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New York, 3:06 AM
Thu Nov 26
64 posts in the last 24 hours
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12:32 AM
Don't Forget The Gravy! will take on an entirely new meaning.
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01:05 AM
QUOOOOOOOOOOOOOORN!!
a la Khan.
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Anwyay, I've found that for many people a vegetarian is acting "holier-than-thou" simply by being a vegetarian and will start confrontations because I'm eating a veggie burger while minding my own business.
11/25/09
I can agree that people who don't give a thought to what they put in their bodies are.. unfortunate.
However, eating a diet composed almost entirely of animal products and getting roughly 300% of my 'recommended' daily saturated fat intake daily.. believe me, I get a lot of confrontational 'concern trolls' who interfere with my meal time because they need to tell me I am going to get sick or have a heart attack because I am not eating 300 grams of grains per day, and are convinced that drinking Silk soymilk and making sure to eat lots of those delicious sweet fruits is 'best' for me.
Two sides of the same coin.
#tips
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11/16/09
I wish that article had more info about the study. I'm also confused as to what the difference between sports and "rough and tumble" play is, because I've seen 6-year-olds play soccer and it's mostly running and roughly kicking each other. #boystoys
11/16/09
11/16/09
I'm pregnant too and now I have an overwhelming urge to go lick my shower curtain.
I'm very suggestible. #boystoys
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So any effect of pthalates that edges boys' genitals back to that "female" default *is* feminizing. And feminizing is only a "bad" word if we make it one by squawking every time it's not used as we feel it should be. I fell like it's getting to the point where *we* are the ones stigmatizing the term, not the scientists. #boystoys
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11/16/09
So in this topic, "feminization" is correctly used only as a technical term relating to the genital aspect of the child's physical sex. The term "feminization" is inaccurate when discussing gender and/or any related topics such as play or behavior. #boystoys
11/16/09
And if differences in play and behavior are based on someone's natural sense of their own gender (and aren't socialized into them), then why would it be inaccurate to label certain play behavior masculine or feminine? #boystoys
11/16/09
Also, "why would it be inaccurate to label certain play behavior masculine or feminine?" ties in with the fact that masculinity/femininity are relatively meaningless terms, since what is masculine or feminine is not only different when it comes to any particular person, but also purely societal/cultural contextually defined. So labeling behavior masculine or feminine is misleading and in many cases unnecessarily restrictive.
For the first part, since I personally feel (from a non-scientist standpoint, let it be known) that gender is a 100% societal/cultural creation rather than anything innate in a person, I don't think so. I think that chemicals which alter the physical sex of a person alter just that, the physical sex. Conclusions of gender are drawn independent of physical sex, whether the person's gender matches their physical sex or not, so they (in my opinion) would have little to do with a person's gender. #boystoys
11/16/09
But your second paragraph I think really hits the nail on the head. Your assumption, that gender is just a social creation, is common to alot of feminists. But I think there are thousands of reasons to believe that boys and girls are in fact biologically different. They have different hormones and different brains. Google David Reimer, the boy who was raised as a girl after botched circumcision castrated him. If gender was really just a social creation, that should have worked, but it failed rather disastrously. #boystoys
11/16/09
While our brains are different if we are male or female, the correlation is not between brain and genitalia, as I feel you are inferring from raising the issue of David Reimer, but rather hormones. Also, hormones are different in every person on earth, so in that sense, gender is really a spectrum.
Non-hormonal differences in male and female brains affect, as far as my own limited research has found, things like color vision and detection of motion in peripheral vision, not aggression, that is still hormones.
I think all of the effects of phthalates have to do with them being synthetic estrogen, which explains the genital as well as behavioral effects. And, they can also give women cancer, as someone posted in a different thread about beauty products.
Maybe we just don't notice their impact on girls when they play because we don't see their feminine behavior as unusual? It may be overloading them with female hormones and increasing their risk for certain cancers, but we don't notice.
WHEW that was long. #boystoys
11/17/09
11/17/09
And, I'd say it's a bad idea, unless you have a masters in anthropology or the likes, because usually calling something masculine or feminine isn't used in a scientific way. If you aren't what's considered typical of your gender, then it makes you feel weird/bad about yourself when you are pressured/teased about going against the grain... like me playing video games and Lego's, which is apparently "boy stuff." Know what I'm sayin'? #boystoys
11/17/09
Yes, calling certain behaviors masculine or feminine is generally not done in a scientific way. But it's still a commonsense acknowledgment of what most people understand -- that the differences between men and women go different than our genitalia. Sure, it's bad if people are teased or pressured -- but the answer to that is to let people know it's okay to go "against the grain" -- not to deny the obvious truth that the grain exists. #boystoys
11/17/09
First of all, just because most people believe something to be scientifically true does not mean that it is. The earth is flat, and the center of the universe, the universe was created by a guy with a white beard, etc.
Especially when the validity of an authoritative group's pretense depends on the results, like it does with gender, sexuality, drugs, and psychology, tests and experiments shouldn't be assumed objective or conclusive. The test itself can be flawed or intentionally or unintentionally biased, an involved group may throw out or ignore results that disprove their position, or the conclusions drawn from the data may be based in assumptions which the data does not imply.
