Duling textbooks this time. I’ve got a book that claims that testosterone and violence are not correlated, and this girl (ahem, lady) I know has a book that claims otherwise. What’s the deal here, and whatnot, yada yada yada.
Shakespeare had testosterone. So did Emerson and Thoreau, Yehudi Menuhin, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudolf Nureyev, Albert Einstein, Jesus, Pascal, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Martin Luther King, W.B. Yeats and Bill Gates. Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon have it and so does Peter Jennings. Steven Hawking has it and Forrest Gump had it. God probably has it if he really looks like that.
Bill Gates isn’t dead, I know that. While I’m here I could add (insufferably) Aldous Huxley, David Bohm, Adam Smith, Truman Capote, Albert Switzer, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Barry Manilow, Gershwin and Carl Jung. Also Victor Borge and Danny Kaye, Richard Dawkins, Milton Friedman…
Taking testosterone supplements can increase ones tendency towards violent behavior. Which is NOT to say that testosterone causes violence. The question is so politically charged that no one, besides possibly people doing research on it, will ever get a clear answer on it.
Things would be very different if we were all as docile as women.
Was the book that claims otherwise “The Trouble with Testosterone” by Robert Sapolsky? That book was also printed under the title Junk Food Monkeys - I know because I was accused of not returning it to the library (I did) and ended up paying $40 to keep my library card. In it the author says:
“higher testosterone levels do not increase aggression, but aggression increases testosterone levels. Even if you give massive amounts of hormone to a monkey who, let us say, is number three in a dominance hierarchy, he will tyrannize numbers four and five but still kowtow to the two above him.”
There are a lot of violent women around you know. One was sent to prison here last week (for six years only) for whipping her child to death. She took half an hour to do it. That sort of thing is quite common. If there’s any hormone that is prevalent in the world at the moment it’s estrogen. Ecoestrogens are hugely detrimental to the environment. So, if violence in women increases you could say (equally spuriously, I suppose) that an increase of female hormone causes violence too.
Welcome to our planet spaceman! We have much to teach you!
No cite, but I remember reading something (or seeing on TV - I’m not really sure) about a mare who had unusually high testosterone levels. She was very aggressive and displayed many of the types of behaviour commonly associated with the male of the species. Estrogen therapy helped calm her down a little.
So there is a link, its just as yet unclear exactly what it is.
Well, I could go back to my list of examples of non-violent men: Bach, Vivaldi, Richard Simmons, Michangelo, Keats, Byron, the Dalai Lama, Tim Berners-Lee, John Cusack and all non prisoners etc etc but it’s making me wonder how men ever got the “aggressive sex” reputation in the first place. For every example of an aggressive man there is probably 100,000 examples of non-aggressive ones. I know that the issue is whether they would become violent if injected with excess testosterone but I think I have a point.
And there was little ol’ me wondering if estrogens made one more prone to emotional instability, unpredictability and violence.
Why is not a good idea to ask a sexist question like that ?
BECAUSE I SAID SO !