I was just wondering abou the following: testosterone as a hormone is actually closely linkable to pretty much everything that is culturally considered masculine (muscles, risk-taking i.e. courage, sex drive etc.) and thus it is not wrong to “essentialize” it as the The He Hormone.
However it seems estrogen does not work like that for women: surprisingly, it is NOT linked with many culturally feminine characteristics, and probably should NOT be essentialized as The She Hormone. For example, it crashes during childbirth: i.e it has nothing to do with nurturing, motherhood stuff (if it had, it should peak at birth and gradually drop as children become more self-sufficient, yet it actually peaks in early pregnancy and drops at birth). Given that birth control pills are estrogen, it reduces fertility (at least in those doses) and there is a common report that it reduces libido as well (at least in those doses, again). The primary behavioral effects seem to be a strong desire to be accepted by one’s group (see puberty, “teenage girl syndrome”, and once I learned it I saw the word “marginalization” in a different light as well) and mood swings (see: early pregnancy). (I should also add I see more and more health-conscious women warning each other about xenoestrogens in food, increasing the risk of ovarian cancer. They are probably not very good for men either (manboobz?) so I think this should be paid attention to in general, I just want to point out how xenoestrogens seem to have no beneficial effects for women which is a bit weird as well.)
So I just want to say it is sort of odd, estrogen does not represent cultural femininity nearly as well as testosterone represents cultural masculinity.
Any good articles or books or personal opinions that shed some light on this?
I should not be surprised that complex human behaviors cannot be reduced to a hormone. But once I was surprised that many popular, symbolical, role-model men in fact often can be, that everything that a Mike Tyson type symbolizes is T, I expected the same...
It actually is not very odd for there to be a difference like this. Given that there are only two sexes, there only needs to be one hormone which is sex determining in that way. Having two in fact could have strange effects of its own.
Sex determination in placental mammals turns out to be really complicated, which is probably why there are so many intersex conditions. It’s much simpler in marsupials, which is why male kangaroos don’t have nipples. (Where would they keep them?)
If you think it’s complicated in placental mammals, it’s REALLY fun in zebrafish… all embryos start off building an ovary and dozens of loci all over the genome on autosomes rather than sex chromosomes alter the probability of the ovary spontaneously regressing then transforming into a testis. Immature egg cells are vital to both the process by which it becomes an ovary and by which it becomes a testis. Every breeding pair of zebrafish will produce a unique sex ratio of offspring depending on their genotypes at many loci and what they pass on to their offspring.
Woman is the biological default. That’s why women have redundancy on the 23rd chromosomal pair, whereas men have a special “Y” chromosome—leading to much higher rates of genetic disorders in men. That’s why in infant male humans, the testicles have to descend. And so on. Both from an encoding and from a developmental point of view, a man is a woman altered to be masculine. And testosterone is what does that altering.
Yes, it could have been different. We can imagine a species with a neutral default, which then gets altered to be either masculine or feminine by different sex-encoding hormones. But that’s not how humans came about.
We don’t have to imagine. We can look at birds, where the sex chromosomes are the opposite. I haven’t looked at them, so I don’t know how much is a consequence of the chromosomal structure. But, for some reason, I’m skeptical that most people who pontificate their role have looked either. The points about hormones and development are more reasonable.
Are the opposite? I assumed the XX/XY goes back to the very beginnings of gender i.e. fishes… how comes very different chromosomes can make the same hormones i.e. AFAIK birds do have testosterone?
The sheer number of ways sex can be determined amongst vertebrates is amazing, let alone other animals or microbes (there are fungi with 10,000 ‘sexes’/mating types...). I will restrict my examples to vertebrates.
As a rule, in most vertebrates (including humans and other organisms in which it is genetically determined) everything needed to make all the biology of both sexes is present in every individual, but a switch needs to be thrown to pick which processes to initiate.
Many reptiles use temperature during a critical developmental period with no sex chromosomes. Many fish too.
The x y system has evolved independently several times, when an allele of a gene or a new gene appears that when it is present reliably leads to maleness regardless of what else is in the genome. For weird population genetic reasons this nucleates an expanding island of DNA that cannot recombine with the homologous chromosome and which is free to degenerate except for sex determining factors and a few male gamete specific genes that migrate there over evolutionary time, until eventually the entire chromosome degenerates and you get a sex chromosome.