Second, it is impossible to know if gendered behaviors are biologically inherent from birth. It's true that hormones can have an effect on our behavior, but our behavior can also have an effect on our hormones, along with diet and environmental factors. We can't seperate the body from the mind. There is no "default".
Third, it is impossible to know what gendered behaviors are. Anyone can decide to behave in any way, regardless of their sex. But from birth onward, those behaviors will be reacted to by adults, and you learn to make decisions based on those reactions. Babies are dressed in unambiguously gendered clothing - blue for boys, pink for girls, trucks and trains for boys, unicorns and crowns for girls - so that adults know how to react to them, and you are told to be a "good girl" or a "good boy" - two very different things.
Even when we try to find evolutionary links, we would still need to factor in culture and environment, and we cannot make assumptions about our own biology based on the biology or behavior of our ancestors. We also cannot say that certain evolutionary behaviors are gendered, and assume that similar behaviors are gendered in the same way when they couldn't possibly exist simultaneously.
For example, if we say that hunting is a male behavior, we can't assume that sports (or whatever) are the modern equivalent of hunting, or that sports are male activities, because they are different behaviors that exist in different environments, and environmental factors always need to be considered.
And we can't say that hunting was ever a male behavior in the first place. Not only because females are the hunting sex in many animals, but because the act of hunting itself is a behavior that was invented by humans within culture, and is not "natural" the way it is in animals. It has always been extremely varied depending on environment, and it has always evolved & changed. There is no "basic" way of hunting.
Human behavior doesn't stabilize or maintain itself the way animal behavior does. It doesn't have to, it can't, and it never has. Everything about us is circumstantial. Our entire history as a species has been defined by constant change and increasing diversity of behavior.
Even our physical bodies and most basic gender traits are mostly artificial, and widely varied. Things like language, love, music, mental illness, religion, and humor are a part of our biology, and all have complex relationships to gender that have little to do with genitals and everything to do with culture and society.
Our conscious choices have defined our evolution for a period of between 35,000 and 300,000 years. To think that we've been able to conclusively pin down which of those behaviors are genetic during the 200 or less years that we've been asking is ridiculous. To think that we, as individuals, have any way of knowing how other people's behavior is related to their sex is completely absurd. Gender, we can make sense of. It has a history and a purpose and a role in our behavior. But if sex ever was relevant, it was at least a million years ago, and who we were then says as much about us today as a bucket of paint. #boystoys
11/17/09
A lot like all magazines having underweight models... it has the effect of making me feel inadequate, whether I am actually healthier than they are or not.
Common sense acknowledgments of this sort, in my experience, are actually social concepts that are taught to us, not natural ways of thinking, much like most of what is "normal" for our gender.
I dunno, I studied a lot of philosophy at one point, and it seems like a lot of our common sense ideas were actually things that individual men came up with hundreds of years ago... #boystoys
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11/17/09
First, yes, I agree with you here. Of course the Conventional Wisdom can be wrong. On the other hand, you do need I think fairly strong evidence to overturn it.
Second: Well, you could cut off a guy's penis at birth, turn it into a vagin and try raising him as a girl and see what happens. Which is pretty much what happened (accidentally) to David Reimer. That is just one case, true, but I think it's utterly devastating to the idea that the only differences between girls and boys is genitalia.
Third: I don't think it's nearly as difficult as you think to decide what is gendered behavior. You can look across cultures that developed independently, for example. Look at the effects of sex hormones, and what happens to men and women that take synthetic estrogen or testosterone.
Also, just because it's tough to pin down the effects of culture and socialization versus genetics and biologically doesn't mean we can't say that they exist. Studies on identical twins have shown us, beyond I think any real scientific doubt, that about half of who we are -- even fairly sophisticated stuff like personality traits and music preferences -- is determined by our genes, not how we are raised.
As we continue to decode the human genome, we'll be able to tell more and more how we are influenced by our biology and not society.
When I think of behavior BTW, I'm thinking of things much more basic than a skill like hunting. More stuff like physical rambunctiousness in young boys, and so on.
Here's a question for you: What do you think of the whole issue of gays, lesbians and transgendered people? I don't think there's anyone left out there who believes their identity is due to how they were raised. No one raised their kid to be gay... Gays, lesbians and the transgendered were just Born Differently. So why do certain feminists recoil at the idea that boys are just Born Differently as well? #boystoys
11/17/09
This very study we're talking about, where boys were exposed to phthalates that mimic estrogen and block testosterone ... and then researchers saw them less likely to engage in "play with cars, trains and guns or engage in rougher' games like playfighting" -- that strikes me as v. strong evidence that rougher games like playfighting is in fact a naturally gendered activity that boys engage in because of their male hormones. Not acknowledging this natural difference, and expecting boys to behave like little girls, seems to me like it would be oppressive and damaging ...
Also, see my response to @prismatism. (Also that was a typo, obv., where I left an "a" off the end of the word "vagina") #boystoys
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There, I said it. #boystoys
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