On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> I doubt that many pregnant mothers
> would be rushing to take diet pills or synthetic thyroid medications
> in order to increase the chance of having homosexual offsprings, if
> any do so at all. On the whole, the type of research undertaken by
> Ellis and Hellberg is likely to lead to futile efforts to curtail the
> number of homosexuals and bisexuals. Futile, because their research
> (and others' like it) is unlikely to be replicated and proven true.
> It's a waste of money at best and a reinforcement of homophobia and
> heterosexism at worst.
A passage from the Ellis and Hellberg article illustrates Yoshie's point:
Regarding male offspring, the consumption of three substances were significantly related to sexual orientation. One class of such drugs was anti-nausea and vomiting medications, substances reportedly consumed by 7.0% of the mothers of male heterosexuals, but only 4.2% of the mothers of homosexuals (p=0.038). This very surprising finding suggests that such medications could have a "protective effect" with respect to male offsprings' typical sexual orientation.
Note the language here: these drugs could "protect" male offspring from becoming homosexual. --This is the language epidemiologists use to identify factors that lessen the risk of disease! Apparently male homosexuality is an aberration from which our offspring need to be "protected".
> Behaviors and identities are not the same thing, however.
>
> Generally speaking, in pre-capitalist and pre-modern societies that
> were more hierarchical and exploitative than so-called "primitive"
> societies, the most common norms about sexual behaviors were that men
> could fuck both women (with or without marriage) _and boys_; women
> could fuck men only when they were married; while it was all right
> for boys to be fucked by men, it was not all right for boys to fuck
> men or men to be fucked by other men.
Go Yoshie! Read a bit of Foucault lately?
Miles