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divideandconquer » Thu Nov 19, 2015 6:58 pm wrote:Yes, absolutely. We need strong manly men in shining armor to protect the womenfolk (and all those useless homos) from the nasty nobles.
You know, homosexual men can be strong manly men, right? Many of the early Nazis, the Brown Shirts, were super macho homosexual men who despised effeminacy. That's just one very nasty example, but there are many more positive examples as well.
And what about our attraction to one gender over the other gender? In most people, it's hard-wired. If not, why do so many gay men struggle with coming out? If gender doesn't matter, why not switch your attraction to the gender that's more socially acceptable? If it's just masculinity they're attracted to, why not go for masculine women? Because they can't! How can that be if gender doesn't exist? Sure, there are people who are attracted to both, but they're in the minority.
Just because a very small minority do not feel comfortable with the gender they've been biologically assigned doesn't mean gender doesn't exist and homosexuality, if anything, proves the existence of gender. Not the other way around.
yathrib » Thu Nov 19, 2015 12:15 pm wrote:I don't understand how these advanced thinkers who reject all the claims of idealistic metaphysics--much less traditional religion--can hear someone postulate the existence of a magical gender essence independent of both biology and socialization, and say "Sounds legit!"
guruilla » Thu Nov 19, 2015 1:59 pm wrote:Devil's advocate question: suppose, as a white male, I wanted to self-identify as black?
solace » Thu Nov 19, 2015 3:14 pm wrote:"Quarter of men believe they have 'man periods'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/health/q ... n-periods/
solace » 19 Nov 2015 20:14 wrote:"Quarter of men believe they have 'man periods'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/health/q ... n-periods/
yathrib » Thu Nov 19, 2015 3:35 pm wrote:Maybe they do. Maybe masculinity is not the one dimensional default state for humanity that we have been led to believe it is. Experiencing cycles in one's existence does not make one a woman, or half-woman, or what have you. It is called being a living, biological being as opposed to a rock or some other mineral.solace » 19 Nov 2015 20:14 wrote:"Quarter of men believe they have 'man periods'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/health/q ... n-periods/
Strange but True: Males Can Lactate
Unless you are an Indonesian fruit bat, though, it probably won't happen naturally
By Nikhil Swaminathan | September 6, 2007
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... n-lactate/
In late 2004 the Internet Movie Database reported that Dustin Hoffman suddenly had the urge to breast-feed. Had the then-67-year-old Hoffman—who brought mainstream culture face to face with autism in Rain Man and went mano a mano with an Ebola-like filovirus in Outbreak—never quite broken character from his 1982 film Tootsie? Nope. He was just really keen to help out with his first grandchild.
Interestingly, he could have possibly lent a helping, er, breast, if he had held the suckling newborn to his nipples for a couple weeksalthough he could also have tried starving himself or taking a medication that would affect his brain's pituitary gland.
There have been countless literary descriptions of men miraculously breast-feeding, from The Talmud to Tolstoy, where, in Anna Karenina, there is a short anecdote of a baby suckling an Englishman for sustenance while on board a ship. The little anthropological evidence documented suggests it is possible. In the 1896 compendium Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, George Gould and Walter Pyle catalogue several instances of male nursing being observed. Among them was a South American man, observed by Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who subbed as wet nurse after his wife fell ill as well as male missionaries in Brazil that were the sole milk supply for their children because their wives had shriveled breasts. More recently, Agence France-Presse reported a short piece in 2002 on a 38-year-old man in Sri Lanka who nursed his two daughters through their infancy after his wife died during the birth of her second child.
In her 1978 book The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding, medical anthropologist Dana Raphael claimed that men could induce lactation simply by stimulating their nipples. The eminent endocrinologist Robert Greenblatt of the Medical College of Georgia concurred. But Jack Newman, a Toronto-based doctor and breast-feeding expert, insists that in order to produce milk, a hormone spike must occur. "That Tolstoy quote suggests that the father just put the baby to the breast and he would produce milk; I think that's pretty unlikely," he says. "It could be that you have this man with this pituitary tumor and he produces milk once the baby starts suckling."
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Newman explains that medical disruptions involving prolactin, the hormone necessary to produce milk, have resulted in spontaneous lactation. Thorazine, a popular antipsychotic used in the mid-20th century, impacted the pituitary gland—the pea-size endocrine gland located near the base of the brain—often causing it to overproduce prolactin. If prolactin levels remained high, milk could follow. According to Newman, lactation is listed as a possible side effect of the heart medication digoxin. A pituitary tumor could also induce milk production: "It would be the same reason—increased prolactin levels&mdashin the one case drug-induced, in the other due to a tumor or some other sort of neurological problem."
In a 1995 article for Discover titled "Father's Milk," Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one-time physiologist Jared Diamond reconciles the nipple stimulation and hormone quandary, pointing out that such stimulation can release prolactin. He also notes that starvation—which inhibits the functioning of hormone-producing glands as well as the hormone-absorbing liver—can cause spontaneous lactation, as observed in survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Japanese POW camps in World War II. "The glands recover much faster than the liver when normal nutrition is resumed," he writes, "so hormone levels soar unchecked."
Males of many different mammalian species have the potential to lactate, although only one, the Dayak fruit bat of Southeast Asia, does so spontaneously. Diamond points out, however, that with the societal norm of fathers helping to rear their young, male milk production could actually be to our advantage, especially with all the career women trying to balance the demands of job and family. Why else would men still have nipples?
"Up until a certain age, boys and girls, as fetuses, are indistinguishable, really, so women retain some remnants of the vas deferens, which is the canal that sperm follows," Newman answers. "If you have no Y chromosome, then certain hormones are released that say, 'Okay, we'll set up this child's breast tissue to develop at puberty so that she will be able to produce milk.' Men didn't [secrete those hormones], so we don't usually have breast tissue."
"Actually a significant number of boys around the age of puberty do develop breasts," he continues, "so the tissue is there, but it regresses." In short, men may not have full-fledged breasts but they certainly can lactate, under extreme circumstances.
yathrib wrote:
I don't understand how these advanced thinkers who reject all the claims of idealistic metaphysics--much less traditional religion--can hear someone postulate the existence of a magical gender essence independent of both biology and socialization, and say "Sounds legit!"
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