{"id":12221,"date":"2018-02-19T11:16:42","date_gmt":"2018-02-19T09:16:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/feministeerium.ee\/?p=12221"},"modified":"2024-05-16T19:43:18","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T17:43:18","slug":"testosterone-making-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.feministeerium.ee\/en\/testosterone-making-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Testosterone, what are you making these men do?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe masculine aggression springs from testes. After all, injecting testosterone, at least to some extent, spikes levels of aggression in not only human males, but chimp and other monkey males too. So maybe the gendered aggression we find around us is the fault of human bodies. There are a lot of apologetic posts these days, asking if men being aggressive is a biological problem. Or at least, a partially biologically problem. <\/span><\/p>\n

Old Tricks<\/h2>\n

Well, it is not. Patriarchy always tries to distract attention from social structures to the human body and excuses itself from the problem. When people at the margins voice legitimate complaints, it is quite often labelled as them \u201cfeeling hormonal.\u201d Legitimate, spontaneous and restless expressions of anger from women are often explained away as \u201chormonal\u201d and as not indicative of social conditions. This is an old trick. To find physical phenomena that co-occurs alongside unpalatable behaviour and say that the behaviour is just being caused by that physical phenomena. If there is a certain cocktail of hormones that shows up often while someone is angry, one can lazily reduce the cause of anger to that cocktail. It is the classic fallacy of confusion causation with mere correlation. The problem with this is that it immediately hides the social reasons that might have contribute to a given phenomenon. <\/span><\/p>\n

A Matter of Patient and Open-Minded Research<\/h2>\n

This same strategy is also used to explain away masculine aggression that could be driven by structures of social domination. By blaming it on testosterone. However, direct correlation between biological phenomenon and any social behaviour is nearly impossible to find. It is never, ever so direct. External social conditions have shaped everything \u201cbodily\u201d and, at the same time, bodily structures have shaped external social conditions. To find out what is causing what is a matter of patient and open-minded research. That\u2019s why, when I recently heard about an online discussion about whether it is testosterone that\u2019s been causing all this male sexual aggression, I thought that there several crucial steps were missing in this line of thinking. Surely, it cannot be so simple. So I quickly began to look up what my go-to Neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has to say about this. He recently wrote a new book called <\/span>Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. <\/span><\/i>It is sort of a compendium of fresh, up-to-date biological explanations of human behaviour.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Fabio Issao, Unsplash CC<\/p><\/div>\n

So it turns out that testosterone, at best has a weak relation with aggression. It definitely isn\u2019t the only thing that\u2019s causing aggression. If you chopped of a male\u2019s testes – human males – aggressive behaviour would still remain. Suck out all testosterone from the body and if the chap has been aggressive in his life before this event, he will continue to be aggressive. Therefore, testosterone is not an obvious culprit. However, to some extent, this notorious hormone does increase aggression. In a hierarchical community of monkeys, if enough testosterone was pumped into a middle-ranking monkey, you\u2019d find that monkey engaging in increased level of aggressive behaviour towards monkeys who are in the lower social ranks. <\/span><\/p>\n

We Have the Tools To Dismantle Inequality<\/h2>\n

But, think about this: why towards monkeys from lower social ranks? Why not monkeys above his social rank, from the dominant group? Obviously, that chap would not have the guts to do that. It is much more convenient to dispose off your aggression unto monkeys from the dominated group rather than unto the powerful. And there is not much biological about it, it is purely how monkey societies are structured. Social structure is what determines who gets what social rank and therefore upon whom it is easier to dispose your testosterone fueled aggression upon. Social structure is also what chooses that the direction of masculine aggression in humans go towards women, transgender and gay communities. Who bears the brunt of aggression is not decided out of thin air, it is enabled by pre-existing pathways of domination and power dynamics that we continually reinforce in our societies. And maybe monkeys don\u2019t have the tools to dismantle these structures, but we definitely do.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Seth Doyle, Unsplash CC<\/p><\/div>\n

We Reward Aggression<\/h2>\n

Secondly, and most importantly, testosterone does not cause aggression. That is just not the lesson you would want to draw from what the hormone did to those monkeys. What do I mean by this? Let\u2019s see what happens if you play around a bit with the social structure of the subjects involved in testosterone experiments. <\/span><\/p>\n