t has a slightly golden hue, suspended
in an oily substance and injected in a needle about half as thick as a
telephone wire. I have never been able to jab it suddenly in my hip
muscle, as the doctor told me to. Instead, after swabbing a small
patch of my rump down with rubbing alcohol, I push the needle in
slowly until all three inches of it are submerged. Then I squeeze the
liquid in carefully, as the muscle often spasms to absorb it. My skin
sticks a little to the syringe as I pull it out, and then an odd mix
of oil and blackish blood usually trickles down my hip.
I am so used to it now that the novelty has worn off. But every now
and again the weirdness returns. The chemical I am putting in myself
is synthetic testosterone: a substance that has become such a metaphor
for manhood that it is almost possible to forget that it has a
physical reality. Twenty years ago, as it surged through my pubescent
body, it deepened my voice, grew hair on my face and chest,
strengthened my limbs, made me a man. So what, I wonder, is it doing
to me now?
There are few things more challenging to the question of what the
difference between men and women really is than to see the difference
injected into your hip. Men and women differ biologically mainly
because men produce 10 to 20 times as much testosterone as most women
do, and this chemical, no one seriously disputes, profoundly affects
physique, behavior, mood and self-understanding. To be sure, because
human beings are also deeply socialized, the impact of this difference
is refracted through the prism of our own history and culture. But
biology, it is all too easy to forget, is at the root of this process.
As more people use testosterone medically, as more use
testosterone-based steroids in sports and recreation and as more
research explores the behavioral effects of this chemical, the clearer
the power of that biology is. It affects every aspect of our society,
from high divorce rates and adolescent male violence to the exploding
cults of bodybuilding and professional wrestling. It helps explain,
perhaps better than any other single factor, why inequalities between
men and women remain so frustratingly resilient in public and private
life. This summer, when an easy-to-apply testosterone gel hits the
market, and when more people experience the power of this chemical in
their own bodies, its social importance, once merely implicit, may get
even harder to ignore.
Andrew Sullivan is a contributing writer for the
magazine.
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My own encounter with testosterone came about for a simple medical
reason. I am H.I.V.-positive, and two years ago, after a period of
extreme fatigue and weight loss, I had my testosterone levels checked.
It turned out that my body was producing far less testosterone than it
should have been at my age. No one quite knows why, but this is common
among men with long-term H.I.V. The usual treatment is regular
injection of artificial testosterone, which is when I experienced my
first manhood supplement.
At that point I weighed around 165 pounds. I now weigh 185 pounds.
My collar size went from a 15 to a 17 1/2 in a few months; my chest
went from 40 to 44. My appetite in every sense of that word expanded
beyond measure. Going from napping two hours a day, I now rarely sleep
in the daytime and have enough energy for daily workouts and a hefty
work schedule. I can squat more than 400 pounds. Depression, once a
regular feature of my life, is now a distant memory. I feel better
able to recover from life's curveballs, more persistent, more alive.
These are the long-term effects. They are almost as striking as the
short-term ones.
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Hormones Make the Man?
Can testosterone be used as a "success" drug? Is it directly
related to dominance and general life performance, as Andrew
Sullivan describes? Amid the popular debates on both gender
roles and brain chemistry, what is the importance of
testosterone as a medical resource or as a key to understanding
behavior? Go to
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Because the testosterone is injected every two weeks, and it
quickly leaves the bloodstream, I can actually feel its power on
almost a daily basis. Within hours, and at most a day, I feel a deep
surge of energy. It is less edgy than a double espresso, but just as
powerful. My attention span shortens. In the two or three days after
my shot, I find it harder to concentrate on writing and feel the need
to exercise more. My wit is quicker, my mind faster, but my judgment
is more impulsive. It is not unlike the kind of rush I get before
talking in front of a large audience, or going on a first date, or
getting on an airplane, but it suffuses me in a less abrupt and more
consistent way. In a word, I feel braced. For what? It scarcely seems
to matter.
And then after a few days, as the testosterone peaks and starts to
decline, the feeling alters a little. I find myself less reserved than
usual, and more garrulous. The same energy is there, but it seems less
directed toward action than toward interaction, less toward pride than
toward lust. The odd thing is that, however much experience I have
with it, this lust peak still takes me unawares. It is not like
feeling hungry, a feeling you recognize and satiate. It creeps up on
you. It is only a few days later that I look back and realize that I
spent hours of the recent past socializing in a bar or checking out
every potential date who came vaguely over my horizon. You realize
more acutely than before that lust is a chemical. It comes; it goes.
