Survey: Most Oppose San Francisco's Pending Ban On Male Circumcision

The ballot referendum is a still a long way away, but it doesn't look good for San Francisco's proposed ban on male circumcision.

San Francisco voters 4:1 oppose a ballot measure that would make it against the law to circumcise any male child under the age of 18, according to a SurveyUSA poll conducted exclusively for KPIX-TV. The city lines up on circumcision this way:

* 26% see it as a harmless tradition.
* 47% see it as a medical procedure whose health benefits outweigh the health risks.
* 8% see it as a medical procedure whose risks outweigh the benefits.
* 9% see it as mutilation.

Women by 2:1 say they would circumcise a boy if they had a male baby today. Men split. Regardless of their feelings about circumcision, San Franciscans by 8:1 say the government should not be involved. Jewish voters oppose the ballot measure 18:1.

Gallup: How Many Gays Are There?

Gallup says: "U.S. adults, on average, estimate that 25% of Americans are gay or lesbian. More specifically, over half of Americans (52%) estimate that at least one in five Americans are gay or lesbian, including 35% who estimate that more than one in four are. Thirty percent put the figure at less than 15%."

PhoboQuotable - Michael Medved

"Among those who describe themselves as homosexual or bisexual (a grand total of 3.7% of the 18-44 age group), overwhelming majorities (81%) say they've experienced sex with partners of the opposite gender. Among those who call themselves heterosexual, on the other hand, only a tiny minority (6%) ever engaged in physical intimacy of any kind with a member of the same sex. These figure indicate that 94% of those living heterosexual lives felt no physical attraction to members of the same sex, but the great bulk of self-identified homosexuals and bisexuals feel enough intimate interest in the opposite gender to engage in erotic contact at some stage in their development. [snip]

"In other words, for the minority who may have experimented with gay relationships at some juncture in their lives, well over 80% explicitly renounced homosexual (or even bisexual) self-identification by age of 35. For the clear majority of males (as well as women) who report gay encounters, homosexual activity appears to represent a passing phase, or even a fleeting episode, rather than an unshakable, genetically pre-determined orientation." - Asshat conservative columnist Michael Medved, twisting statistics for USA Today.

Crimes Against Nature

On Tuesday I posted a map showing which states still have anti-sodomy laws on the books. In the clip below, Russia Today examines how those antiquated laws are using against Louisiana's sex workers, who are often forced to register as sex offenders.

23% Of Straight Online Dating Site Members Report Experiencing Gay Sex

The online dating site OK Cupid polled 250,000 self-identified heterosexuals to get the above result. Buzzfeed has dozens of other survey responses, any one of which would also be worthy of discussion here.

What Celery Does To Straight Dudes

(Tipped by JMG reader Jaydog)

Michael Stipe: I'm 80% Gay

"On a sliding scale of sexuality I’d place myself around 80-20, but I definitely prefer men to women. I had sex with, and enjoyed sex with, women until I met someone that I fell in love with, and who is now my boyfriend. I wasn’t troubled or confused, but I just felt there wasn’t a place for me. I hate and refuse to apply the term bisexual to myself. It doesn’t seem appropriate. It feels like just another label." - REM lead singer Michael Stipe, speaking to the Observer.

Tears Kill Boners

When scientists exposed men to women's tears, they expected the men to respond with sympathetic emotions. Instead, they lost interest in sex.

In several experiments, researchers found that men who sniffed drops of women’s emotional tears became less sexually aroused than when they sniffed a neutral saline solution that had been dribbled down women’s cheeks. While the studies were not large, the findings showed up in a variety of ways, including testosterone levels, skin responses, brain imaging and the men’s descriptions of their arousal. “Chemical signaling is a form of language,” said one of the researchers, Dr. Noam Sobel, a professor of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. “Basically what we’ve found is the chemo-signaling word for ‘no’ — or at least ‘not now.’ ”

When gay men are exposed to women's tears, they respond with offers of cocktails and shopping.

