Chemical Pollution Is Destroying Masculinity 773
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."
That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
On behalf of my fellow males I'd like to say:
...shit
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
Women will get so desperate they can't resist any male guy! My plan is all falling to place. Muahahahahaa.
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Informative)
This makes me think about a period after a war with Brazil and Argentina when Paraguay's government actually encouraged polygamy.
I could be happy in a place like that.
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
Polygamy? Most man can hardly tolerate one wife!
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
You think tolerating multiple wives is difficult, try more than one mother in law!
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
no problem, just go for sisters!
Re:That sucks (Score:4, Informative)
And Latin American cultures (and many other ones as well) are where mother-in-laws living in the house with you is the norm. (Shudders)
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
The real downside is that women who live togather tend to have synchronised menstral cicles. Imagine your pain on that one weekend off when you get home to find 5 wives and nobody to screw.
Or worse. 5 wives with PMS all bent on "discussing" your failures with you.
Re:That sucks (Score:4, Funny)
That's why you never marry them!! If you have to...only live with them for a bit..that's like leasing with an option to buy.
But, you can still get out in time so that you don't lose half your stuff when you decide to 'upgrade' to a newer model.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
No you wouldn't, because you can only have sex so many times in a given day.
Two words: Coolidge Effect
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
Coolidge effect: The term comes from an old joke, according to which President Calvin Coolidge and his wife allegedly visited a poultry farm. During the tour, Mrs. Coolidge inquired of the farmer how his farm managed to produce so many fertile eggs with such a small number of roosters. The farmer proudly explained that his roosters performed their duty dozens of times each day.
"Perhaps you could point that out to Mr. Coolidge," pointedly replied the First Lady.
The President, overhearing the remark, asked the farmer, "Does each rooster service the same hen each time?"
"No," replied the farmer, "there are many hens for each rooster."
"Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge," replied the President.
From the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust me. I'm married. You wouldn't. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happily married. But one thing being married has taught me -- women are complex, emotional creatures who need a whole lot of care and feeding (well, actually, I knew that before I got married, but you learn it better after you're married). Taking care of one spouse is difficult enough.
What you want is polyamory, not polygamy. That way you get to have sex with the other women, and you only have take care of one. ;)
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
women are complex, emotional creatures who need a whole lot of care and feeding
Oh come on, your wife isn't that fat.
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
women are complex, emotional creatures
She's forced you to watch a lot of Oprah, hasn't she.
Re:That sucks (Score:4, 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.
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
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). But reality is that it simply takes different forms. In the west, for example, the rich manager simply has an affair. More often with knowledge of his wife than you'd think.
The common factor is that requires the ability to financially support two wives. That's why in muslim countries, even though they can have up to four wives, the vast majority only have one. They simply can't afford a second one. And that's why in western society, a lot of rich men do have two (or more) wives, going by different official terms, because they can afford to.
So - you still happy? :-)
Re:That sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Mormons have not had plural marriages in well over a century.
Re:That sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mormons, or FLDS? (Score:5, Insightful)
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. :-)
Re:That sucks (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, this would explain why most of my ex-girlfriends are now lesbians.
Re:That sucks (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, this would explain why most of my ex-girlfriends are now lesbians.
Because they were really un-masculine men to start with?
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
On a planet of women, what is a man needed for? Reproduction that is it.
This is probably more well known in general society than it is in this forum, but most women actually do enjoy sex with men.
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
[Citation Needed]
Re:That sucks (Score:4, Funny)
Well, it works both ways. The old addage:
"Why did God give women breasts?"
"So men would talk to them.".
It largely holds true....
Re:That sucks (Score:5, 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)
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
It only takes an inch.
And if that's no good, I can build her a machine. That's why I earned my EE degree. ;-)
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but does that 'jock' have a four screen, 8 core system, 300+ ripped movies on a terabyte NAS, and 5 different blogs on action figures?
I. Think. NOT!
Unfortunately, in reality most likely different. (Score:5, 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.
Re:Unfortunately, in reality most likely different (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Unfortunately, in reality most likely different (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Unfortunately, in reality most likely different (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. No wife on Earth, and virgins promised in heaven leads to ...
Re:op, spelling available :-o (Score:4, Funny)
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
About time somebody noticed (Score:4, 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?