It waxes; it wanes. You are not helpless in front of it, but you are
certainly not fully in control.
Then there's anger. I have always tended to bury or redirect my
rage. I once thought this an inescapable part of my personality. It
turns out I was wrong. Late last year, mere hours after a T shot, my
dog ran off the leash to forage for a chicken bone left in my local
park. The more I chased her, the more she ran. By the time I retrieved
her, the bone had been consumed, and I gave her a sharp tap on her
rear end. "Don't smack your dog!" yelled a burly guy a few yards away.
What I found myself yelling back at him is not printable in this
magazine, but I have never used that language in public before, let
alone bellow it at the top of my voice. He shouted back, and within
seconds I was actually close to hitting him. He backed down and slunk
off. I strutted home, chest puffed up, contrite beagle dragged
sheepishly behind me. It wasn't until half an hour later that I
realized I had been a complete jerk and had nearly gotten into the
first public brawl of my life. I vowed to inject my testosterone at
night in the future.
That was an extreme example, but other, milder ones come to mind:
losing my temper in a petty argument; innumerable traffic
confrontations; even the occasional slightly too prickly column or
e-mail flame-out. No doubt my previous awareness of the mythology of
testosterone had subtly primed me for these feelings of irritation and
impatience. But when I place them in the larger context of my new
testosterone-associated energy, and of what we know about what
testosterone tends to do to people, then it seems plausible enough to
ascribe some of this increased edginess and self-confidence to that
biweekly encounter with a syringe full of manhood.
estosterone,
oddly enough, is a chemical closely related to cholesterol. It was
first isolated by a Dutch scientist in 1935 from mice testicles and
successfully synthesized by the German biologist Adolf Butenandt.
Although testosterone is often thought of as the definition of
maleness, both men and women produce it. Men produce it in their
testicles; women produce it in their ovaries and adrenal glands. The
male body converts some testosterone to estradiol, a female hormone,
and the female body has receptors for testosterone, just as the male
body does. That's why women who want to change their sex are injected
with testosterone and develop male characteristics, like deeper
voices, facial hair and even baldness. The central biological
difference between adult men and women, then, is not that men have
testosterone and women don't. It's that men produce much, much more of
it than women do. An average woman has 40 to 60 nanograms of
testosterone in a deciliter of blood plasma. An average man has 300 to
1,000 nanograms per deciliter.
Testosterone's effects start early -- really early. At conception,
every embryo is female and unless hormonally altered will remain so.
You need testosterone to turn a fetus with a Y chromosome into a real
boy, to masculinize his brain and body. Men experience a flood of
testosterone twice in their lives: in the womb about six weeks after
conception and at puberty. The first fetal burst primes the brain and
the body, endowing male fetuses with the instinctual knowledge of how
to respond to later testosterone surges. The second, more familiar
adolescent rush -- squeaky voices, facial hair and all -- completes
the process. Without testosterone, humans would always revert to the
default sex, which is female. The Book of Genesis is therefore exactly
wrong. It isn't women who are made out of men. It is men who are made
out of women. Testosterone, to stretch the metaphor, is Eve's rib.
Soon after I inject myself with
testosterone I feel a deep surge of energy. My attention span
shortens. My wit is quicker, my mind faster, but my judgment is
more impulsive.
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The effect of testosterone is systemic. It engenders both the brain
and the body. Apart from the obvious genital distinction, other
differences between men's and women's bodies reflect this: body hair,
the ratio of muscle to fat, upper-body strength and so on. But
testosterone leads to behavioral differences as well. Since it is
unethical to experiment with human embryos by altering hormonal
balances, much of the evidence for this idea is based on research
conducted on animals. A Stanford research group, for example, as
reported in Deborah Blum's book "Sex on the Brain," injected newborn
female rats with testosterone. Not only did the female rats develop
penises from their clitorises, but they also appeared fully aware of
how to use them, trying to have sex with other females with merry
abandon. Male rats who had their testosterone blocked after birth, on
the other hand, saw their penises wither or disappear entirely and
presented themselves to the female rats in a passive, receptive way.
Other scientists, theorizing that it was testosterone that enabled
male zebra finches to sing, injected mute female finches with
testosterone. Sure enough, the females sang. Species in which the
female is typically more aggressive, like hyenas in female-run clans,
show higher levels of testosterone among the females than among the
males. Female sea snipes, which impregnate the males, and leave them
to stay home and rear the young, have higher testosterone levels than
their mates. Typical "male" behavior, in other words, corresponds to
testosterone levels, whether exhibited by chromosomal males or
females.
