ignore the man and find comfort in each other.
(ducks a spitball)
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Well if you have multiple wives, they can listen to each other gossip, and they don't need to rely on just your ear. So having that extended family might actually be beneficial.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
I'm a 56 year old geezer. When I was a kid, I never saw a man with boobs. Never.
I thought it was a sign of my aging that women my age looked masculine, and young men look feminine. I've been chasing women twenty years my junior for that reason.
I also noticed that people's heads are larger than they used to be. And there seem to be a lot more homosexuals and lesbians, although that may be that they've just come out of the closet.
What I want to know is if we're going to do anything about it?
Free Martian Whores!
I just watched a House rerun last night on the USA channel with exactly this topic.
A fifteen year-old supermodel punched a chick on the catwalk and then passed out (but didn't, because she was aware).
They made a ton of dialog relate to just how perfect this girl was, with her "perky, all natural breasts" and her "perfect heart-shaped butt" and so on.
They narrowed it down to her having cancer, causing anterograde amnesia and short term memory loss as well as involuntary body spasms, cataplexy and severe aggression. When they did the scans for cancer, they couldn't find anything. When they looked for ovarian cancer, the ovaries weren't enlarged in any way, "if anything, they're undersized."
House has his epiphany when he's faced with a pregnant woman whose husband has grown breasts, can't sleep because his teeth hurt and is experiencing morning sickness. He has already written the husband off because it's "just couvade's" - sympathetic pregnancy. He comments to the wife that she has "the perfect husband, a woman."
He explains to the supermodel and her dad that in the womb, testes are supposed to a) turn into ovaries for woman, b) descend for men. With a certain form of hermaphoroditism neither happens and the body is effectively immune to the effects of testosterone. The result: 'the perfect woman.' As such, she was really a boy, and he had a tumor on one of his testicles.
It's rare, but you can get things like Swyer syndrome, where an apparently normal girl gets to be around sixteen and has never had a period or other signs of puberty. Examination reveals the girl has no functional ovaries and actually has a Y chromosome.
(This has other implications, so far as I can see. When something's more complicated to make, that means there are more ways for it to go wrong...)
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Well not totally sonless, but many more girls are being born into rural areas than two generations ago.
I come from a long line of farmers, though my fathers side got out in the '50s my mothers side all still own/run farms. We're not talking little hobby farms either.
I spent a lot of time on those farms in my childhood and one thing I always remember was the massive sheds full of drums of toxic chemicals for use in various sheep and cattle dips, pesticides and vaccines. We're talking industrial scale with thousands of litres a year being used. Not to mention the big piles of petrochemcal fertilizers, lime and other bits and pieces laying around in the open.
Now the interesting thing, 90% of my cousins on my mothers side are female. And I have a LOT of cousins. In fact both of my mothers brothers had four girls and only one boy EACH (8 girls to 2 boys). Now two data points does not mean much, but the thing is this is now extremely common out there and most of the families that I know of in the district now have families where daughters vastly outnumber sons. It's widely known and occasionally discussed, and it's only become so since my mothers generation. In her fathers generation it was a roughly even split. The general consensus is it's the toxic chemicals that gained popularity in the 50's that farmers are regularly exposed to (read drenched in).
I remember when I was about 13 helping to dip sheep for the first time (kills all the bugs in the wool, basically the sheep get a high pressure shower with some sort of chemical concoction). Well for that whole week anytime I was anywhere near the spray, when I got even a whiff of the overspray if I was lucky it'd just be burning eyes, if I got a good dose I'd be running for the toilet, it was literally that toxic. The men operating the machine were drenched in it.
I dunno, what environmental legislation did that republican congress pass?
Tax credits for biofuels, including research funding for non-corn based ethanol production - like switchgrass. Increased funding for solar and wind research and tax credits for the same. Tax credits for the purchase of hybrid cars. Also worked to open the way for new nuclear power plants.
This is my sig.
My daughter loves pink and Hello Kitty, but she loves cars and train sets too. I think it's more about not restricting her access to boys toys than anything else.
My mother in law was kind of upset when I bought her a train table... she thought I was pushing my toys onto her!
GPL Deconstructed
I have also seen such events, but conversely I have seen the opposite
Little girls playing with cars, trucks what not and little boys playing with barbies and toy houses. So my Anecdotal Evidence trumps yours.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's rare, but you can get things like Swyer syndrome, where an apparently normal girl gets to be around sixteen and has never had a period or other signs of puberty. Examination reveals the girl has no functional ovaries and actually has a Y chromosome.
This came up in the... Barcelona Olympics? I forget exactly, but there was a woman runner and during the course of testing, they discovered she's genetically male. They decided to let her run in the women's races, despite that. I read about it in my Child Developmental Psych textbook (which is at home, alas). It would make a great anecdote for that wikipedia article you cited.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
I took a few Genetics and Biology courses in college. The thing that shocked me is the fact that anyone ever actually gets pregnant in the first place, let alone carries a fetus to term.