Re:About time somebody noticed (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.
Re:About time somebody noticed (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:That sucks (Score:5, Funny)
...shit
I'm not so sure that will get the hormones out of our systems any faster, but I appreciate the advice.
It's the commies! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's the commies! (Score:5, Funny)
I warned them this would happen. That's why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol.
New Mens Bathroom Joke (Score:4, Funny)
Woah, little fella, your mom was exposed to PCB's wasn't she!
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
IT still an almost male-only field. It is simply the most manly of jobs.
Re:In other news (Score:4, Funny)
IT still an almost male-only field. It is simply the most manly of jobs.
Yeah, but doesn't being around computer equipment mean being exposed to a lot of PCBs?
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Finally an excuse! (Score:5, Funny)
Finally an excuse for my weak body, small penis and my interest for tea. And sadly my limited interest for breasts.
Re:Finally an excuse! (Score:5, Funny)
You need an excuse for being British?
Re:Finally an excuse! (Score:5, Funny)
Pollution = More Gay Men (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Pollution = More Gay Men (Score:5, Insightful)
So will the religious right now be against pollution? I guess not, the religious right are also against science.
Thats not entirely true. They are against science that does not promote a given point they are trying to make. If it happens to agree with something they like the sound of, they generally quote findings as if the conclusion was known to them for quite some time.
So in this case it would constitute proof pollution is Gods punishment for everyone being gay.
Re:Pollution = More Gay Men (Score:4, Insightful)
They are against science that does not promote a given point they are trying to make.
That *IS* being against science. Science is not a bunch of facts, it is a process. If you pick and choose your data to support your hypothesis, you are not following that process. That is being against science.
Re:Pollution = More Gay Men (Score:5, Insightful)
The religious right is against millions-of-years-ago storytelling that masquerades as hard science. As we all should be.
As opposed to thousands-of-years-ago storytelling that they take as gospel?
Re:Pollution = More Gay Men (Score:5, Funny)
Hey now, you gotta respect the religious right. They were makin' up stories that break most of the laws of physics and science before we even knew they existed!
Now that takes dedication - precognitive ignorance.
Re:Pollution = More Gay Men (Score:5, Insightful)
<irony>
It's clear from your neutral, non-emotionally charged and logical words and arguments that you are not at all pushing an agenda.
</irony>
Having been raised in a deeply catholic country and having studied science at an University along with some colleagues and even teachers which were both scientists AND Christians it never ceases to amaze me how the US seems to produce scores and scores of uneducated, anti-education, ignorant and even downright dumb "believers", incapable of reconciling religion with science.
Quick hint: it's perfectly possible to believe both in God and in the Big-Bang - they're not at all mutually exclusive as long as you look at the bible as a book full of allegories instead of trying to believe that the English translation is literally the word of Jesus.
Re:Pollution = More Gay Men (Score:5, Insightful)
That really is it in a nutshell.
A lot of American atheists are fighting against that literal minded Fundamentalist thinking... and to be fair, the cultural environment has an awful lot of that. It was a a REAL eye-opener for me (years and years into my mush agnosticism) when I read an interview with some Anglican Bishop where he says something like "well, of course the stories about Jesus aren't literally true..."- that a high ranking member of the clergy of a very established Christian group could even say that took me aback.
So then you get into, why believe at all? Is it a pragmatic, useful stance for moral guidance? Or is there an inescapable supernatural element? And - and this is crucial - are the *other* books full of allegories about equally as true, or do you think that one specific one or group is special in its connection to the truth?
Re:Pollution = More Gay Men (Score:4, Insightful)
As a transplant from a more urban area of the US (Massachusetts), my personal theory is that the Atheistic scientists in the more urban centers tend to provoke the religous with their talk of science disproving God somehow (The lack of evidence while convincing, is never proof in and of itself). This leads to a tendancy toward radicalization (or fundamentalism) among those who feel as though they are being attacked. Then the willfully ignorant become more promenant for predicting this persecution all along, and then we get things like the creationist museum that recently opened.
Maybe the religious shot first, probably depends on who you ask, But I hold those that intentionally bait the religious with indifensible scientific stances to be as responsible for the present situation as the most vocal of the religous fundamentalists that are unwilling to accept any science that disagrees with stories originally told before the advent of heliocentricity. Religion and science are two different fields with two different goals. Science asks "HOW" and religion asks "WHY". Anyone attempting to use one to inappropriately draw conclusions within the others bailiwick are just full of shit.
