by Liz Plank
No hormone gets a worse rep than testosterone. The fact that men on average produce more testosterone than women is used to justify the worst social ills. Testosterone has been blamed for everything under the moon: theft, crime, violence—even the 2008 stock market crash. Neuroscientist, author and former Wall Street trader John Coates has argued that “testosterone shifts traders’ risk profiles to become overly aggressive, causing bubbles,” and advised that we put more women and older men in banks because they have a “very different biology with less testosterone.” One article in The Guardian by columnist Tim Adams headlined “Testosterone and High Finance Do Not Mix: So Bring On the Women” argued that men should be ousted from the industry entirely because “hormonally-driven young men should not be left alone in charge of our finances.” Although these might be well-intentioned arguments, it’s hard to believe we are talking about full-grown adults and not children who have no choice but to act on every bodily and emotional impulse.
But the most persisting and damaging myth about testosterone is that it makes men predisposed to being violent.
The idea that men are biologically predisposed toward being more violent than women may be one of the oldest and most consistent lies we tell about men. One of the most egregious examples of that is how it’s used to excuse rape. Evolutionary theorists have relied on the myth of a fixed male biology to explain why men rape women. Entomologist and evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill seems to love this theory so much he dedicated a whole book to it! In A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, Thornhill argues that men are evolutionarily adapted to rape women because the potential reward of reproduction is worth more than the costs of the harm to the victim. Of course, Thornhill fails to account for men who rape other men, as well as the many male victims of rape who are sexually assaulted by women. Still, this flawed perspective was called part of this “courageous, intelligent, and eye-opening book with a noble goal” by professor of psychology and bestselling author Steven Pinker. It’s also still taught in schools (I had a professor who made this part of our curriculum in college) and is still frequently peddled in popular culture.
But very little data actually shows that violence against women has anything to do with testosterone. Sex offenders don’t have higher levels of testosterone than men who aren’t, and there’s no evidence showing that rapists who are castrated have lower sexual recidivism rates. Men who become violent with their partners do not have higher levels of testosterone than the regular population. In fact, scientists who have looked at the effects of altering hormonal fluctuations of domestic violence perpetrators have found that the far more effective solution to curbing abusers’ behavior was to help change some of their damaging and deeply held beliefs, such as their sense of entitlement. When Thornhill’s controversial book came out, many experts in his own field dissented with the theory. Dr. Patricia Adair Gowaty, a distinguished professor and an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, told The New York Times in a review of Thornhill’s book, “As sociobiologists we have become enamored of some ideas in the absence of credible and critical data.” Rape theories are “intuitively attractive and they fit many of the experiences we have,” but she warned against the lack of “adequate scientific controls” in many of the studies. In other words, Gowaty argues that it’s all too easy for her colleagues to “prove” the theories that they already believe are true, while ignoring the data that would disprove them.
To be clear, there is a link between violence and testosterone, but while scientists have tried to find a causal link between testosterone and violent behavior, their results suggest that testosterone is not the cause of violence, but it can be the result of it. In one study conducted by researchers at Knox College, men who were instructed to hold a gun had levels of testosterone increase one hundred times more than men who were asked to hold a game of Mouse Trap. Holding a gun even made men pour more hot sauce into a glass of water that researchers told them another man would be drinking. In other words, testosterone seems to follow rather than precede violent behavior. Testosterone plays a crucial role in triggering key developmental features, like facial hair, deepening of the voice and muscle growth (it’s also, fun fact, produced by the ovaries and it’s necessary for their proper functioning!), but there’s no unanimous peer-reviewed evidence that it causes violent behavior.
We are not slaves to our hormones—numerous factors go into our choices; one of them is wanting to fulfill expectations. Some research is starting to show that other people’s perceptions about our gender are better predictors of our violent behavior than our actual gender. One of the most fascinating examples of this is a study where researchers asked women and men to do a world-conflict simulation. When they were told that researchers knew the gender and name of the subject, women dropped fewer bombs than men, but when the subjects were granted anonymity, women actually dropped more bombs than the men. Maybe if we didn’t reflexively expect and require women to be so peaceful, and men to be so violent, they would act very differently.
While there is a dearth of research proving that testosterone causes violent behavior, I’m not arguing that hormones and testosterone don’t have an effect on men (or on women, for that matter). That would be ridiculous. But I do believe testosterone’s toll on men’s behavior has been enormously overblown and widely misrepresented in scientific research as well as in popular culture. Instead of teasing out the nuanced and perhaps even positive effects of testosterone, it’s often used to justify the worst behavior in men. Research is starting to give us a much more complex understanding of its effects on the human body.