The Bizarre World Of The Bisexual

Circumcision Ban May Go To SF Voters

Next year San Francisco's voters may see a ballot question that would ban the circumcision of males under 18 years old.

“It’s genital mutilation,” said Lloyd Schofield, the author of a San Francisco ballot measure that would make it a “misdemeanor to circumcise, excise, cut or mutilate the…genitals” of a person under 18. Baby boys in San Francisco may be relieved but not everybody agrees with a proposed ban. "I just had him circumcised 3 weeks ago,” said Heather Wisnicky of Sacramento, mother of Tyler, a 6-week-old baby boy. “It’s a health issue. It’s cleaner,” she said. Scientists with the Centers for Disease Control are still studying whether circumcisions are healthier, and have promised recommendations to the public. Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, a CDC researcher reported a sharp drop in the number of American parents choosing circumcision in hospitals - from 56 percent in 2006 to less than 33 percent last year. “Most medical groups have not come out with strong opinions regarding pro or con circumcisions,” said CBS 5 medical reporter Dr. Kim Mulvihill. “Most are saying leave it up to the families, let them decide what’s right for their son.”

The measure's backer needs to gather 7100 signatures to place it on the ballot.

New Survey: 8% Gay, 7% Lesbian

In what they are calling the "largest nationally representative study of sexual and sexual-health behaviors ever fielded," a just-released survey commissioned by Indiana University says that 8% of adult American men self-identify as gay or bisexual, with 7% of women identifying as lesbian or bisexual. Those numbers are almost triple the percentages claimed by some anti-gay groups.

ABC News takes note of the study's "interesting findings."

About 85 percent of men reported that their partner had an orgasm during their most recent sexual encounter, but only 64 percent of women report having had one. Researchers said the difference is too great to attribute to men having had their last encounter with another man. Eight percent of men and 7 percent of women identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, but a much higher percentage report engaging in sexual activity with someone of the same sex at least once. The study found that 15 percent of men aged 50-59 have received oral sex from another man at some point.

Here's one of the sexual behaviors graphs from the study.

Inside The Gay Brain

Over at Box Turtle Bulletin Rob Tisinai tips us to this fascinating BBC clip in which openly gay actor John Barrowman undergoes a brain scan while looking at nude images of men and women. Researchers can conclude the primary sexual orientation of their subjects by measuring the brain's electrical responses as the images are viewed. We hereby issue an open challenge to Peter LaBarbera, Matt Barber and Charlie Crist to undergo this test!

The Lands Of Human Sexuality

Everything from "Spin The Bottle" to stuff whose meaning I shudder to wonder. Visit the Human Sex Map to click off what you've already tried and liked, tried and hated, and so on.

Elizabeth Hasselbeck: Older Women Become Lesbians Due To Lack Of Men

(Via - The Advocate)

HomoQuotable - Mike Alvear

"Why do so many effeminate gay men prefer in their partners the very masculinity they've bleached out of themselves? The obvious answer is that they're attracted to their opposites. But that answer only goes so far. Effeminate men may lust for their masculine counterparts but most masculine men don't return the favor.

"Effeminate men get hoisted on their own chiffon petards. The more they take on effeminate characteristics the less able they are to attract the kinds of guys they want to sleep with. This is a mating absurdity. Imagine birds trying to attract mates with red and white plumage when the objects of their affection are attracted to yellow and green. The mis-matched mating call of the merry marys brings up a great question: If effeminacy is counter-productive to attracting the kind of sexual partners you want, then why not butch it up? Is it because like being gay, being effeminate isn't a choice?

"Nobody knows what fuels the gay flame -- nature or nurture. Some believe gay guys turn sissy because they're naturally nelly and some think it's because they're conforming to a culture that expects it. I've always maintained that effeminacy is like obesity. Sometimes it's glandular, but mostly it's cultural. There's an undeniable Pansy Vortex in gay life. You fall into it with baggy jeans and a t-shirt and climb out of it with spandex up the crack of your ass." - Mike Alvear, writing for the Huffington Post.

