Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Wait, THAT'S the REAL reason he hasn't proposed yet

Ladies, it's not that your marriage-phobic boyfriend is boycotting the institution until same-sex couples can also enjoy the rights of matrimony. Nope, it's that all the tofu he sucks down is making him question opposite-sex couples to begin with. Soy makes you gay, apparently.

Don't believe me? Just ask this guy.
Soy is nutritious and contains lots of good things. Unfortunately, when you eat or drink a lot of soy stuff, you're also getting substantial quantities of estrogens.

Estrogens are female hormones. If you're a woman, you're flooding your system with a substance it can't handle in surplus. If you're a man, you're suppressing your masculinity and stimulating your "female side," physically and mentally.

In fetal development, the default is being female. All humans (even in old age) tend toward femininity. The main thing that keeps men from diverging into the female pattern is testosterone, and testosterone is suppressed by an excess of estrogen.

See, he's using almost real science (soy contains phytoestrogens that mimic estrogen; estrogen is the primary female sex hormone) and applying it to theoretically and empirically unfounded statements (soy makes you feminine). Clever. This is a dismissable (dare I say bat shit crazy) application of the real-science-plus-fake-conclusions tactic that's especially popular among people who foster anti-scientific thinking.

But there are many who employ the methods of scientists and researchers, then twist these methods beyond recognition into a mangled clump of speculation, superstition, and prejudice, but still have their ideas taken seriously! Take the Intelligent Design team or anti-feminists, for example.

All this talk about soy-based estrogens got met thinking, though. Given that about two-thirds of soybeans grown in America are fed to livestock, and given that a cow's diet is as much soybean as anything else, maybe beef is to blame for the gay epidemic. I feel so sorry for those millions of beef steers who have to spend their entire two years on the planet questioning their own bovine sexuality.

By the way, could there be a more hilarious headline than "A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals"? That wins.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I saw the headline to the article about Devil Foods turning people gay, my first reaction was, "Great! Now I can feel less guilty about eating Chocolate Devil Food's Cake." But now I find out I have to eat more soy to stay gay? How lame is that?!

In all seriousness, though, the article has got to be one of the funniest pieces I have ever read regarding the origins of gays. It goes so far as to say that those who eat soy have smaller penises than their counterparts because of a reduction in testosterone. If that were true, not only would gay men have shorter penises, but they wouldn't have male pattern balding.

(Sketchy) Emperical evidence gathered by Kinsey actually shows that gay guys have bigger penises than straight guys. Which means soy probably doesn't cause shorter penises OR homosexuality.

So, I can safely eat my current levels of soy without fear that I might accidentally turn straight if I don't consume enough.

Lisa said...

Hmm, I can tell that meat eaters must have written this article, because science has now shown that vegetarians have a higher IQ (thus preventing them from believing in pseudoscience).