Saturday, April 14, 2012

Inappropriate Behavior and Toxic Chemicals?

I’ve been chewing on something that’s been on the news off and on over the past year or two — and that is the increased sexual activity and sexual exhibitionism of teens, especially in the United States. Of course, teens having intercourse may not be a new phenomenon (in spite of the fact that the percentage of them doing so has risen dramatically over the past few decades). What is new these days is “sexting” and public sexual activity.

Having sex in public would have been scandalous years ago. We now learn that not only is a large percentage of teens sexting each other (by sending nude photos of themselves to the opposite sex) but also that there is public and group sexual intercourse and penetration, as if it were a game. Needless to say, this type of overt sexual exhibitionism and promiscuity leaves many people — primarily adults — scratching their heads.

What is behind this sexed-up activity?

While I’m sure there are many contributing factors, such as absentee parents, loosening mores and values, and widespread sexual activity being increasingly portrayed overtly in media (TV, film, and print), I would wonder if there may not be an additional factor at work here — a fairly invisible factor.

This factor is that of the omnipresence and pervasiveness of toxic chemicals in our environment — in our food, air, water, clothing, furnishings, toiletries, cosmetics, etc. It’s no secret that many of these toxic chemicals are endocrine disruptors, and there are many scientific accounts of animals in the world having aberrant sexual traits. Frogs have been widely observed with sexual mutations for several years now, and these sexual mutations have been attributed to the estrogenic effects of pesticides.

So could the toxic chemicals everywhere in our world be affecting us in ways we could not have dreamed of? There have been some reports in the past few years of blood sample results showing numerous chemicals in people’s blood, the most recent showing newborn infants with over 200 chemicals (see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=newborn-babies-chemicals-exposure-bpa and http://www.naturalnews.com/026584_chemicals_cancer_blood.html, for example).

Given the fact that some of these toxic chemicals are known to be endocrine disruptors, could chemical contamination be contributing to contemporary teens’ overtly sexed up behavior, as well as contributing, perhaps, to the increase of irrational and even deranged behavior on the part of those from all age groups?

Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?