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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."
On behalf of my fellow males I'd like to say:
...shit
They are impurifying our precious bodily fluids!
Woah, little fella, your mom was exposed to PCB's wasn't she!
Got Code?
IT still an almost male-only field. It is simply the most manly of jobs.
Aliens have began the process of converting the majority of the human population to females for their future breeding programmes.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Finally an excuse for my weak body, small penis and my interest for tea. And sadly my limited interest for breasts.
So will the religious right now be against pollution? I guess not, the religious right are also against science.
The choice of playing with dolls, tea sets or cars is CULTURAL and not genetic. This have been proved in numerous scientific researches.
-- dnl
Not only is it destroying our masculinity, but it's making my nails really dirty and I've just had them done :(
Summation 2
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.
welcome our forthcoming female overlords.
Oh wait ...
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.
I played with old electrical transformer as a kid, practically bathing in PCBs. It didn't hurt me any. People see me comin', and it's "Lock up your wives, your daughters and your good silver, Joe's a-comin!"
I'm the roughest, toughest, meanest, leanest, rootin-est, tootin-est, sharp-damned-shootin-est man you ever had the bad luck to meet! I can drink longer, fight harder, shout louder and piss further than any other man in the Yukon, and anyone who doesn't believe me can step outside!
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Too many people on this rock anyways. Imagine the disparity in China, which is, by and large, and enormous polluted sewer.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I doubt we'll ever be dependent on technologies like IVF, since it it safe to assume there is a lot of selection against men who are unable to reproduce, UNLESS we start using IVF on a massive scale.
...named Oprah?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Interesting that the fall in sperm count goes along with the increasing availability of porn - as the 'spilling of seed' increases the number of sperm left per, um, 'dose' goes down. Now that we have the internet I suspect the figure will slip below double digits within a decade.
How can a boy though with one Y-chromosome become a girl? Does the chromosome change??
Should be enough for anybody.
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
Ahem... I blame internet porn!
So what are the odds that this research was funded by some fundamentalist religious group ? No one just randomly sets out on random research, someone has to pay the bill, which usually (always) means there's something to be gained from the results. Today's world is anything but altruistic.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
What this really means is that us old guys have bigger dicks than you nelly boys. Now get off my lawn, pansy.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
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.
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.
If there's any argument that could get red-blooded, meat-eating, women-banging Republican men interested in environmentalism, it's the thought that pollution will turn their sons into gay little girlie men with small dicks.
Next, we need to convince them professional sports and country music lowers sperm count.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
So stop drinking from them, already!
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!
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!
I took one look at the article before I questioned the source. Then I looked at the top of the page and see "Why is religious belief seen as a private eccentricity?" This is one of those religious "news" sites used to promote homophobia, fud, and fear of all things that aren't godly. Go read the rest of the articles on "the independent" and see if you can tell when you started riding in their think tank. Garbage news article posted by garbage poster who doesn't take any time to verify any information. Thanks for linking us OUTRAGEOUS article, you btard.
Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia, and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls as boys...
Well, that explains Russia's booming mail-order bride industry.
This, and many other phenomena occurring due to overpopulation/pollution/etc. didn't make it into the previous story "This Is The Way The World Ends". The ones that did make it were for the most part enormous explosions and such (alien invasion? come on.) Those things are highly unlikely but spectacular. The truth will be spectacular only in retrospect, if there is anyone left to retrospect.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
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.
Polygamy is here, today. Depending on your culture or country, it might be officially sanctioned (muslims if n=4, or mormons)
As Zordak pointed out, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints doesn't do polygamy anymore. Are you thinking of the FLDS church, which formed when the mainstream LDS dropped polygamy?
What environmental legislation did Clinton sign?
\
I dunno, what environmental legislation did that republican congress pass?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
Indeed. No wife on Earth, and virgins promised in heaven leads to ...
main() {1;}
Think about it, I'll call it the "Swedish Problem" wherein the entire country is filled with hot blondes...
I don't know if I would go as far as calling it a "problem".
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Here's a point by point list of environmental legislation that Clinton signed. Just off the top of my head, Clinton signed the law that allowed lands held in the public trust by the federal government to NOT be used for ranching is the winning lease winner choses not to. Clinton also signed the law making federal agency net zero polluters, meaning all waste from federal labs is cleaned up. Clinton signed the bill requiring paper mills to recycle their waste paper. Clinton improved the rules on wetlands conservation. Clinton upgraded many of the pollutant standards in the Clean Water and Clean Air acts. Clinton established the Staircase-Escalante National Monument. He accelerated cleanup of superfund sites. He signed the sustainable fisheries act. He signed the legislation to restore the everglades.... I'm only at 1996 here!
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
I'm amazed it took Slashdot (or anyone) twelve years to report on it. The very first report I wrote in high school - in 1996, as a freshman - was about the feminizing effects of environmental dioxins, and there was a meta-analysis showing the decline of global sperm counts even then. (And enough other data to fill several pages.) I've been warning people ever since, but it's nice to see the media finally catching up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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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.
Imagine how many effects aren't obvious.
Terry Collins: Persuasive Communication about Matters of Great Urgency: Endocrine Disruption: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es800079k
Shanna Swan: Decrease in Anogenital Distance among Male Infants with Prenatal Phthalate Exposure http://www.ehponline.org/members/2005/8100/8100.html
My understanding is that *endocrine disruptors* are the chemical pollutants responsible for these gender shifts. EDs cause shifts in cellular development, which is particularly important because it is a very fragile process. For example, the fundamental difference (from a molecular perspective) between testosterone and estrogen is very subtle. Therefore minor mistakes can cause drastic changes depending upon the timing and dose of exposure. You don't want things to disrupt *how* your maleness cells develop. What scientists are beginning to find is that babies (in the womb) who have exposure to EDs during development are showing significant differences in the finalized male genitals.
Today two types of endocrine disruptors: Bisphenol A and Phthalates are ubiquitous in our lives, namely in vinyl, PVC, and polycarbonate (plastics 3 and 7). Regulatory committees struggle to monitor the impact of these chemicals because of their ubiquitous application and the tiny size of what constitutes an *exposure* (something like 4 parts per trillion). Supposedly there have been lots of discussions in the scientific community about EDs since these findings started to come out in the mid 90s. However, its been a lot more talk than it has research and action.
But I can't sell everybody short. There was a big Nalgene bottle recall last year for this exact reason. The state of California has banned EDs from pesticides. Companies like BornFree make baby products without EDs. It feels like its coming, awareness just isn't there yet.
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?
Unaviable ... they can't be made to fly? :)
First, that's an average. Second, a hell of a lot of sperm don't make it.
Even with 150 million, conception is definitely not a sure thing. With half that many, it's harder still. With a quarter as many... you get the picture.
It only takes one. But that one has to make it, upstream, to a certain place, at a certain time.
I haven't seen anyone comment yet about an interesting angle to this story - what the author considers to be the main source of the problem: "Half the male fish in British lowland rivers have been found to be developing eggs in their testes; in some stretches all male roaches have been found to be changing sex in this way. Female hormones - largely from the contraceptive pills which pass unaltered through sewage treatment - are partly responsible, while more than three-quarters of sewage works have been found also to be discharging demasculinising man-made chemicals. Feminising effects have now been discovered in a host of freshwater fish species as far away as Japan and Benin, in Africa, and in sea fish in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, Osaka Bay in Japan and Puget Sound on the US west coast."
5 is right out?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...