The zw system has evolved multiple times, in which the factor present in one sex and leading to a degenerate sex chromosome leads to femaleness.
In species that are hermaphroditic like some fish all this is superfluous.
In many organisms where sex determination is random or temperature based there are still genetic loci that bias the choice of program one way or another, see my recent comment about zebrafish. These traits are kept in balance in the population because the more males there are the less likely any one of them is to successfully reproduce and vice versa.
Biological sex is ancient but the method of picking which program (or both) to follow has changed frequently.
To echo Salemicus, everyone with a normal endocrine system has testosterone/androgens and estrogens (and other sex hormones too) and indeed both are needed for normal puberty in both sexes, but the ratios and absolute levels vary a lot between the two usual patterns. For example, sealing growth plates in bones to establish adult height requires estrogen for males and females, and androgens are required to establish a lot of hair and skin changes.
One interesting thing I have heard is that amongst hyenas females have more androgens, and this is also visible in size, behavior etc. Must be an interesting kind of puberty.
Yep. While having different developmental payhways to making ova and sperm is ancient, pretty much everything else associated with biological sex is potentially mutable over evolutionary time (and even that can revert to hermaphrodite status).
I am unaware of any examples of normally functionally hermaphroditic mammals, and unaware of but less confident in the same for tetrapods (four limbed vertebrares that came onto land and their descendants). I am aware of tetrapod species that became almost entirely female, reproducing primarily by cloning. I am also aware of tetrapods that switch sex during their lifetimes, though you could call that a form of hermaphroditism. Tetrapods also exhibit all of the above methods of sex determination.
The pattern of hermaphroditism in ray finned fish, a very diverse and old vertebrate lineage, however suggests multiple conversion events back and forth some of which are recent. See http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/images/hermaphroditismtree.gif . Of note, cichlid fish are listed as hermaphroditic on there but recently went through a huge evolutionary radiation and several of their sublineages have been caught in the act of reevolving most of the above sex determination systems.
They all contain the same genome and can activate the same pathways. Same way that your skin and airways can make histamine as an inflammitory signal while your midbrain makes it as a sleep suppressing neurotransmitter (which is why most antihistamines make you sleepy). Genes and pathways and enzymes are quite often not organ specific.
People with full androgen insensitivity syndrome (never responding to androgens produced by gonads) or gonadal dysgenesis of various stripes (gonads fail to develop properly and don’t make any hormones) usually wind up more or less externally normally female regardless of the state of their sex-associated karyotypes/genoypes (with the internal plumbing variable depending on the exact details). In this way, the pre-pubescent female state is probably the closest thing we have to a default inasmuch as that means anything.
These people do, however, fail to naturally go through most of puberty (a few androgens are usually made by the adrenal glands in everyone regardless of sex but not much) which is an active switch being thrown regardless of sex. As such, the secondary female sex characteristics of sexual maturity are not exactly ‘default’ themselves in the same way.
Not sure how the following anecdotal observation relates but it seems to me female gender expression is far more fluid. That is, if situation is tough, poverty and all that, and women end up doing hard physical labor and facing similar challenges of deprivation and difficulties, they end up pretty close to becoming tough-guys, even including things like having insults develop into fist-fights.
The opposite does not seem to be true, it is pretty rare that circumstances make men adopt feminine traits, it is more like they either like them on their own or will never pick up.
However the situations are not exactly parallel because any sort of deprivation and difficulty is generating an obvious response to toughen up with moves people naturally towards masculine roles while there is no such similarly compelling force that could force men towards feminine roles.
Or is there? It would be interesting to examine 1) what fathers do if their wives suddenly die, do they manage to simulate the motherly role as well 2) do more or less cis/straight men sometimes adopt gay traits in prisons?
This is a bit of a chaotic comment, I probably need to organize my thoughts better. My thoughts are roughly like, put women into a tough environment and their testosterone goes up and adopt masculine traits. But there is not really such an environment for men that would make their estrogene go up, except xenoestrogens. However it is possible to create testosterone-lowering environments e.g. schools with an anti-competitive ethos.
I don’t think that women doing hard physical labour is a consequence of ” female gender expression” under certain circumstances. If you need to do physical labour to survive, you do physical labour to survive and gender has nothing to do with it.