Read the entire essay.

RELATED: A lot of you took issue with Alvear's last essay quoted here.

BRITAIN: Top Medical Association Declares Conversion Therapy To Be Harmful

The British Medical Association yesterday declared "ex-gay" therapies to be harmful and called for investigating any doctor that attempts to "cure" homosexuality. Via Pink News:

The body met in Brighton yesterday and more than two-thirds of doctors present backed a call for the Royal College of Psychiatrists and other mental health standard-setting bodies to reject the treatments and ban their use in codes of practice. Health departments should also investigate alleged cases of conversion therapy being funded by the NHS, the meeting agreed. Research published last year found that a sixth of registered British therapist and psychiatrists have attempted to "cure" patients of homosexuality. Tom Dolphin, the proposer of the motion and the vice-chair of the BMA's junior doctors committee, said: "Sexuality is such a fundamental part of who a person is that attempts to change it just result in significant confusion, depression and even suicide.

RELATED: In February UK-based reporter Patrick Strudwick went undercover and exposed the abuses of British doctors engaging in conversion therapy.

FLORIDA: Doctor Treats Pregnant Women With Drug To Prevent Gay Babies

Last night Dan Savage emailed us with the tip that a doctor in Florida is treating pregnant women with a drug she hopes will prevent babies from being born lesbian. Savage:

Pediatric endocrinologist Maria New—of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University—isn't just trying to prevent lesbianism by treating pregnant women with an experimental hormone. She's also trying to prevent the births of girls who display an "abnormal" disinterest in babies, don't want to play with girls' toys or become mothers, and whose "career preferences" are deemed to "masculine." Unbelievable.

From the Bioethics Forum:

“Gender-related behaviors, namely childhood play, peer association, career and leisure time preferences in adolescence and adulthood, maternalism, aggression, and sexual orientation become masculinized in 46,XX girls and women with 21OHD deficiency [CAH]. These abnormalities have been attributed to the effects of excessive prenatal androgen levels on the sexual differentiation of the brain and later on behavior.” Nimkarn and New continue: “We anticipate that prenatal dexamethasone therapy will reduce the well-documented behavioral masculinization...” It seems more than a little ironic to have New, one of the first women pediatric endocrinologists and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, constructing women who go into “men’s” fields as “abnormal.” And yet it appears that New is suggesting that the “prevention” of “behavioral masculinization” is a benefit of treatment to parents with whom she speaks about prenatal dex. In a 2001 presentation to the CARES Foundation (a videotape of which we have), New seemed to suggest to parents that one of the goals of treatment of girls with CAH is to turn them into wives and mothers.

Dan Savage:

Two things: Gay people have been stressing out about a day arriving when scientists developed treatments to prevent homosexuality. You can read about the preventing gay sheep freak out here, you can read about Twilight of the Golds here, and I recall—but can't quickly find a link for—a "fellow" at the Family Research Council or the American Family Association who backed in-utero hormone treatments to prevent homosexuality. Well, here we are—the day appears to have arrived. Now what are we going to do about it?

And will the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee invite Maria New to testify at Elana Kagan's confirmation hearings? New could argue that Kagan—childless, unmarried Kagan—is unfit to serve on our highest court because her "low maternal interest" pegs her as abnormal, well outside the "maternal mainstream." Maybe GOP senators would be mollified if Kagan knocked back a few bottles of dex during her confirmation hearings?

Quote Of The Day - Camille Paglia

"In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.

"Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.

Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left." - Camille Paglia, in a New York Times essay about the search for a female version of Viagra.

Quote Of The Day - Cameron Diaz

"If I'm going to be with a woman sexually, it doesn't mean I'm a lesbian. We put these restraints and definitions on people, but it's hard to define. Sexuality and love can be different things. I can be attracted to a woman sexually, but it doesn't mean I want to be in love with a woman." - Cameron Diaz, speaking to Playboy Magazine. Women are permitted such equivocation. But if a man were to say the same thing, he's clearly a deluded closet case.