FORGET EVERYTHING YOU KNEW ABOUT TESTOSTERONE
For instance, researchers from Pennsylvania State University studied the effect of testosterone on men and found that “popular perceptions of the effect of testosterone on ‘manly’ behavior are inaccurate.” The researchers urge the scientific community to address its bias in studies about testosterone and account for more variables and factors in the research that focuses on it: “We need to move away from such simplistic notions by treating testosterone as one component along with other physiological, psychological and sociological variables in interactive and reciprocal models of behavior.” Their paper finds that testosterone alone can’t explain men’s behaviors, but that we need to incorporate the way testosterone is acted upon depending on social systems, arguing that “social environment plays a key role in understanding behavior-hormones associations.” This mirrors research by the late Christoph Eisenegger at the University of Cambridge that concluded that the biggest impact of testosterone is not that it made men more physically aggressive but instead that it motivated men to be more competitive and eager to achieve higher social status. This explains why research shows that men’s testosterone will rise during more passive activities like a game of chess, despite there being no physical element required for it, and why there is no testosterone difference between socially dominant but nonaggressive prisoners and physically aggressive prisoners. If testosterone predicted violent or aggressive behavior, you would likely see a difference between violent offenders and nonviolent offenders, but there is no testosterone difference between men who are attempting dominance through injuring others and those who don’t. Maybe if we didn’t generalize all men as inherently violent, we’d appreciate what makes so many deviate from the norm.
Although I encountered very few studies focused on the positive effects of testosterone on men (if anyone wants to fund one, please be my guest!), some are starting to show that it can lead to prosocial behavior. For instance, one German study conducted on ninety-one men found that being given a small dose of testosterone actually made men more honest. When they were instruced to play a game with a monetary reward and the researcher left the room, those who had received testosterone were less likely to cheat on the game and more likely to tell the truth than the control group. Researchers believe that because the financial reward was small, being found out to
be a cheater was a greater threat to their social status than getting the money. Because testosterone is ultimately about competing for greater social status, it made the men more honest, not less. Another study found that giving men a small dose of testosterone made them more generous toward a negotiator with whom they were instructed to make a deal. Because being generous can be status enhancing, testosterone increased their kindness toward their collaborative negotiator. The researchers conclude that “a potential interpretation for our findings is that testosterone administration affects a concern for self-image [25], or pride [16],” i.e., it enhances behavior that will make a subject feel proud, and leads to the avoidance of behavior considered “cheap” or “dishonorable.”
To put it simply, the way men are affected by testosterone depends on social perceptions and norms that we create; its effect is variable and heavily determined by our social environment. Testosterone encourages men to seek status, but the way one’s ranking is defined is entirely up to us and the social norms we agree upon. If being more turbulent gives a man higher status, then this could make him more turbulent—and our society absolutely does reward this type of behavior. So, if we didn’t assume that men are aggressive and, more importantly, we didn’t expect or praise that conduct, testosterone could serve as an agent compelling men to engage in more prosocial behavior. Testosterone does make men more likely to compete and seek status, but it’s the way they learn to do that which makes them violent. If we didn’t reward or expect those behaviors, it’s worth asking if men would be even on average more violent than women. Testosterone doesn’t create behaviors, but it can make certain behaviors more likely, and a person’s choice to engage in said behaviors is heavily associated with the social messaging they receive.
Although there is a lot of research on testosterone being associated with dominance through the lens of risk taking, there is little research untangling that from aggression. Most research lumps all of those things together, failing to isolate violence and competitiveness. It’s a shame that most of the studies focused on testosterone seems to start from a negative framing about men. Most of the research out there assumes that competitiveness inherently leads to violence, which is just not always true in the modern civilized world. If more researchers were interested in the positive impacts of testosterone, perhaps we would come to very different conclusions about it and men’s behavior.
But it’s not all bad. Emerging data is starting to change the essentialist lies about testosterone. Researchers at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor discovered that where a man is raised heavily influences his levels of testosterone. When they created an experiment where male subjects were accosted and insulted by a passerby, the men who were raised in the South were more likely to react aggressively and have an increase in testosterone than those raised in the North. The researchers’ conclusion: testosterone doesn’t make you fight; you release it when you feel like you need to fight. In many ways, it’s the social environment that dictates biology, not the other way around.
And the effects are found across the world. Researchers from Durham University came to the same conclusion when they contrasted boys born and raised in Bangladesh with those born in Bangladesh but who moved to the UK as children. The researchers found that testosterone levels were determined by the subjects’ social environment rather than their genetics. Boys who grew up in the UK consistently showed higher levels of testosterone. Researchers concluded that testosterone is not determined by biological factors but “instead reflect[s] their surroundings when they were children.”