As to feminization of men, it’s a popular topic (google it up), usually in the context of political correctness / rise of feminism / anti-discrimination policies / SJWs / etc. in the first world countries.
By the way, for feminization you don’t need estrogen to go up, all you need is testosterone to go down. And, hey, look, testosterone seems to be decreasing in late XX century…
Given that birth control pills are estrogen, it reduces fertility (at least in those doses) and there is a common report that it reduces libido as well
You say that sex drive is “male”. Then crashing libido would be “female”.
So I just want to say it is sort of odd, estrogen does not represent cultural femininity nearly as well as testosterone represents cultural masculinity.
I think there’s some form of the mind projection fallacy going on here. I think the oddness is a result of expectations based on the principles of culture, instead of the principles of biology.
Any good articles or books or personal opinions that shed some light on this?
This is a bit of a word-game really, the article could use some tabooing. While cooperation and competition are often seen as opposites, in reality any status-competition game has both, because one needs allies to win.
It is really a huge stretch to imply an fair outcome means a cooperative outcome means a cooperative mentality means an anti-competitive mentality.
If we want to interpret the experiment hugging the query as close as possible, we see an attitude of enforcing fairness or more properly standing up to an punishing people if they try to play unfair with you which is very, very close to what we consider traditionally masculine approach and does NOT indicate a non-competitive personality: would we really expect a highly competitive person to gladly accept and take unfair deals? Offer a sucker’s deal to a Clint Eastwood type and he will gladly take it? Surely not. What the experiment seems to confirm is that competitive drives can result in cooperative and fair overall outcomes—i.e. a modern version of the Fable of the Bees, it does not suggest that the mentality and approach of guys who rejected unfair offers was not competitive. It is the outcome that was fair and cooperative, not the drive.
It’s a gross oversimplification to link testosterone with ‘masculinity’ in this way. Testosterone is most closely linked with muscle size, bone density, acne, and body hair. All other links you mention seem tenuous and ill-supported by evidence. No link has been established between testosterone level and aggression. A link between risk-taking and testosterone does exist, but as it turns out, both high and low testosterone levels are linked with risk-taking. It’s average testosterone levels that display lower risk-taking. Even so, the correlation is small and risk-taking is much more correlated with other chemicals like dopamine levels. As for sex drive, most studies looking at this correlation haven’t eliminated the effects of aging and lifestyle changes which are probably more important.
Aggression is one of the less useful terms here and really deserves tabooing, because it is a too broad term, it covers everything from a bit too intense status competition to completely mindless destructivity.
In other words, aggression is not a useful term because it describes behavior largely from the angle of the victim or a peaceful bystander, and does not really predict what the perpetrator really wants. Few people ever simply want to be aggressive. They usually want something else through aggressive behavior.
I would prefer to use terms like competitiveness, dominance and status, they are far more accurate, they describe what people really want. For example, you can see war between tribes and nations as a particularly destructive way to compete for dominance and status, while trade wars and the World Cup being a milder form of competing for status and dominance. This actually predicts human behavior—instead of a concept like aggression which sounds a lot like mindless destructivity, it predicts how men behaved in wars i.e. seeking “glory” and similar status-related concerns.
This formulating is actually far more predictive of what people want and here the link with testosterone is clear, even so much that researchers use T levels as a marker of a compeititive, status-driven behavior, for example when they wanted to test the effects of stereotype threat in women, they had this hypothesis that being told that boys are better at math will only hold back women who have a competitive spirit i.e. want to out-do boys and will not harm women who simply want to be good at it but not comparatively better than others, they used T levels as a marker of such spirit. They say ” given that baseline testosterone levels have been shown to be related to status-relevant concerns and behavior in both humans and other animals”.
This is the central idea, aggression is not really a good way to formulate it. To see war-waging esp. tribal raids and other typically, classically male behavior as aggressive, while technically correct, it misses the real motivation i..e. competing for status and dominance.
“Competitive spirit” can play out in more than one way. Some people give up when they’re told they have no chance of winning, others are motivated to try to do the “impossible”.
If that is true then it kind of comes back to my original point which is that testosterone level isn’t necessarily linked with traits considered traditionally ‘masculine’. Certainly aggression is considered masculine, far more so than the more abstract idea of dominance and status-driven behavior, which is considered traditionally ‘evil’ (although in fiction ‘evil’ characters tend to be more often male than female, so there’s that).
