Science Channel, née Discovery Channel, evidently thinks that when a fish goes from being female to male (it’s airing the show as I type this, and this particular factoid was aired not five minutes ago) indicates a change in sexuality.
Um.
WTF? It’s a change in gender. The fish doesn’t become gay/bi/something else, as “change in sexuality” would indicate.
But oh no, it’s not done yet. Evidently there’s another aquatic animal that is bisexual. How does the Science Channel know this?
Why, because it has a top of one gender and a bottom of another.
::checks roos:: No, no, can’t say I’ve got a girly top or bottom…this particular animal seems to be hermaphoditic if anything (unless there’s a more scientifically specific name for an animal possessing functional characteristics of more than one gender). Now, the animal in question, they say, engages in intercourse with both female and male parts, and that arguably makes them bisexual, but … no. Having parts of both does not a bisexual organism make.
Where in the world are they getting these definitions?
Eh? That seems like a pretty tame gripe for the Discovery Channel.
The documentary on after that was probably about how hermaphroditic fish conspired with the aliens that built Atlantis and Elvis to found the Third Reich.
I mentioned this in the last rant about The (Discovery) Science Channel, but it bears repeating:
The channel does not determine the content of the program. The channel typically commissions the program to be made, and hires a freelance producer. The producer is responsible for fact-checking and proper presentation. A few do a good job, but most succumb at least a little bit to vast oversimplificaton and frequently to one-sided, sensationalistic coverage of any topic that has the slightest potential for controversy. Ultimately, the channel is concerned mostly with whatever draws viewers, and if the program contains inaccuracies but seems exciting or interesting otherwise, it doesn’t matter.
I’m still pissed off at the newspaper reviews of the recent biography of Micheal Redgrave, which insist that is wife was unhappy in their marriage because of his bisexuality.
She wasn’t.
She was upset that he had extra-marital affairs with both men and women.
Bisexuality has nothing to do with your ability to be monogamous.
(I’m unable to watch most other medical programmes, because of the obvious inaccuracies in the medical stuff. For example, the fact that the X-ray in the Scrubs titles is back to front really bugs me.)
Actually, there is. It’s bisexual. The term was originally used for organisms (especially plants), with both male and female functional reproductive organisms. The word later also came to mean a person who’s sexually attracted to both men and women.
Can everyone with the whole truth on a subject please make a show so we know the truth?
If you want, I’ll promote it, free of charge, in Cafe Society. Otherwise, I’ll just remind everyone that t.v. is entertainment. Be it documentaries, evening news, reality shows, etc.
A television show that puts itself forward as an authority on something ought to bloody well not say that a fish that goes from being female to male undergoes a change in sexuality. For the love of Og I don’t see what’s difficult to understand about this. It’s not like I’m pitting Saved by the Bell because Zack Morris isn’t ACTUALLY enrolled at Bayside High.
I personally do not take anything SC/DC says for fact - especially when it isn’t. However, there are people who might mistakenly use these programs for something other than purely fictional entertainment - in a school, for example. I’ve seen at least two DC programs in Bio labs this past term, and at least one of them (I don’t know enough about parasites to say it was wrong about them) was … incomplete, shall we say.
Used to be “gender” was one of two, three or howevermany categories a language assigned to certain words, and what living things had to facilitate reproduction was two sexes. That bit of linguistic pedancy may reflect what may be happening here: people have somehow allowed themselves to be reprogrammed to use “sex” to refer only to the actual process of intercourse/reproduction and to seek out some derivative word to refer to anything else related to the subject.
::checks roos:: No, no, can’t say I’ve got a girly top or bottom…this particular animal seems to be hermaphoditic if anything (unless there’s a more scientifically specific name for an animal possessing functional characteristics of more than one gender). Now, the animal in question, they say, engages in intercourse with both female and male parts, and that arguably makes them bisexual, but … no. Having parts of both does not a bisexual organism make.