Does this apply to humans? The evidence certainly suggests that it
does, though much of the "proof" is inferred from accidents. Pregnant
women who were injected with progesterone (chemically similar to
testosterone) in the 1950's to avoid miscarriage had daughters who
later reported markedly tomboyish childhoods. Ditto girls born with a
disorder that causes their adrenal glands to produce a hormone like
testosterone rather than the more common cortisol. The moving story,
chronicled in John Colapinto's book "As Nature Made Him," of David
Reimer, who as an infant was surgically altered after a botched
circumcision to become a girl, suggests how long-lasting the effect of
fetal testosterone can be. Despite a ruthless attempt to socialize
David as a girl, and to give him the correct hormonal treatment to
develop as one, his behavioral and psychological makeup was still
ineradicably male. Eventually, with the help of more testosterone, he
became a full man again. Female-to-male transsexuals report a similar
transformation when injected with testosterone. One, Susan/Drew
Seidman, described her experience in The Village Voice last November.
"My sex-drive went through the roof," Seidman recalled. "I felt like I
had to have sex once a day or I would die. ... I was into porn as a
girl, but now I'm really into porn." For Seidman, becoming a
man was not merely physical. Thanks to testosterone, it was also
psychological. "I'm not sure I can tell you what makes a man a man,"
Seidman averred. "But I know it's not a penis."
The behavioral
traits associated with testosterone are largely the clich�-ridden ones
you might expect. The Big T correlates with energy, self-confidence,
competitiveness, tenacity, strength and sexual drive. When you talk to
men in testosterone therapy, several themes recur. "People talk about
extremes," one man in his late 30's told me. "But that's not what
testosterone does for me. It makes me think more clearly. It makes me
think more positively. It's my Saint Johnswort." A man in his 20's
said: "Usually, I cycle up the hill to my apartment in 12th gear. In
the days after my shot, I ride it easily in 16th." A 40-year-old
executive who took testosterone for bodybuilding purposes told me: "I
walk into a business meeting now and I just exude self-confidence. I
know there are lots of other reasons for this, but my company has just
exploded since my treatment. I'm on a roll. I feel capable of almost
anything."
When you hear comments like these, it's no big surprise that
strutting peacocks with their extravagant tails and bright colors are
supercharged with testosterone and that mousy little male sparrows
aren't. "It turned my life around," another man said. "I felt stronger
-- and not just in a physical sense. It was a deep sense of being
strong, almost spiritually strong." Testosterone's antidepressive
power is only marginally understood. It doesn't act in the precise way
other antidepressants do, and it probably helps alleviate gloominess
primarily by propelling people into greater activity and restlessness,
giving them less time to think and reflect. (This may be one reason
women tend to suffer more from depression than men.) Like other drugs,
T can also lose potency if overused. Men who inject excessive amounts
may see their own production collapse and experience shrinkage of
their testicles and liver damage.
Individual effects obviously vary, and a person's internal makeup
is affected by countless other factors -- physical, psychological and
external. But in this complex human engine, testosterone is gasoline.
It revs you up. A 1997 study took testosterone samples from 125 men
and 128 women and selected the 12 with the lowest levels of
testosterone and the 15 with the highest. They gave them beepers,
asked them to keep diaries and paged them 20 times over a four-day
period to check on their actions, feelings, thoughts and whereabouts.
The differences were striking. High-testosterone people "experienced
more arousal and tension than those low in testosterone," according to
the study. "They spent more time thinking, especially about concrete
problems in the immediate present. They wanted to get things done and
felt frustrated when they could not. They mentioned friends more than
family or lovers."
Unlike Popeye's spinach, however, testosterone is also, in humans
at least, a relatively subtle agent. It is not some kind of on-off
switch by which men are constantly turned on and women off. For one
thing, we all start out with different base-line levels. Some women
may have remarkably high genetic T levels, some men remarkably low,
although the male-female differential is so great that no single
woman's T level can exceed any single man's, unless she, or he, has
some kind of significant hormonal imbalance. For another, and this is
where the social and political ramifications get complicated,
testosterone is highly susceptible to environment. T levels can rise
and fall depending on external circumstances -- short term and long
term. Testosterone is usually elevated in response to confrontational
situations -- a street fight, a marital spat, a presidential debate --
or in highly charged sexual environments, like a strip bar or a
pornographic Web site. It can also be raised permanently in
continuously combative environments, like war, although it can also be
suddenly lowered by stress.