Strange, I think aggression is far too often seen as evil, and dominance and status-driven competition as traditionally masculine but maybe we need to taboo both and use some visual examples. For example, when a boy bullies and tortures a weak kid who cannot fight back, I would call that aggression, but when he seeks to brawl with an opponent who is largely his equal, that is status-seeking, because winning such a brawl brings honor, glory, respect. The first is pretty universally seen as evil, the second maybe stupid but not inherently that wrong.
The stereotypical female shopping habits are high-quantity, mid-quality and low price i.e. hunting for discounts and sales. This is not really a status game. A guy is more likely to have status-oriented clothing habits i.e. have only 5 t-shirts but all of them have Armani Jeans written over them in big letters telegraphing the “I am rich, hate me” message :)
This is IMHO different. A dominant person wants to have a high rank and if he or she cannot have it then would much rather exit the group and lone-wolf it instead of being a low ranking member. A person who is more interested in group acceptance wants to be a member of the group at all costs and not excluded, not marginalized, does not want to lone-wolf it and accepts a lower rank as long as being accepted inside the group.
So in other words the dominant person will keep asking “Are you dissing me?!” and the group acceptance oriented person will keep asking “Are we still friends?” which is markedly different and the later seems to be more feminine to me.
The stereotypical female shopping habits are high-quantity, mid-quality and low price
Don’t forget that status signals radically change between social classes.
Lower-middle females indeed shop for a lot of cheap items because the status signal is “I can afford new things” or maybe even “I can afford to buy things”.
In the upper-middle class, it’s rather about whether you can afford that bag with the magic words “Louis Vuitton” inscribed on it.
And in the upper classes you have to make agonizing decisions about whether to wear a McQueen or a Balenciaga to the Oscars (oh God, but what if there will be other McQueen dresses there?!?!!?)
Or you might go for countersignaling and just release a sex tape X-D
A dominant person wants to have a high rank and if he or she cannot have it then would much rather exit the group and lone-wolf it instead
I see no reason to define dominance that way. A dominant person is just one for whom social dominance is a high value and who is willing to spend time, effort, and resources to achieve it. And, of course, it’s not either alpha or omega, there is a whole Greek alphabet of ranks in between. Being a beta is fine if there are a lot of gammas, etc. around.
the group acceptance oriented person will keep asking “Are we still friends?”
A dominant person doesn’t ask questions like this to start with :-) It’s a very submissive question.
It’s extremely weird to me that you do not consider aggression to be a masculine trait.
However there are many cultural differences in what is considered masculine, hence the problem. A lot of Asian cultures consider risk-taking to be anti-masculine, for instance.
Perhaps I do, the point is that we may define it differently, this is why I am trying to taboo it and focus on more concrete examples. In my vocab aggression is something assymetric—like picking a fight with a weaker, easily terrorized opponent, while picking opponents of roughly equal dangerousness (to prove something) is closer to competitiveness for me. Aggression wants to hurt, competition wants to challenge—although often through hurting.
I don’t see why you choose to define aggression in that way, unless it is just to support your point. At the risk of being too reliant on dictionary definitions, the various definitions of aggression that I’ve seen are “the practice of making assaults or attacks; offensive action in general” or “feelings of anger or antipathy resulting in hostile or violent behaviour; readiness to attack or confront.” Nothing there about the size or strength of the opponent.
These are victim-centric definitions. IMHO if you want to understand the motoves of the perp you need to see a clear difference between “intent to harm” vs. “intent to challenge”. Like, go back a few hundred years in history and you will see a huge, really huge difference of social opinion between challenging someone to a duel to death vs. just back-stabbing them.
I was just wondering abou the following: testosterone as a hormone is actually closely linkable to pretty much everything that is culturally considered masculine (muscles, risk-taking i.e. courage, sex drive etc.) and thus it is not wrong to “essentialize” it as the The He Hormone.
