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