Because testosterone levels can be measured in saliva as well as in
blood, researchers like Alan Booth, Allan Mazur, Richard Udry and
particularly James M. Dabbs, whose book "Heroes, Rogues and Lovers"
will be out this fall, have compiled quite a database on these
variations. A certain amount of caution is advisable in interpreting
the results of these studies. There is some doubt about the validity
of onetime samples to gauge underlying testosterone levels. And most
of the studies of the psychological effects of testosterone take place
in culturally saturated environments, so that the difference between
cause and effect is often extremely hard to disentangle. Nevertheless,
the sheer number and scale of the studies, especially in the last
decade or so, and the strong behavioral correlations with high
testosterone, suggest some conclusions about the social importance of
testosterone that are increasingly hard to gainsay.
estosterone is
clearly correlated in both men and women with psychological dominance,
confident physicality and high self-esteem. In most combative,
competitive environments, especially physical ones, the person with
the most T wins. Put any two men in a room together and the one with
more testosterone will tend to dominate the interaction. Working women
have higher levels of testosterone than women who stay at home, and
the daughters of working women have higher levels of testosterone than
the daughters of housewives. A 1996 study found that in lesbian
couples in which one partner assumes the male, or "butch," role and
another assumes the female, or "femme," role, the "butch" woman has
higher levels of testosterone than the "femme" woman. In naval medical
tests, midshipmen have been shown to have higher average levels of
testosterone than plebes. Actors tend to have more testosterone than
ministers, according to a 1990 study. Among 700 male prison inmates in
a 1995 study, those with the highest T levels tended to be those most
likely to be in trouble with the prison authorities and to engage in
unprovoked violence. This is true among women as well as among men,
according to a 1997 study of 87 female inmates in a maximum security
prison. Although high testosterone levels often correlate with
dominance in interpersonal relationships, it does not guarantee more
social power. Testosterone levels are higher among blue-collar
workers, for example, than among white-collar workers, according to a
study of more than 4,000 former military personnel conducted in 1992.
A 1998 study found that trial lawyers -- with their habituation to
combat, conflict and swagger -- have higher levels of T than other
lawyers.
The salient
question, of course, is, How much of this difference in aggression and
dominance is related to environment? Are trial lawyers naturally more
testosteroned, and does that lead them into their profession? Or does
the experience of the courtroom raise their levels? Do working women
have naturally higher T levels, or does the prestige of work and power
elevate their testosterone? Because of the limits of researching such
a question, it is hard to tell beyond a reasonable doubt. But the
social context clearly matters. It is even possible to tell who has
won a tennis match not by watching the game, but by monitoring
testosterone-filled saliva samples throughout. Testosterone levels
rise for both players before the match. The winner of any single game
sees his T production rise; the loser sees it fall. The ultimate
winner experiences a postgame testosterone surge, while the loser sees
a collapse. This is true even for people watching sports matches. A
1998 study found that fans backing the winning side in a college
basketball game and a World Cup soccer match saw their testosterone
levels rise; fans rooting for the losing teams in both games saw their
own T levels fall. There is, it seems, such a thing as vicarious
testosterone.
One theory to explain this sensitivity to environment is that
testosterone was originally favored in human evolution to enable
successful hunting and combat. It kicks in, like adrenaline, in
anticipation of combat, mental or physical, and helps you prevail. But
a testosterone crash can be a killer too. Toward the end of my
two-week cycle, I can almost feel my spirits dragging. In the event of
a just-lost battle, as Matt Ridley points out in his book "The Red
Queen," there's a good reason for this to occur. If you lose a contest
with prey or a rival, it makes sense not to pick another fight
immediately. So your body wisely prompts you to withdraw, filling your
brain with depression and self-doubt. But if you have made a
successful kill or defeated a treacherous enemy, your hormones goad
you into further conquest. And people wonder why professional football
players get into postgame sexual escapades and violence. Or why
successful businessmen and politicians often push their sexual luck.
