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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."

15 of 773 comments (clear)

  1. Pollution = More Gay Men by purpledinoz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So will the religious right now be against pollution? I guess not, the religious right are also against science.

    1. Re:Pollution = More Gay Men by Fallingcow · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Wouldn't a study of the average size of the penises of gay men help to isolate the variables here?

      If they are significantly smaller than the average in the general population, and smaller penis size is a consequence of exposure to PCB, then the case would be strengthened for male homosexuality being caused in large part by these chemicals. If there's not much of a difference, then it might be the cause in only a minority of cases.

      (No, I'm not volunteering to help "test" gay men's penises. Let me know when it's time to start running doing some studies of lesbians, though. Since the masculine ones might also be related to this chemical, we'll need a control of very feminine lesbians. I'll take care of that part.)

  2. Unfortunately, in reality most likely different. by msgmonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Cultural influence by VoidCrow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  4. Re:Unfortunately, in reality most likely different by Lostlander · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:That sucks by theaveng · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)

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  6. Re:That sucks by theaveng · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  7. About time somebody noticed by mcgrew · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:About time somebody noticed by kabocox · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

      If it was "discovered" that a huge percentage of homosexual behavior was directly caused by chemical pollution, I don't know which community would go crazy the most, the homosexuals or the religious folks. You'd suddenly find the vast religious right pushing for environmental controls that even current greens would think are extreme. You'd have the parents of many homosexuals start suing and winning the nearest chemical plants that may have been at fault for causing their child to become homosexual. I think that the homosexual community would panic more than go crazy. You'd find a large portion of them just vanishing back into the closet.

  8. Re:Y-chromosome by Emb3rz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  9. Males are more complicated in terms of engineering by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The 'default' body plan for mammals is female. Left to itself, an embryo will develop (mostly) female unless specific steps are taken at specific times. Developing a male means (a) suppressing female development paths, and (b) initiating male development paths. (And yes, those are two separate steps. Sometimes (a) doesn't happen even though (b) does, and you get hermaphrodism.

    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...)

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    PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
  10. Farmers have been sonless for a generation by twostix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  11. Re:The right is against pollution.. by tjstork · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  12. Re:Cultural influence by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!

  13. Phytoestrogens by Reziac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.)

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