Re:The right is against pollution.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The right is against pollution.. (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.
Re:Pollution = More Gay Men (Score:4, 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.)
Re:Pollution = More Gay Men (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the reason gay men act feminine at times has more to do with them letting go of the macho image that straight men try to portray, especially in the United States, which is why European men are often accused of "acting gay"; because they don't worry about acting "macho" as much as American men do. Europeans in general don't have such a deep seated fear of being branded as gay. This hasn't always been the case in the United States either. Watch some old B&W movies and note how much more "gay" the male actors tend to be than they do today.
Cultural influence (Score:5, Insightful)
The choice of playing with dolls, tea sets or cars is CULTURAL and not genetic. This have been proved in numerous scientific researches.
Re:Cultural influence (Score:5, Insightful)
When my daughter was born, my wife and I were very adamant that she wouldn't have any cultural stereotypes imposed on her. Everything was very gender neutral, but she still ended up being obsessed with Barbie and pink stuff.
Some years later we had a son, and treated him with the same neutrality (and he had an older sister who was always dressing him in pink) - his first word was 'digger'.
You may be right - but you'll have a hard time convincing me.
Re:Cultural influence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cultural influence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cultural influence (Score:4, 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!
Re:Cultural influence (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you completely prevent your daughter from watching TV -- where she would encounter a steady stream of images of little girls dressed in pink and playing with dolls?
Did you prevent her from reading kids books, which are brimming with descriptions (and illustrations) of little girls wearing pink and playing with dolls?
Did you keep her out of all malls, toy stores, and clothing stores, which display row upon row of pink clothes and dolls in the "Girls" aisles?
Did you keep her locked in a basement, where she would never meet other little girls (whose social approval she would subconsciously seek) dressed in pink and playing with dolls?
Did you prevent her from interacting with relatives who disagreed with your philosophy, and got her dolls and pretty pink dresses?
Of course you didn't.
Societal gender norms creep into every household through a hundred back doors. You can't stop them. And unless you wore pink and played with dolls in front of your little girl, and your wife never did, you were probably doing nothing to counter their influence. Being neutral is not the same as working against.
And by the way: just a hundred years ago, pink was considered a boy's color, and blue was for girls [google.com].
Sorry, but the GP is correct: the whole "girls love pink" thing has long been accepted as cultural, not genetic, and a hundred years from now it could very well swing the other way.
Re:Cultural influence (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cultural influence (Score:5, Insightful)
And speaking as a livestock person with several decades and multiple generations' experience -- I agree with you. Cultures, by way of what's valued in individuals, exert selection pressure for and against certain phenotypes, which in turn tends to promote or eliminate the associated genotypes. This is most obvious in dogs (and to a lesser degree, in other livestock), where various breeds WITH DIFFERING INSTINCTS developed in response to selection pressure for various functions -- which is to say, a directly applied form of "culture".
A human culture that valued stay-at-home moms and denigrated "working girls" might likewise select strongly for genes that produce a temperament of demure mothers who never let their kids out of their sight. Whereas a culture that valued (or required) working moms might select for a more-independent female that's more willing to dump the kids in daycare.
It only takes a few generations for such selection pressure to have a profound effect on the relevant part of the gene pool.
Re:Cultural influence (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a little of both. Much of human behavior is driven by instinctual needs. Men instinctually find women with wide hips attractive because women with wide hips have the best chances of having a successful child birth. Girls are instinctually taken to playing with dolls because they are nurturers by nature.
OTOH, in cultures where playing with dolls is acceptable for boys, boys will play with dolls, too.
That's because gender is not binary. Girls have a masculine side and boys have a feminine side. The human male has both testosterone and estrogen, the same is true of the human female. It's mostly a matter of how much of each hormone is present in the body that determines how effeminate a boy will be vs. how much of a 'tom boy' a girl will be.
Culture and upbringing also play a crucial role, however. Men are culturally shamed into not embracing their feminine side and women were once typically culturally shamed into not embracing their masculine side. Since then, we as a culture have begun embracing the 'strong' woman and the metrosexual man -- roles are changing.