Similarly, testosterone levels may respond to more long-term
stimuli. Studies have shown that inner-city youths, often exposed to
danger in high-crime neighborhoods, may generate higher testosterone
levels than unthreatened, secluded suburbanites. And so high T levels
may not merely be responses to a violent environment; they may
subsequently add to it in what becomes an increasingly violent,
sexualized cycle. (It may be no accident that testosterone-soaked
ghettos foster both high levels of crime and high levels of
illegitimacy.) In the same way, declines in violence and crime may
allow T levels to drop among young inner-city males, generating a
virtuous trend of further reductions in crime and birth rates. This
may help to explain why crime can decline precipitously, rather than
drift down slowly, over time. Studies have also shown that men in
long-term marriages see their testosterone levels progressively fall
and their sex drives subsequently decline. It is as if their wives
successfully tame them, reducing their sexual energy to a level where
it is more unlikely to seek extramarital outlets. A 1993 study showed
that single men tended to have higher levels of testosterone than
married men and that men with high levels of testosterone turned out
to be more likely to have had a failed marriage. Of course, if you
start out with higher T levels, you may be more likely to fail at
marriage, stay in the sexual marketplace, see your testosterone
increase in response to this and so on.
None of this means, as the scientists always caution, that
testosterone is directly linked to romantic failure or violence. No
study has found a simple correlation, for example, between
testosterone levels and crime. But there may be a complex correlation.
The male-prisoner study, for example, found no general above-normal
testosterone levels among inmates. But murderers and armed robbers had
higher testosterone levels than mere car thieves and burglars. Why is
this not surprising? One of the most remarkable, but least commented
on, social statistics available is the sex differential in crime. For
decades, arrest rates have shown that an overwhelmingly
disproportionate number of arrestees are male. Although the sex
differential has narrowed since the chivalrous 1930's, when the
male-female arrest ratio was 12 to 1, it remains almost 4 to 1, a
close echo of the testosterone differential between men and women. In
violent crime, men make up an even bigger proportion. In 1998, 89
percent of murders in the United States, for example, were committed
by men. Of course, there's a nature-nurture issue here as well, and
the fact that the sex differential in crime has decreased over this
century suggests that environment has played a part. Yet despite the
enormous social changes of the last century, the differential is still
4 to 1, which suggests that underlying attributes may also have a
great deal to do with it.
This, then, is what it comes down to: testosterone is a facilitator
of risk -- physical, criminal, personal. Without the influence of
testosterone, the cost of these risks might seem to far outweigh the
benefits. But with testosterone charging through the brain, caution is
thrown to the wind. The influence of testosterone may not always lead
to raw physical confrontation. In men with many options it may
influence the decision to invest money in a dubious enterprise, jump
into an ill-advised sexual affair or tell an egregiously big whopper.
At the time, all these decisions may make some sort of testosteroned
sense. The White House, anyone?
he effects of
testosterone are not secret; neither is the fact that men have far
more if it than women. But why? As we have seen, testosterone is not
synonymous with gender; in some species, it is the female who has most
of it. The relatively new science of evolutionary psychology offers
perhaps the best explanation for why that's not the case in humans.
For neo-Darwinians, the aggressive and sexual aspects of testosterone
are related to the division of labor among hunter-gatherers in our
ancient but formative evolutionary past. This division -- men in
general hunted, women in general gathered -- favored differing levels
of testosterone. Women need some testosterone -- for self-defense,
occasional risk-taking, strength -- but not as much as men. Men use it
to increase their potential to defeat rivals, respond to physical
threats in strange environments, maximize their physical
attractiveness, prompt them to spread their genes as widely as
possible and defend their home if necessary.
But the picture, as most good evolutionary psychologists point out,
is more complex than this. Men who are excessively testosteroned are
not that attractive to most women. Although they have the genes that
turn women on -- strong jaws and pronounced cheekbones, for example,
are correlated with high testosterone -- they can also be precisely
the unstable, highly sexed creatures that childbearing,
stability-seeking women want to avoid. There are two ways,
evolutionary psychologists hazard, that women have successfully
squared this particular circle. One is to marry the sweet class nerd
and have an affair with the college quarterback: that way you get the
good genes, the good sex and the stable home. The other is to find a
man with variable T levels, who can be both stable and nurturing when
you want him to be and yet become a muscle-bound, bristly gladiator
when the need arises. The latter strategy, as Emma Bovary realized, is
sadly more easily said than done.
So over millennia, men with high but variable levels of
testosterone were the ones most favored by women and therefore most
likely to produce offspring, and eventually us. Most men today are
highly testosteroned, but not rigidly so. We don't have to live at all
times with the T levels required to face down a woolly mammoth or bed
half the village's young women. We can adjust so that our testosterone
levels make us more suitable for co-parenting or for simply sticking
around our mates when the sexual spark has dimmed. Indeed, one
researcher, John Wingfield, has found a suggestive correlation in bird
species between adjustable testosterone levels and males that have an
active role to play in rearing their young. Male birds with
consistently high testosterone levels tend to be worse fathers; males
with variable levels are better dads. So there's hope for the new man
yet.