However it seems estrogen does not work like that for women: surprisingly, it is NOT linked with many culturally feminine characteristics, and probably should NOT be essentialized as The She Hormone. For example, it crashes during childbirth: i.e it has nothing to do with nurturing, motherhood stuff (if it had, it should peak at birth and gradually drop as children become more self-sufficient, yet it actually peaks in early pregnancy and drops at birth). Given that birth control pills are estrogen, it reduces fertility (at least in those doses) and there is a common report that it reduces libido as well (at least in those doses, again). The primary behavioral effects seem to be a strong desire to be accepted by one’s group (see puberty, “teenage girl syndrome”, and once I learned it I saw the word “marginalization” in a different light as well) and mood swings (see: early pregnancy). (I should also add I see more and more health-conscious women warning each other about xenoestrogens in food, increasing the risk of ovarian cancer. They are probably not very good for men either (manboobz?) so I think this should be paid attention to in general, I just want to point out how xenoestrogens seem to have no beneficial effects for women which is a bit weird as well.)
So I just want to say it is sort of odd, estrogen does not represent cultural femininity nearly as well as testosterone represents cultural masculinity.
Any good articles or books or personal opinions that shed some light on this?
I should not be surprised that complex human behaviors cannot be reduced to a hormone. But once I was surprised that many popular, symbolical, role-model men in fact often can be, that everything that a Mike Tyson type symbolizes is T, I expected the same...
It actually is not very odd for there to be a difference like this. Given that there are only two sexes, there only needs to be one hormone which is sex determining in that way. Having two in fact could have strange effects of its own.
Sex determination in placental mammals turns out to be really complicated, which is probably why there are so many intersex conditions. It’s much simpler in marsupials, which is why male kangaroos don’t have nipples. (Where would they keep them?)
If you think it’s complicated in placental mammals, it’s REALLY fun in zebrafish… all embryos start off building an ovary and dozens of loci all over the genome on autosomes rather than sex chromosomes alter the probability of the ovary spontaneously regressing then transforming into a testis. Immature egg cells are vital to both the process by which it becomes an ovary and by which it becomes a testis. Every breeding pair of zebrafish will produce a unique sex ratio of offspring depending on their genotypes at many loci and what they pass on to their offspring.
Woman is the biological default. That’s why women have redundancy on the 23rd chromosomal pair, whereas men have a special “Y” chromosome—leading to much higher rates of genetic disorders in men. That’s why in infant male humans, the testicles have to descend. And so on. Both from an encoding and from a developmental point of view, a man is a woman altered to be masculine. And testosterone is what does that altering.
Yes, it could have been different. We can imagine a species with a neutral default, which then gets altered to be either masculine or feminine by different sex-encoding hormones. But that’s not how humans came about.
We don’t have to imagine. We can look at birds, where the sex chromosomes are the opposite. I haven’t looked at them, so I don’t know how much is a consequence of the chromosomal structure. But, for some reason, I’m skeptical that most people who pontificate their role have looked either. The points about hormones and development are more reasonable.
Are the opposite? I assumed the XX/XY goes back to the very beginnings of gender i.e. fishes… how comes very different chromosomes can make the same hormones i.e. AFAIK birds do have testosterone?
The sheer number of ways sex can be determined amongst vertebrates is amazing, let alone other animals or microbes (there are fungi with 10,000 ‘sexes’/mating types...). I will restrict my examples to vertebrates.
As a rule, in most vertebrates (including humans and other organisms in which it is genetically determined) everything needed to make all the biology of both sexes is present in every individual, but a switch needs to be thrown to pick which processes to initiate.
Many reptiles use temperature during a critical developmental period with no sex chromosomes. Many fish too.
The x y system has evolved independently several times, when an allele of a gene or a new gene appears that when it is present reliably leads to maleness regardless of what else is in the genome. For weird population genetic reasons this nucleates an expanding island of DNA that cannot recombine with the homologous chromosome and which is free to degenerate except for sex determining factors and a few male gamete specific genes that migrate there over evolutionary time, until eventually the entire chromosome degenerates and you get a sex chromosome.
The zw system has evolved multiple times, in which the factor present in one sex and leading to a degenerate sex chromosome leads to femaleness.
In species that are hermaphroditic like some fish all this is superfluous.
In many organisms where sex determination is random or temperature based there are still genetic loci that bias the choice of program one way or another, see my recent comment about zebrafish. These traits are kept in balance in the population because the more males there are the less likely any one of them is to successfully reproduce and vice versa.
Biological sex is ancient but the method of picking which program (or both) to follow has changed frequently.
