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Scary Health News: Soy Edition

By Fannie

Sometimes, I am just so amused by "news" source WorldNetDaily. Thanks to commenter Sarah, who passed along this article about the dangers of soy I was more amused than usual.

Jim Rutz begins:

"There's a slow poison out there that's severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture."

Goodness, this sounds scary. He continues:

"The dangerous food I'm speaking of is soy. Soybean products are feminizing..."

You know, it's always funny to me when anti-feminist folks claim that it is feminists who hate femininity. In a mere few sentences, this fella claims that a food that is "feminizing" is a "slow poison" that threatens to "tear apart our culture."

Why? Because it's girly:

"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."

You can see where Rutz is going with this: Lots of foodstuffs contain soy. Soy contains female hormones. Female hormones emasculate boys. Emasculated boys are gay. Thus, kids (oh, by kids he means boys) who eat soy will become gay.

No word on what makes the girl kind of kids gay.

What is clear is that this article is entitled "Soy is making kids 'gay'" as though homosexuality is the worst possible outcome of eating soy products. At the end of the article, we also learn:

"There's also a serious connection between soy and cancer in adults ? especially breast cancer."

Note, I don't dispute that soy can be dangerous. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I'm not a scientist, not even a pretend "food expert" on the internet. I more just wanted to note (a) the conflation of emasculation with gay, (b) the erasure of female homosexuality, (c) the assumption that being gay is a disease, (d) the making of boys as the default kid, and (e) the implicit message that being gay is worse than getting breast cancer.

Full post as published by Fannie's Room on April 28, 2010 (boomark / email).