Further, although one’s biological gender does not easily predict one’s behavior, one’s belief in biological essentialism sure seems to. Research shows that one of the easiest ways to predict one’s tolerance of prejudice is not their gender, but rather how much they ascribe to biological essentialism. Research performed in Denmark and Australia shows that subscribing to the idea that men and women are biologically predisposed to act and think a certain way increases a person’s likelihood of “predicted lack of support for sex-role egalitarianism and support for gender discrimination.” The data also showed that “high essentialists were more likely to respond negatively towards a power-seeking female political candidate relative to a male candidate.” Gender equality also seems to be a better predictor of each gender’s preferences for the other gender. One mass survey performed in ten countries across the world shows that our preference for the characteristics that align with evolutionary theory fades away in societies that enjoy more gender equality. Using the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) showed that the more gender-equal a country was, the less people seemed pulled by what traditional determinist biology would predict. Men in Finland preferred a smart woman. Women in Germany preferred a man who can clean the house. In societies with less gender equality, both women and men put a prime value on more traditional characteristics. Embedded in the very theory of evolution is the idea that humans evolve in and are affected by their environments. Therefore, social environments shape our wants and needs and even what attracts us in a mate.
NO, THE PATRIARCHY IS NOT NATURAL
It’s often assumed that evolutionary theory explains the existence of patriarchy as a main organizing principle in society, but the truth is that many evolutionary theorists do not see male dominance as inevitable. In fact, apart from humans and chimpanzees, male dominance is not found consistently across the animal kingdom. As Valerie M. Hudson argues in Sex and World Peace, male dominance is not innate in human societies—it was constructed during the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural production where resources, and therefore family members, became property. This justified the dominance of men over women, children, other men and of course nature, which becomes separate rather than a part of the beings who inhabit it. Patriarchy is not the natural order of things. It’s not that we can’t help it; in fact, it’s the opposite: we helped create it, which means that change is not only possible, it’s probable.
Another lie we tell about men is that their brains are only partially responsible for their behavior because their private parts have their own agenda. Robin Williams summed up this popular notion when he said, “The problem is, God gave man a brain and a penis and only enough blood to run one at a time.” Annie Potts, an associate researcher at the University of Canterbury School of Humanities and Creative Arts, calls this the myth of “the man with two brains.” In her book The Science/Fiction of Sex, she argues that it shows up often in popular culture with expressions like “thinking with your dick” or even “boys will be boys,” but she writes that “this ‘penis-brain’ culturally invested with a primal ‘carnal’ intelligence, operates in contrast to, and thereby resists, the man’s rational cerebral thought.” This emphasis on essentializing gender differences down to biology makes the narrative that boys and girls are from different planets the only acceptable narrative. After all, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus was the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1990s. It’s seen as the defining book for relationships between men and women. It’s responsible for re-entrenching in popular culture the myth that women and men are fundamentally different because of biological differences and was written by John Gray, who had a degree in meditation and took one correspondence course in psychology.
THE LIES WE TELL ABOUT TESTOSTERONE MATTER
Massively popular pseudoscience that asserts unchangeable differences between men and women worries neuroscientists because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because we believe these are innate differences, children learn that they are expected to exhibit certain traits and then go on to exhibit them. “People say men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but the brain is a unisex organ,” said Lise Eliot, professor of neuroscience at the the Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, while speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “The default assumption is that these differences are hard-wired … But male and female brains are not much [more] different from each other than male or
female hearts or kidneys.” Neuroscientists have found that since the brain is so malleable, especially in children, those small differences are exacerbated and exaggerated by the way we socialize children differently.
Eliot finds that boys are not less emotional or empathetic than girls; they simply show less ability and comfort expressing those emotions because they are encouraged not to. Her research finds that social interactions have a lasting impact on the shaping of our brains. This means that regardless of gender, our brains are not as hardwired as we previously thought. When Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus was written, the field of neuroplasticity had not entered the mainstream discourse, but now that we know the brain can change itself, claims that we are trapped by our own behaviors are ludicrous.
The biggest irony is that although masculinity panic warriors aggressively instruct men to be “tough” and take personal responsibility for their lives, isn’t the ultimate passivity suggesting that men are victims of their supposed brain wiring and can’t change? As Eliot told The Guardian, “There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired. Every skill, attribute and personality trait is molded by experience.” Although masculinity panic warriors claim men can overcome weakness and failure, they do not think men have the same flexibility or endurance to change the wiring of the gender stereotypes they’ve learned. I think Deepak Chopra said it best when he said “most people think that their brain is in charge of them. We say we are in charge of our brain.” Isn’t that what true freedom for men could look like?