To echo Salemicus, everyone with a normal endocrine system has testosterone/androgens and estrogens (and other sex hormones too) and indeed both are needed for normal puberty in both sexes, but the ratios and absolute levels vary a lot between the two usual patterns. For example, sealing growth plates in bones to establish adult height requires estrogen for males and females, and androgens are required to establish a lot of hair and skin changes.
One interesting thing I have heard is that amongst hyenas females have more androgens, and this is also visible in size, behavior etc. Must be an interesting kind of puberty.
Yep. While having different developmental payhways to making ova and sperm is ancient, pretty much everything else associated with biological sex is potentially mutable over evolutionary time (and even that can revert to hermaphrodite status).
Has that actually happened to anything amphibian or above?
I am unaware of any examples of normally functionally hermaphroditic mammals, and unaware of but less confident in the same for tetrapods (four limbed vertebrares that came onto land and their descendants). I am aware of tetrapod species that became almost entirely female, reproducing primarily by cloning. I am also aware of tetrapods that switch sex during their lifetimes, though you could call that a form of hermaphroditism. Tetrapods also exhibit all of the above methods of sex determination.
The pattern of hermaphroditism in ray finned fish, a very diverse and old vertebrate lineage, however suggests multiple conversion events back and forth some of which are recent. See http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/images/hermaphroditismtree.gif . Of note, cichlid fish are listed as hermaphroditic on there but recently went through a huge evolutionary radiation and several of their sublineages have been caught in the act of reevolving most of the above sex determination systems.
Birds have a ZZ/ZW system where the male is the homogametic sex.
Yes, birds have testosterone. Mind you, women have testosterone. It’s the elevated quantity of testosterone that leads to masculinity.
How come very different organs in mammals can make the same hormones? ie. testes, ovaries, adrenals all make testosterone
They all contain the same genome and can activate the same pathways. Same way that your skin and airways can make histamine as an inflammitory signal while your midbrain makes it as a sleep suppressing neurotransmitter (which is why most antihistamines make you sleepy). Genes and pathways and enzymes are quite often not organ specific.
You could with equal sense (i.e. very little) summarise the same empirical observations as “a woman is an incompletely developed man.”
No quite because ‘development’ at least suggests that the change happens ‘later’.
I am not convinced that “is the biological default” is a meaningful concept.
If (a) then b else c
is the same thing as if (!a) then c else b
The point is that !a (not testosterone) is just the lack of testosterone, but not the presence of estrogen.
People with full androgen insensitivity syndrome (never responding to androgens produced by gonads) or gonadal dysgenesis of various stripes (gonads fail to develop properly and don’t make any hormones) usually wind up more or less externally normally female regardless of the state of their sex-associated karyotypes/genoypes (with the internal plumbing variable depending on the exact details). In this way, the pre-pubescent female state is probably the closest thing we have to a default inasmuch as that means anything.
These people do, however, fail to naturally go through most of puberty (a few androgens are usually made by the adrenal glands in everyone regardless of sex but not much) which is an active switch being thrown regardless of sex. As such, the secondary female sex characteristics of sexual maturity are not exactly ‘default’ themselves in the same way.
Not sure how the following anecdotal observation relates but it seems to me female gender expression is far more fluid. That is, if situation is tough, poverty and all that, and women end up doing hard physical labor and facing similar challenges of deprivation and difficulties, they end up pretty close to becoming tough-guys, even including things like having insults develop into fist-fights.
The opposite does not seem to be true, it is pretty rare that circumstances make men adopt feminine traits, it is more like they either like them on their own or will never pick up.
However the situations are not exactly parallel because any sort of deprivation and difficulty is generating an obvious response to toughen up with moves people naturally towards masculine roles while there is no such similarly compelling force that could force men towards feminine roles.
Or is there? It would be interesting to examine 1) what fathers do if their wives suddenly die, do they manage to simulate the motherly role as well 2) do more or less cis/straight men sometimes adopt gay traits in prisons?
This is a bit of a chaotic comment, I probably need to organize my thoughts better. My thoughts are roughly like, put women into a tough environment and their testosterone goes up and adopt masculine traits. But there is not really such an environment for men that would make their estrogene go up, except xenoestrogens. However it is possible to create testosterone-lowering environments e.g. schools with an anti-competitive ethos.