From the point of view of men, after all, constantly high
testosterone is a real problem, as any 15-year-old boy trying to
concentrate on his homework will tell you. I missed one deadline on
this article because it came three days after a testosterone shot and
I couldn't bring myself to sit still long enough. And from a purely
genetic point of view, men don't merely have an interest in
impregnating as many women as possible; they also have an interest in
seeing that their offspring are brought up successfully and their
genes perpetuated. So for the male, the conflict between sex and love
is resolved, as it is for the female, by a compromise between the
short-term thrill of promiscuity and the long-term rewards of
nurturing children. Just as the female does, he optimizes his genetic
outcome by a stable marriage and occasional extramarital affairs. He
is just more likely to have these affairs than a woman. Testosterone
is both cause and effect of this difference.
And the difference is a real one. This is so obvious a point that
we sometimes miss it. But without that difference, it would be hard to
justify separate sports leagues for men and women, just as it would be
hard not to suspect judicial bias behind the fact that of the 98
people executed last year in the United States, 100 percent came from
a group that composes a little less than 50 percent of the population;
that is, men. When the discrepancy is racial, we wring our hands. That
it is sexual raises no red flags. Similarly, it is not surprising that
55 percent of everyone arrested in 1998 was under the age of 25 -- the
years when male testosterone levels are at their natural peak.
Those qualities associated with low
testosterone - patience, risk aversion, empathy - can all lead
to excellent governance. They are just lousy qualities in the
crapshoot of electoral politics.
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It is also controversial yet undeniable that elevating testosterone
levels can be extremely beneficial for physical and mental
performance. It depends, of course, on what you're performing in. If
your job is to whack home runs, capture criminals or play the market,
then testosterone is a huge advantage. If you're a professional
conciliator, office manager or teacher, it is probably a handicap.
Major League Baseball was embarrassed that Mark McGwire's 1998 season
home-run record might have been influenced by his use of
androstenedione, a legal supplement that helps increase the body's own
production of testosterone. But its own study into andro's effects
concluded that regular use of it clearly raises T levels and so
improves muscle mass and physical strength, without serious side
effects. Testosterone also accelerates the rate of recovery from
physical injury. Does this help make sense of McGwire's achievement?
More testosterone obviously didn't give him the skill to hit 70 home
runs, but it almost certainly contributed to the physical and mental
endurance that helped him do so.
Since most men have at least 10 times as much T as most women, it
therefore makes sense not to have coed baseball leagues. Equally, it
makes sense that women will be underrepresented in a high-testosterone
environment like military combat or construction. When the skills
required are more cerebral or more endurance-related, the male-female
gap may shrink, or even reverse itself. But otherwise, gender
inequality in these fields is primarily not a function of sexism,
merely of common sense. This is a highly controversial position, but
it really shouldn't be. Even more unsettling is the racial gap in
testosterone. Several solid studies, published in publications like
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, show that black men have on
average 3 to 19 percent more testosterone than white men. This is
something to consider when we're told that black men dominate certain
sports because of white racism or economic class rather than black
skill. This reality may, of course, feed stereotypes about blacks
being physical but not intellectual. But there's no evidence of any
trade-off between the two. To say that someone is physically gifted is
to say nothing about his mental abilities, as even N.F.L. die-hards
have come to realize. Indeed, as Jon Entine points out in his new
book, "Taboo," even the position of quarterback, which requires a deft
mix of mental and physical strength and was once predominantly white,
has slowly become less white as talent has been rewarded. The
percentage of blacks among N.F.L. quarterbacks is now twice the
percentage of blacks in the population as a whole.
ut fears of
natural difference still haunt the debate about gender equality. Many
feminists have made tenacious arguments about the lack of any
substantive physical or mental differences between men and women as if
the political equality of the sexes depended on it. But to rest the
equality of women on the physical and psychological equivalence of the
sexes is to rest it on sand. In the end, testosterone bites. This
year, for example, Toys "R" Us announced it was planning to redesign
its toy stores to group products most likely to be bought by the same
types of consumers: in marketing jargon, "logical adjacencies." The
results? Almost total gender separation. "Girl's World" would feature
Easy-Bake Ovens and Barbies; "Boy's World," trucks and action figures.
Though Toys "R" Us denied that there was any agenda behind this -- its
market research showed that gender differences start as young as 2
years old -- such a public out-cry ensued that the store canceled its
plans. Meanwhile, Fox Family Channels is about to introduce two new,
separate cable channels for boys and girls, boyzChannel and
girlzChannel, to attract advertisers and consumers more efficiently.
