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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jack Clarke who wrote (18013)	3/10/1998 3:06:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Well, Jack, I also think that menstrual blood may have just been plain scary to early peoples, who did not have much knowledge of science, and did not understand that it was natural, and would not hurt them. Many cultures today still have isolating women during their menstrual periods as a part of their tradition. I guess that one of the questions I have about homosexuality and the Bible is that aside from the fact that homosexual behavior did not result in children being born--at a time when they were really needed to build the population--was it perhaps just very frightening for some other reason? And why in Christian culture, but not in some others? Many cultures take their homosexuals and actually make them into powerful figures. Shamen, or witch doctors, are often homosexual. So it is not in every culture that homosexuals are shunned; sometimes they are glorified and given additional powers. And then, relating back to our understanding of science and nature in the first paragraph, I would note that we are just starting to discover the scientific underpinnings of why people, and animals, may be homosexual, or bisexual. You may have read the National Academy of Sciences study which was published last week, where researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, said they measured the function of the cochlea, a key sound amplifier in the inner ear, and found that lesbians had less sensitive cochlea amplifiers than heterosexual women. The study goes on to say that development of the inner ear is affected before birth by androgens. "Their auditory centers have been masculinized and the presumption is that so have sites in the brain that direct sexual preference", said Dr. Dennis McFadden, the lead author of the study. Androgens, he said, may also "alter the brain centers that produce sexual orientation." I could not find the entire study when I did a web search, which is too bad, but in one of the newspaper articles I read about it, it was also mentioned that in sets of twins where there is a boy and a girl, the girls are slightly more masculine than other girls, so that would again suggest that at least one cause of homosexuality is a prenatal hormone exposure. I read somewhere that there is a particular time in pregnancy, perhaps the fifth month, where extreme stress may cause hormones to be released which cause male homosexuality. Had you heard of that theory? I personally believe there are several reasons, some of them relating to early childhood trauma as well as prenatal events, that are causative factors for homosexuality. Another very interesting article I read recently was about the positive survival implications of homosexuality in a bird species, the oystercatcher. Again, I could not find the original article on the web, but I found this web page which at least discusses it, although in less purely scientific terms: ishipress.com Christine