I don’t think that women doing hard physical labour is a consequence of ” female gender expression” under certain circumstances. If you need to do physical labour to survive, you do physical labour to survive and gender has nothing to do with it.
As to feminization of men, it’s a popular topic (google it up), usually in the context of political correctness / rise of feminism / anti-discrimination policies / SJWs / etc. in the first world countries.
By the way, for feminization you don’t need estrogen to go up, all you need is testosterone to go down. And, hey, look, testosterone seems to be decreasing in late XX century…
You say that sex drive is “male”. Then crashing libido would be “female”.
I think there’s some form of the mind projection fallacy going on here. I think the oddness is a result of expectations based on the principles of culture, instead of the principles of biology.
Introductory texts on cell biology.
Testosterone is popularly very misunderstood.
This is a bit of a word-game really, the article could use some tabooing. While cooperation and competition are often seen as opposites, in reality any status-competition game has both, because one needs allies to win.
It is really a huge stretch to imply an fair outcome means a cooperative outcome means a cooperative mentality means an anti-competitive mentality.
If we want to interpret the experiment hugging the query as close as possible, we see an attitude of enforcing fairness or more properly standing up to an punishing people if they try to play unfair with you which is very, very close to what we consider traditionally masculine approach and does NOT indicate a non-competitive personality: would we really expect a highly competitive person to gladly accept and take unfair deals? Offer a sucker’s deal to a Clint Eastwood type and he will gladly take it? Surely not. What the experiment seems to confirm is that competitive drives can result in cooperative and fair overall outcomes—i.e. a modern version of the Fable of the Bees, it does not suggest that the mentality and approach of guys who rejected unfair offers was not competitive. It is the outcome that was fair and cooperative, not the drive.
It’s a gross oversimplification to link testosterone with ‘masculinity’ in this way. Testosterone is most closely linked with muscle size, bone density, acne, and body hair. All other links you mention seem tenuous and ill-supported by evidence. No link has been established between testosterone level and aggression. A link between risk-taking and testosterone does exist, but as it turns out, both high and low testosterone levels are linked with risk-taking. It’s average testosterone levels that display lower risk-taking. Even so, the correlation is small and risk-taking is much more correlated with other chemicals like dopamine levels. As for sex drive, most studies looking at this correlation haven’t eliminated the effects of aging and lifestyle changes which are probably more important.
Aggression is one of the less useful terms here and really deserves tabooing, because it is a too broad term, it covers everything from a bit too intense status competition to completely mindless destructivity.
In other words, aggression is not a useful term because it describes behavior largely from the angle of the victim or a peaceful bystander, and does not really predict what the perpetrator really wants. Few people ever simply want to be aggressive. They usually want something else through aggressive behavior.
I would prefer to use terms like competitiveness, dominance and status, they are far more accurate, they describe what people really want. For example, you can see war between tribes and nations as a particularly destructive way to compete for dominance and status, while trade wars and the World Cup being a milder form of competing for status and dominance. This actually predicts human behavior—instead of a concept like aggression which sounds a lot like mindless destructivity, it predicts how men behaved in wars i.e. seeking “glory” and similar status-related concerns.
This formulating is actually far more predictive of what people want and here the link with testosterone is clear, even so much that researchers use T levels as a marker of a compeititive, status-driven behavior, for example when they wanted to test the effects of stereotype threat in women, they had this hypothesis that being told that boys are better at math will only hold back women who have a competitive spirit i.e. want to out-do boys and will not harm women who simply want to be good at it but not comparatively better than others, they used T levels as a marker of such spirit. They say ” given that baseline testosterone levels have been shown to be related to status-relevant concerns and behavior in both humans and other animals”.
This is the central idea, aggression is not really a good way to formulate it. To see war-waging esp. tribal raids and other typically, classically male behavior as aggressive, while technically correct, it misses the real motivation i..e. competing for status and dominance.
Most men in war didn’t try to seek glory but tried to avoid getting killed and prevent their mates from getting killed.
“Competitive spirit” can play out in more than one way. Some people give up when they’re told they have no chance of winning, others are motivated to try to do the “impossible”.
Yes. The first is more common, the second is what perhaps one may call the dafke spirit.
If that is true then it kind of comes back to my original point which is that testosterone level isn’t necessarily linked with traits considered traditionally ‘masculine’. Certainly aggression is considered masculine, far more so than the more abstract idea of dominance and status-driven behavior, which is considered traditionally ‘evil’ (although in fiction ‘evil’ characters tend to be more often male than female, so there’s that).
