Tofu Will Make You Gay!
Tofu Will Make You Gay!
This just in: Soy will turn your kid into a fey girly man with a very small penis. Also: God hates vegans
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: I knew it. I knew that soy stuff was evil like black sunshine in spring! Also: Is Tom Cruise really gay? Does he eat a lot of soy? And maybe: How do I get hot porn onto my new black 30 GB iPod I got for Christmas? Is Steve Jobs a god? Does God like soy? Wait, didn't God invent soy? So how could it be bad for my innocent cherubic child who loves iPods and looks nothing like Tom Cruise? Should I try anal sex? Is this the year I wear more orange? And so on.
Oh yes, you knew it. Especially if you are from the far end of the baffled gay-hatin' right-wing mind-set and don't read much and don't really care about pesky stuff like science, or fact, or health, or, you know, actual thought. Yay you!
Yes, you knew there was a threat far, far more dire to your precious child right now than Nancy Pelosi's terrifying agenda or Aaron Sorkin's bewildering dialogue or pagan yoga classes or swell federal abstinence programs that all those hippie perverts on the left claim actually demean and degrade the human sexual animal worse than the thought of Pat Robertson with a lederhosen ball gag but which you really appreciate given how you haven't had sex since, say, the Ford administration.
Here, then, is your hot new target, writ large and lunkish and gleefully offensive in what must be the absolute cutest unsung little ultra-right-wing article of all of 2006, appearing on an obscure conservative news compendium site called WorldNetDaily most liberals have never seen because, well, you have a brain and a nimble soul and prefer not to have your eyeballs stabbed with rusty ice picks of sweetly unencumbered dumb-assedness.
"Should Christians be armed? The ultimate biblical exploration of self defense." "How the UN will be the death of Israel and the West." "Chuck Norris' column appears here!" "U.S. infrastructure for sale to foreigners." "The good news about the looming disaster ... it's easy, inexpensive and fun to get prepared!" It's a site to make Ann Coulter's nipples hard.
The author of this particular article, our boy Jim Rutz, a guy who likes his meat organic but his facts as toxic and undercooked as a high school cheeseburger, Jim states, with absolute certainty, that soy products will make your kid gay. And why? Because soy contains "feminizing" estrogen compounds and hence when you feed soy products to your little girl she will menstruate by age 7 and if you feed it to your little boy his testicles might not fully develop until he enters college and if you feed soy milk to your baby (Heathen! Sinner!) your tot will, according to Jimbo, receive the equivalent of five birth control pills per day (italics his) and doing so could actually kill your baby, oh my God, who will save the children from the gay (plant) agenda!
I see you smiling, you over there who actually read books and eat well and, you know, think for yourself. I see you shaking your head in disbelief, perhaps thinking I am making this up. Alas, I am not. It is a real article, read (presumably) by real humans, many of whom might actually believe it, just like they believe that immigrants want to "mongrelize" the American "race" and that Christmas trees are actually Christian and that Taylor Hicks is somehow tolerable. It's funny because it's true.
But wait. Do not fall into fits of ironic intellectual mirth just yet, because perhaps you should consider the ugly truth that, by logical extension, God hates vegans.
Is it not obvious? After all, most vegans eat a lot of soy. Consequently, most vegans are, of course, violently gay, just like billions of Asians who've eaten soy products for millennia and are so gay and feminine and estrogen heavy they can barely stand up. Which explains Hello Kitty. And samurai movies. And the Scion Xb. I mean, obviously.
It all makes perfect sense. Because if there's one thing God loathes, it's gay people, what with them being such an abomination for daring to want to fall in love and be happy. Therefore God must really hate vegans (especially Asian vegans), because they must be gay, even though he loves everyone, which is a total contradiction and which sort of confuses God and which therefore makes him hate soy products even more even though he invented the stuff despite having long ago forgotten why. See? Clear as a bell, right, Jim?
By the way, for the record, soy does indeed contain estrogen. Plant estrogen (phytoestrogen), that is, a very weak estrogen indeed, 1/1000th the strength of synthetic, which the body cannot even convert into "real" estrogen. Soy, in particular, contains phytoestrogen compounds called isoflavones, which actually do have some very mild estrogenic effect.
Does this make soy a bit controversial? Indeed it does. Are there some on the fringes of the health spectrum who are now claiming we are eating way too much of it? Indeed there are. Should you check into it for yourself? Absolutely.
But does this mean eating a nice tofu veggie burger will shrink your testicles and make your average hetero male linger, swooningly, a bit longer over photos of George Clooney than he normally would? Does this mean you get to dismiss with logic altogether and claim that small penises somehow equal gayness (as opposed to say, increased SUV sales), or that all gay men are "feminine," or that soy is the probable cause of obesity and leukemia and infertility and the downgrading of Pluto? Hell, why not? It's the homophobic, science-is-for-sissies GOP way.
Alas, there is no mention in Rutz' article about the other foods that have calamitous effects on one's sexual wiring. It is no secret, after all, that the consumption of excess Girl Scout cookies -- particularly Caramel deLites -- will make you a butch lesbian. It has also been reported in lesser-known scientific journals that eating lots of organic baby greens means you want to subscribe to the New Yorker and drive a Prius and get your genitals pierced, often at the same time.
Finally, it is now widely known that hip, "fusion" cuisine has been proven to contain alarming amounts of "multicultural" ingredients, like couscous and lemongrass and ghee, which obviously translate directly into anti-American hate and probably mean you are a radical Muslim, a Bollywood fan or both.
I know what you're thinking: It's all too easy to make fun of mind-sets like Jimbo's. But it is also, of course, mandatory that we do so, if for no other reason than if you cannot laugh at such matters and point up the adorably warped mental gyrations required to make such claims, then you are not able to lay blame where it so obviously lies: which is, of course, smack on our education system. It's an intellectual crisis, is what it is.
Stay in school, kids. Stay in school and for Christ's sake please learn something lest you end up like Jim, what with his trembling hands and his spasming colon and his violent nightmares featuring giant tofu robots leading perky armies of sashaying soy-fed children, marching into his yard wielding soy lattes and Barbra Streisand records and waving gay-marriage petitions like victory flags. Shudder.
It's all about the last paragraph...
Oh, oh yes...
~M