Wednesday, November 30, 2005

An Un-P.C. Consideration of Hormones, and stuff. . .

I read something on the web yesterday that wasn't worth much, but I found myself pondering it. Apparently, there's a bunch of fish just off shore - probably around California - and the male fish are growing the beginnings of female sex organs. Evidently there are (a) people who can make such determinations and (b) people who are interested in such things.

A hypothesis was offered as if it were a complete explanation. There's way too much female hormones being flushed and washed into drainage that ends up in the sea and when the fish swim in this soup of femininity(femininininity - say that twice real fast), they get a little confused about their sexuality and start displaying the piscine equivalent of sashaying around with a little extra swish to their fish hips.

I guess this is a problem for the fish, although the article didn't leave me with that impression. But I'm skeptical about the explanation. I don't think that civilized humanity is necessarily the cause of all change that goes on in nature. We didn't kill off the dinosaurs with shopping malls. We didn't cause the first few ice ages and we probably won't be responsible for the next one. I think that whatever hormones are being shed are already pretty dilute when they hit the ocean, where they would have to be further diluted. Our hormonal application just doesn't sound like a very likely explanation to me. And what? We aren't dumping an equivalent amount of male hormones? Just female hormones?

And I wondered, hey, but if we really are dumping all that extra feminine hormone stuff around such that it would affect fish in the ocean, for heavens sake, how come that same extra hormonal blast isn't affecting male humans, and not just the male fish? Wouldn't we human males get exposed to this stuff before the male fish? We hang around female women all the time, and in fact, as much as we can. If that stuff can do it to the male fish, how come it isn't affecting us human males, making us more feminine and less masculine?

And then it occurred to me. Maybe there are signs.

Flouncing around on both coasts - close to the hormonal oceans, doncha know - is a concentration of metrosexuals shrieking and carrying "Bush Lied" and "War is Not the Answer" signs. I say, well, hey. It's a volunteer army. Just don't volunteer and you don't have to go to the damn war and you can just go about your business and stop blocking the intersections with demonstrations. But then I noticed that it isn't that they are actually against war. They like the war on poverty and the war on illiteracy and the war on breast cancer, and if there were a war on bad interior design, they'd like that, too.

No. It's just the old fashioned masculine variety of war the peace party doesn't like. The kind fought traditionally by mostly male warriors who viscerally respond to threats to the safety of their family and country by taking up arms. The mention of the kind of threats offered by the Islamic jihadi terrorists and 9-11, are exactly the kind of threats that will naturally cause a human warrior-type to start listening and sniffing the air for signs of combat to be joined and dangerous enemies to be quashed, all in accord with a deep, biological imperative. That's what the so-called peace activists are really against when they condemn the war in Iraq.

They're hormonal.

How's that for a hypothesis? Could maybe we can test it by gathering up a clan of male protesters and moving them to Tulsa, away from the oceans, for a year and see if they recover their cojones?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

DADDY!!!!

Don't have time for a well-thought rebuttal, so I'll just say:

Leave the metrosexuals alone.

PS - um...if you were joking, it's really funny.

Anonymous said...

Well, of course I was joking. Otherwise, the whole thing would constitute fighting words, in which case . . .

Anonymous said...

Well I enjoyed it. And as far as I'm concerned, any man who shrieks is fair game.

Anonymous said...

It's an askwardly-based and well-convoluted hypothesis complementing sprouted teaching of intelligent design.

Walt, could you please write another post? It will help me to rid off involuntary assessments.

I just keep thinking, who flashes these female hormones?