I think empirically it is. The personality changes in (usually older) men who start taking testosterone (e.g. as injections) are well-documented.
Link?
Google up “testosterone replacement therapy” which will lead you to a bunch of PubMed papers and a variety of internet anecdata. Or see e.g. this.
Strange, I think aggression is far too often seen as evil, and dominance and status-driven competition as traditionally masculine but maybe we need to taboo both and use some visual examples. For example, when a boy bullies and tortures a weak kid who cannot fight back, I would call that aggression, but when he seeks to brawl with an opponent who is largely his equal, that is status-seeking, because winning such a brawl brings honor, glory, respect. The first is pretty universally seen as evil, the second maybe stupid but not inherently that wrong.
Many women are intensely status-driven (look at their shopping habits, etc.) and dominance is not uncommon, though usually in a “softer” way.
The stereotypical female shopping habits are high-quantity, mid-quality and low price i.e. hunting for discounts and sales. This is not really a status game. A guy is more likely to have status-oriented clothing habits i.e. have only 5 t-shirts but all of them have Armani Jeans written over them in big letters telegraphing the “I am rich, hate me” message :)
I think what you see as dominance amongst women is more often group acceptance / non-acceptance, i.e. popularity vs. marginalization e.g. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=teenage+girl+syndrome
This is IMHO different. A dominant person wants to have a high rank and if he or she cannot have it then would much rather exit the group and lone-wolf it instead of being a low ranking member. A person who is more interested in group acceptance wants to be a member of the group at all costs and not excluded, not marginalized, does not want to lone-wolf it and accepts a lower rank as long as being accepted inside the group.
So in other words the dominant person will keep asking “Are you dissing me?!” and the group acceptance oriented person will keep asking “Are we still friends?” which is markedly different and the later seems to be more feminine to me.
Don’t forget that status signals radically change between social classes.
Lower-middle females indeed shop for a lot of cheap items because the status signal is “I can afford new things” or maybe even “I can afford to buy things”.
In the upper-middle class, it’s rather about whether you can afford that bag with the magic words “Louis Vuitton” inscribed on it.
And in the upper classes you have to make agonizing decisions about whether to wear a McQueen or a Balenciaga to the Oscars (oh God, but what if there will be other McQueen dresses there?!?!!?)
Or you might go for countersignaling and just release a sex tape X-D
I see no reason to define dominance that way. A dominant person is just one for whom social dominance is a high value and who is willing to spend time, effort, and resources to achieve it. And, of course, it’s not either alpha or omega, there is a whole Greek alphabet of ranks in between. Being a beta is fine if there are a lot of gammas, etc. around.
A dominant person doesn’t ask questions like this to start with :-) It’s a very submissive question.
Very funny. Women begin to compete for status and form alliances at age 4...
That may be more of a group acceptance thing: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mgr/open_thread_jul_13_jul_19_2015/ckda
It’s extremely weird to me that you do not consider aggression to be a masculine trait.
However there are many cultural differences in what is considered masculine, hence the problem. A lot of Asian cultures consider risk-taking to be anti-masculine, for instance.
Perhaps I do, the point is that we may define it differently, this is why I am trying to taboo it and focus on more concrete examples. In my vocab aggression is something assymetric—like picking a fight with a weaker, easily terrorized opponent, while picking opponents of roughly equal dangerousness (to prove something) is closer to competitiveness for me. Aggression wants to hurt, competition wants to challenge—although often through hurting.
I don’t see why you choose to define aggression in that way, unless it is just to support your point. At the risk of being too reliant on dictionary definitions, the various definitions of aggression that I’ve seen are “the practice of making assaults or attacks; offensive action in general” or “feelings of anger or antipathy resulting in hostile or violent behaviour; readiness to attack or confront.” Nothing there about the size or strength of the opponent.
These are victim-centric definitions. IMHO if you want to understand the motoves of the perp you need to see a clear difference between “intent to harm” vs. “intent to challenge”. Like, go back a few hundred years in history and you will see a huge, really huge difference of social opinion between challenging someone to a duel to death vs. just back-stabbing them.
This should dissolve any feelings of oddness about this topic.