How much of this is nurture vs. nature is a matter for debate and will probably be strongly debated for a long time.
Re:Cultural influence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cultural influence (Score:5, Informative)
one [springerlink.com]
two [questia.com]
three [wiley.com]
This is a common misconception. Think about a society were there is no tea or car (somewere in africa). Do you think their children would choose tea set and car toys based on gender?
Re:Cultural influence (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
They'd choose "hollowed out wood bowl" and "hand-made spear". Even in Africa the sexes take on different tasks (women stay home; men hunt). It's hard for me to imagine it being different. Can you picture a pregnant woman chasing down a wild boar? Not me. Like it or not, biology is not the same.
Re:Cultural influence (Score:4, Insightful)
If the task changes from one society to another, then that's cultural.
What I am questioning is what task is chosen and not that it's different tasks for girls and boys. The what part is cultural and therefore is not a good reference for scientific research.
There is no question regarding roles and sexes in every society, but people learn their sex roles from their society. They are not born with them. The proof for that is the fact that sex roles differ from one culture to another
Re:Cultural influence (Score:4, Insightful)
Please, don't take things from granted as if they were science just because they sound good.
I would say the same to you as you argue citing some research that sounds good for you ;-)
What those studies had proved is that in western society, gender roles are clear and passed to yougsters very early.
You can't study one culture and make general assumptions. Those researches are on the same level as : "people that eat x get more of y disease". Correlation is not causation.
Nails (Score:5, Funny)
Not only is it destroying our masculinity, but it's making my nails really dirty and I've just had them done :(
I, for one, (Score:3, Funny)
welcome our forthcoming female overlords.
Oh wait ...
Re:I, for one, (Score:5, Funny)
Bunk (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re:Bunk (Score:5, Funny)
"He's a Lumberjack and he's OK..."
Is one of those chemicals... (Score:5, Funny)
...named Oprah?
Dilution (Score:5, Funny)
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.
60 million per millilitre... (Score:4, Funny)
Should be enough for anybody.
Silly homophobic scientists (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The most important point (Score:5, Funny)
What this really means is that us old guys have bigger dicks than you nelly boys. Now get off my lawn, pansy.
I for one applaud the news (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:I for one applaud the news (Score:4, Insightful)
AS opposed to what? Sitting around and nitting with Grandma while listening to some R&B? I'll concede that the mid 1960s through the 1970s, rock was untouchable, but if you think today's slop called rock can even hold a candle to country, you are sadly not very open minded.
Country? You mean that Nashville twaddle with the metrosexual men with shaved chests wearing their little cowboy hats like cornpone fetish night at the gay bar?
Modern country is over-processed, undernourished crap, just like what's become of commercial rock and numetal. Gimme the old stuff like David Allen Coe.
Let's just agree that commercialism sucks because you'll never convince me that Nashville country is good. :)
Farmers have been sonless for a generation (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.
These are observed effects of chemical pollution. (Score:4, Insightful)
For those interested in the Science... (Score:4, Informative)
Terry Collins: Persuasive Communication about Matters of Great Urgency: Endocrine Disruption: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es800079k [acs.org]
Shanna Swan: Decrease in Anogenital Distance among Male Infants with Prenatal Phthalate Exposure http://www.ehponline.org/members/2005/8100/8100.html [ehponline.org]
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.
Phytoestrogens (Score:4, 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 [soyonlineservice.co.nz]
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/articles/phyto1.htm [soyonlineservice.co.nz]
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.)
Re:Y-chromosome (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Males are more complicated in terms of engineering (Score:5, Interesting)
It's rare, but you can get things like Swyer syndrome [wikipedia.org], 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 [homeunix.net]. When something's more complicated to make, that means there are more ways for it to go wrong...)
Re:Y-chromosome (Score:5, 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.
Re:Y-chromosome (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Y-chromosome (Score:4, Funny)
Um, would that be the swishy flaming queen sort of thing, or like the tough and sensitive gay guy gorgeous women are just dying to jump into bed with until they find out? Because if it's the latter, someone should bottle that stuff; they'd make a fortune selling to Slashdotters alone.
(a third alternative, the "physically attracted to men" sort of behavior, probably wouldn't go over so well).
Re:Y-chromosome (Score:5, Insightful)
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.