Fox executives told The Wall Street Journal that their move is simply
a reflection of what Nielsen-related research tells them about the
viewing habits of boys and girls: that, "in general terms, girls are
more interested in entertainment that is relationship-oriented," while
boys are "more action-oriented." T anyone? After more than two decades
of relentless legal, cultural and ideological attempts to negate
sexual difference between boys and girls, the market has turned around
and shown that very little, after all, has changed.
Advocates of a purely environmental origin for this difference
between the sexes counter that gender socialization begins very early
and is picked up by subtle inferences from parental interaction and
peer pressure, before being reinforced by the collective culture at
large. Most parents observing toddlers choosing their own toys and
play patterns can best judge for themselves how true this is. But as
Matt Ridley has pointed out, there is also physiological evidence of
very early mental differences between the sexes, most of it to the
advantage of girls. Ninety-five percent of all hyperactive kids are
boys; four times as many boys are dyslexic and learning-disabled as
girls. There is a greater distinction between the right and left brain
among boys than girls, and worse linguistic skills. In general, boys
are better at spatial and abstract tasks, girls at communication.
These are generalizations, of course. There are many, many boys who
are great linguists and model students, and vice versa. Some boys even
prefer, when left to their own devices, to play with dolls as well as
trucks. But we are talking of generalities here, and the influence of
womb-given testosterone on those generalities is undeniable.
Some of that influence is a handicap. We are so used to associating
testosterone with strength, masculinity and patriarchal violence that
it is easy to ignore that it also makes men weaker in some respects
than women. It doesn't correlate with economic power: in fact, as we
have seen, blue-collar workers have more of it than white-collar
workers. It gets men into trouble. For reasons no one seems to
understand, testosterone may also be an immune suppressant. High
levels of it can correspond, as recent studies have shown, not only
with baldness but also with heart disease and a greater susceptibility
to
infectious diseases. Higher levels of prostate cancer among blacks,
some researchers believe, may well be related to blacks' higher
testosterone levels. The aggression it can foster and the risks it
encourages lead men into situations that often wound or kill them. And
higher levels of testosterone-driven promiscuity make men more prone
to sexually transmitted diseases. This is one reason that men live
shorter lives on average than women. There is something, in other
words, tragic about testosterone. It can lead to a certain kind of
male glory; it may lead to valor or boldness or impulsive romanticism.
But it also presages a uniquely male kind of doom. The cockerel with
the brightest comb is often the most attractive and the most
testosteroned, but it is also the most vulnerable to parasites. It is
as if it has sacrificed quantity of life for intensity of experience,
and this trade-off is a deeply male one.
So it is perhaps unsurprising that those professions in which this
trade-off is most pronounced -- the military, contact sports,
hazardous exploration, venture capitalism, politics, gambling -- tend
to be disproportionately male. Politics is undoubtedly the most
controversial because it is such a critical arena for the dispersal of
power. But consider for a moment how politics is conducted in our
society. It is saturated with combat, ego, conflict and risk. An
entire career can be lost in a single gaffe or an unexpected shift in
the national mood. This ego-driven roulette is almost as highly biased
toward the testosteroned as wrestling. So it makes some sense that
after almost a century of electorates made up by as many women as men,
the number of female politicians remains pathetically small in most
Western democracies. This may not be endemic to politics; it may have
more to do with the way our culture constructs politics. And it is not
to say that women are not good at government. Those qualities
associated with low testosterone -- patience, risk aversion, empathy
-- can all lead to excellent governance. They are just lousy qualities
in the crapshoot of electoral politics.
f you care
about sexual equality, this is obviously a challenge, but it need not
be as depressing as it sounds. The sports world offers one way out.
Men and women do not compete directly against one another; they have
separate tournaments and leagues. Their different styles of physical
excellence can be appreciated in different ways. At some basic level,
of course, men will always be better than women in many of these
contests. Men run faster and throw harder. Women could compensate for
this by injecting testosterone, but if they took enough to be truly
competitive, they would become men, which would somewhat defeat the
purpose.