Between 50 and 80% of all eggs that are fertilized are spontaneously aborted, and only about 10% of women who have that happen are aware of the miscarriage. Fertilized eggs, of course, represent a fairly high barrier to entry in the first place: both the sperm and the egg have to have the correct genetic material and have it relatively stable, the egg has to actually be released at the right time, the sperm have to be able to swim and have a functioning acrosome, etc. I think one of the things I learned was that, on average, it takes something like 20 attempts on average during the correct time in a woman's cycle to generate a fetus that won't spontaneously abort in the first month. (Law of averages, of course--some more, some less.)
If we were just getting by on 150M/mL, let's drop that down to half. Now only 1 in 40 attempts won't be flushed out with the next cycle...say nothing of later miscarriages.
Freaky stuff, huh? I guess the only way it works is that there's so many of us, having sex all the time.
Look at phytoestrogens instead. The most common sources are soy products and flaxseed meal (which has about twice as much as soy does).
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/04phytoestrogens.htm
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/articles/phyto1.htm
Anecdote: flaxseed meal is increasingly used in pet food. When I was feeding my kennel a diet with a significant amount of flaxseed meal, I had a marked increase of certain types of birth defects (mainly some degree of failure of midline closure) AND a 50% miss rate on breedings. Since I've gone to a flax-free diet, the birth defects have gone away, and my conception rate is back to the species norm of 85-90%.
(Credential: I have almost 40 years professional experience in dogs.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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).
The African Anglican/Episcopalian churches tolerate polygamy in converts, so things are looking up for Christians with polygamous leanings.
1. Get a few wives
2. Join their church
3. Pro^H^H^H Get into Heaven anyway.
reminds me of the movie A Boy and His Dog
Has anyone actually thought that this might actually spawn Industrial Strength Lesbianism?
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
Assuming all a child has is a stick to play with, then the question becomes how does a child play with that stick? It is really all about role play, and role play by definition requires a role model. However, that does not mean that boys and girls are not naturally attracted to different things, given the choice.
He explains to the supermodel and her dad that in the womb, testes are supposed to a) turn into ovaries for woman, b) descend for men. With a certain form of hermaphoroditism neither happens and the body is effectively immune to the effects of testosterone. The result: 'the perfect woman.' As such, she was really a boy, and he had a tumor on one of his testicles.
You were fine and actually accurate all the way up to here. The disease that she suffered from is called "CAIS" (Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome). It is not the testes or the ovaries that turn into the other. Rather germ cells (as in "germination" not the other germ) turn into gonad stripes, which then turn into either testes under the presence of the SRY gene, or ovaries in the event that the SRY gene is not there.
At this point, the SRY gene is irrelevant. The fetus develops folds that are scrotal-labial folds, and a clitoral-penile mound, and has a separate urethra that exits within the scrotal-labial folds. Under the effects of testosterone, the scrotal-labial folds fuse, creating the scrotum, and the clitoral-penile mound lengthens, and grows, as well as integrating the urethra into it. Insufficient testosterone will produce female genitalia.
Internally, the Anti-Müllerian Hormone is responsible for preventing the development of the uterus, fallopian tubes, and upper vagina. In order to have the SRY gene yet end up with a full vagina, uterus, and fallopian tubes would require two entirely random mutations of the fetus, both of which are extremely rare.
The inconsistencies in the story on House in the face of medical fact:
No doctor would ever call that patient a "guy". Of course, House is a very mean spirited person, as well he was trying to keep her Dad from having sexual intercourse with her. Basically, House was being an ass... this is consistent with House.
She would not have been aggressive. That would be a response to the androgens flooding her system from her testes affecting her brain's aggression receptors, the same as if she were on steroids. (Exactly as if she were on steroids.) However, if she had enough androgen response to respond to the testosterone in her brain's aggression centers, she would have had significant muscular improvement.
The second they looked for uterine cancer they would have noticed that she didn't have a uterus... and in fact, screw that, the first time Dr Cameron would have put a septum to her vagina to look for cervical cancer, she would have noticed, there wasn't one! (Unless, again, this person was afflicted with 2 extremely rare diseases resulting from random spontaneous mutations, and cancer)
None of this would ever affect anything with regard to her being a "woman" or a "man". She still would have a natural vagina. She would still be a natural female, and was so her entire life, she would never have been a guy. Her birth certificate would still say she was a woman, and her passport and all documentation from her birth to forever would continue to state that she was a female.
Of course, it makes it much more interesting to have the asshole House walk in and call her a boy... it's provocative, as was intentionally planned by House... it's offensive, it's hostile, it's inflammatory. Again, nothing new for House. However, it's extremely not helpful for people who are actually suffering from these diseases to be told that they're guys.
As well, the Olympics had to make a ruling about as to if these women could compete in the woman's division. When they wanted to do genetic tests, it would mean that these people would be forced to compete in the men's division. Meanwhile, while typical women have less testosterone and thus less ability to develop muscular mass (men are naturally on steroids compared to women) they would be placing these women with an even SMALLER rate of testosterone response to compete with people who are all essentially on steroids.
The OIC eventually settled on, "as long as the individual's hormone levels are consistent with a woman, they are allowed to compete in the women's division."
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS