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."
On behalf of my fellow males I'd like to say:
...shit
They are impurifying our precious bodily fluids!
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
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
...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.
Should be enough for anybody.
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.
IANOB but in the womb at some point there is a trigger of testosterone that causes the male characteristics to appear. If that trigger fails or for some reason the testosterone doesn't do its job, the foetus remains in the default mode which is female.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
You are sentenced to death by snoo snoo for that comment.
The game.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
The EPA has, so far, failed utterly.
You must not have been around before the EPA was established. I grew up in Cahokia, Il and you had to drive past Monsanto and Cerro Copper (and some other factories) through Sauget to get to St. Louis.
You had to roll your windows up driving past Monsanto, even if it was 95F and you had no air conditioning. The air would burn your eyes and lungs and throat if you didn't; you literally could not breathe. I don't know how anyone worked there, but I imagine the cancer rate among Monsanto workers was sky high.
Runoff into the creek by it (it was named "Dead Creek iirc) polluted it so badly the creek caught fire one summer.
All the vegetation from Collinsville to Dupo was sickly looking. There were no frogs or fireflies (some toads). Today the vegetation is healthy and green, it doesn't stink driving past Monsanto, and there are fireflies almost every summer.
So I wouldn't say the EPA has failed, although it could certainly be a whole lot better.
Free Martian Whores!
Unaviable ... they can't be made to fly? :)