Health
Testosterone rules
by Noel O'Hare
Why men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
The government is considering a proposal to chemically castrate sex offenders. Chemical castration, practised by several US states, stops the body from producing testosterone, the hormone that supercharges the sex drive and seemingly disengages the mind. It can spell trouble with a capital T. But testosterone influences more than just sexual behaviour: it’s the reason men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
It has been claimed that gender characteristics result from socialisation. If girls were raised the same way as boys, the theory goes, they would be able to read maps and make up their minds about curtain colours. If boys were socialised the same way as girls, they could empty the dishwasher and look after the baby at the same time and remember to lift the toilet seat.
Well, it ain’t necessarily so. Testosterone or the lack of it dictates a great deal of gender-specific behaviour. Girls born with adrenal hyperplasia, for example, a disorder that produces high testosterone levels, are happier playing with Tonka trucks than Barbie dolls.
Testosterone and the female hormone estrogen are converted by enzymes from the body’s cholesterol, and levels can vary according to the time of day, the season and mental attitude. Levels are higher in the morning, and in late autumn-early winter (so much for a young man’s spring fancy) testosterone rises when we win contests and drops when we lose.
Studies show that fans who closely identify with their team are affected in the same way as players. When the All Blacks were thrashed by Australia in the Rugby World Cup, New Zealand must have rated as the most testosterone-deficient nation on the planet. For battered wives, at least, it would have been a boon. Contrary to popular belief, men are more likely to bash their partners after their sports team win than when they lose. High spirits topped up with testosterone is a very volatile mixture.
Testosterone affects verbal ability and mental focus. When men were hunters, they didn’t require a large vocabulary to club small animals, whereas cave women would have found it hell to organise coffee mornings without a knack for talking. Similarly, men gained by having a one-track mind in pursuing the evening dinner and women benefited from being able to decipher runes while stirring gravy and supervising homework. The female style of thinking has been described as “web thinking” and the male style “step thinking”. And it’s mostly due to testosterone’s effect on the brain.
In his book Heroes, Rogues and Lovers: Testosterone and Behaviour, Professor James Dabbs cites the case of a Dutch sex-change patient who was given large doses of testosterone to make his body masculine. The patient not only reported physical changes but mental changes: “He experienced the differences between men and women that researchers have only observed second-hand. The changes he described – trouble expressing himself, thinking and imagining less, acting more quickly, focusing more narrowly but more vividly, feeling euphoric and losing fine motor skills – are all consistent with what researchers know about testosterone’s role in differences between men and women.”
Testosterone improves mental rotation ability, which is related to geographical and mechanical skills, says Dabbs. “Where men excel at mental rotations and geographical ability, women excel at another kind of spatial ability: women notice and remember where objects are located.” So, when giving travel directions to a man, you should stress direction and distance, but, for a woman, landmarks would be more useful.
Over the past two decades Dabbs and his students in the psychology department at Georgia State University in the US have conducted many fascinating experiments on the effects of testosterone on men and women.
They discovered, for instance, that you can tell a high testosterone person from their smile, which is like a politician’s in that it never reaches the eyes. A low testosterone person’s smile is likely to be wider and have crinkles round the eyes. Women smile more than men because they are programmed to. “The sex difference is part of an ancient pattern in which women maintain community by smiling and men maintain dominance by not smiling.” Studies show that even women with high testosterone levels smile less. Doctors find that when they give men testosterone-lowering medication, for prostate cancer, for example, they often become more friendly, sociable and smile more.
Though it makes men feel good about themselves, high testosterone is a bit of a handicap in the modern world. A study of nearly 5000 US military veterans found that, despite making people more aggressive and competitive, “high testosterone levels do not bring money, prestige and general success in our culture”. It would be a shame, though, if real men went the way of the dodo and machismo was defined as a cross between a Wellington accountant and a Ponsonby hairdresser.