The harder cases are in those areas in which physical strength is
important but not always crucial, like military combat or manual
labor. And here the compromise is more likely to be access but
inequality in numbers. Finance? Business? Here, where the
testosterone-driven differences may well be more subtly psychological,
and where men may dominate by discrimination rather than merit, is the
trickiest arena. Testosterone-induced impatience may lead to poor
decision-making, but low-testosterone risk aversion may lead to an
inability to seize business opportunities. Perhaps it is safest to say
that unequal numbers of men and women in these spheres is not prima
facie evidence of sexism. We should do everything we can to ensure
equal access, but it is foolish to insist that numerical inequality is
always a function of bias rather than biology. This doesn't mean we
shouldn't worry about individual cases of injustice; just that we
shouldn't be shocked if gender inequality endures. And we should
recognize that affirmative action for women (and men) in all arenas is
an inherently utopian project.
Then there is the medical option. A modest solution might be to
give more women access to testosterone to improve their sex drives,
aggression and risk affinity and to help redress their disadvantages
in those areas as compared with men. This is already done for severely
depressed women, or women with hormonal imbalances, or those lacking
an adequate sex drive, especially after menopause. Why not for women
who simply want to rev up their will to power? Its use needs to be
carefully monitored because it can also lead to side effects, like
greater susceptibility to cancer, but that's what doctors are there
for. And since older men also suffer a slow drop-off in T levels,
there's no reason they should be cold-shouldered either. If the
natural disadvantages of gender should be countered, why not the
natural disadvantages of age? In some ways, this is already happening.
Among the most common drugs now available through Internet doctors and
pharmacies, along with Viagra and Prozac, is testosterone. This
summer, with the arrival of AndroGel, the testosterone gel created as
a medical treatment for those four to five million men who suffer from
low levels of testosterone, recreational demand may soar.
Or try this thought experiment: what if parents committed to gender
equity opted to counteract the effect of testosterone on boys in the
womb by complementing it with injections of artificial female
hormones? That way, structural gender difference could be eradicated
from the beginning. Such a policy would lead to "men and women with
normal bodies but identical feminine brains," Matt Ridley posits.
"War, rape, boxing, car racing, pornography and hamburgers and beer
would soon be distant memories. A feminist paradise would have
arrived." Today's conservative cultural critics might also be
enraptured. Promiscuity would doubtless decline, fatherhood improve,
crime drop, virtue spread. Even gay men might start behaving like
lesbians, fleeing the gym and marrying for life. This is a fantasy, of
course, but our increasing control and understanding of the scientific
origins of our behavior, even of our culture, is fast making those
fantasies things we will have to actively choose to forgo.
But fantasies also tell us something. After a feminist century, we
may be in need of a new understanding of masculinity. The concepts of
manliness, of gentlemanly behavior, of chivalry have been debunked.
The New Age bonding of the men's movement has been outlived. What our
increasing knowledge of testosterone suggests is a core understanding
of what it is to be a man, for better and worse. It is about the
ability to risk for good and bad; to act, to strut, to dare, to seize.
It is about a kind of energy we often rue but would surely miss. It is
about the foolishness that can lead to courage or destruction, the
beauty that can be strength or vanity. To imagine a world without it
is to see more clearly how our world is inseparable from it and how
our current political pieties are too easily threatened by its
reality.
And as our economy becomes less physical and more cerebral, as
women slowly supplant men in many industries, as income inequalities
grow and more highly testosteroned blue-collar men find themselves
shunted to one side, we will have to find new ways of channeling what
nature has bequeathed us. I don't think it's an accident that in the
last decade there has been a growing focus on a muscular male physique
in our popular culture, a boom in crass men's magazines, an explosion
in violent computer games or a professional wrestler who has become
governor. These are indications of a cultural displacement, of a world
in which the power of testosterone is ignored or attacked, with the
result that it re-emerges in cruder and less social forms. Our main
task in the gender wars of the new century may not be how to bring
women fully into our society, but how to keep men from seceding from
it, how to reroute testosterone for constructive ends, rather than
ignore it for political point-making.
For my part, I'll keep injecting the Big T. Apart from how great it
makes me feel, I consider it no insult to anyone else's gender to
celebrate the uniqueness of one's own. Diversity need not mean the
equalization of difference. In fact, true diversity requires the
acceptance of difference. A world without the unruly, vulnerable,
pioneering force of testosterone would be a fairer and calmer, but far
grayer and duller, place. It is certainly somewhere I would never want
to live. Perhaps the fact that I write this two days after the
injection of another 200 milligrams of testosterone into my
bloodstream makes me more likely to settle for this colorful trade-off
than others. But it seems to me no disrespect to womanhood to say that
I am perfectly happy to be a man, to feel things no woman will ever
feel to the degree that I feel them, to experience the world in a way
no woman ever has. And to do so without apology or shame.