Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (45 page)

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Authors: James McBride Dabbs,Mary Godwin Dabbs

Tags: #test

BOOK: Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior
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the world, and most of them channel the effects of testosterone toward specific goals. People are biological creatures who live in social settings, and any good explanation about how testosterone works must be a biosocial one. Biology provides the hormone and its potential effects on our action. But whether we act, and exactly how we act, depends on other factors, including culture.
Culture is the shared tradition of a group, passed down from one generation to the next. As the human population grew in ancient times, different cultures appeared. At first, people were limited to nearby food and supplies. Gradually they diversified, moving out to hunt animals, herd livestock, farm, develop their knowledge, and finally enter the occupations of the modern world. These developments took a long time. Many cultures rose and fell along the way, and testosterone has been there all along to play its role. Spatial skills at one time guided rocks and spears, and now they guide golf balls, basketballs, airplanes, and rockets. The sexual appetite of primitive man now directs and supports a sex industry. The old desire to dominate makes use of modern tools. A fondness for quick and lethal violence makes modern weapons attractive. The high-testosterone way of thought divides the world into camps of friends and enemies.
Tribal Values
Testosterone is more than an individual trait; it also affects groups of people. People are not solitary creatures, like bears or eagles; we evolved living together in families and tribes, and sociability is part of human nature. People still form groupscommunities, cities, nations, denominations, clubs, associations, parties, regiments, families, and tribesand we are more friendly and comfortable with members of our own group than with outsiders. When trouble arises, group members think in terms of "us" versus "them." Groups decide when to eat dinner, what kind of personal life or business practice will be acceptable, who must fight a war, when to celebrate holidays, and how to treat criminals. In comedian Lily Tomlin's words, "reality is a collective hunch.'' Groups create their own reality, and group members learn special truths from each other. Members must embrace the group's ideology or risk disapproval from the other members of the group. Reality varies from group
 
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to group, and the action it inspires sometimes surprises even the members of the group itself. A sports fan might go to the stadium not intending to fight, but there among his fellow fans and their collective testosterone load, he might get caught up in a brawl, and then later wonder why.
Group reality has a tribal quality. We usually think of tribes as made up of primitive people in less civilized parts of the world; but groups, everywhere in the world, have characteristics in common with tribes. Just as every person has an animal within, every group has a tribe within. Each tribe has its own way of doing things as well as its own reality, and in every tribe, the individual members want to be accepted and respected by the other members. John Keegan, a British military historian, said that British soldiers, officers as well as the men in the ranks, value being accepted by the other soldiers in the regiment above all other things.
Before Keegan went to teach at the Sandhurst Military Academy, he knew the retired soldiers who taught there would be different from other men. After all, the values of war are a world apart from the values of everyday life. Keegan expected the retired soldiers to be united by their association with the British army, and that was true to some extent, but what mattered to them more than the British army was their regiments. Keegan said, "Regimental loyalty was the touchstone of their lives." The regiments, some with roots in the seventeenth century, had strong separate traditions and distinctive uniforms. When the old soldiers dressed for evening mess at Sandhurst, each man wore on his regimental uniform the ribbons, medals, and crosses he'd earned in service to his country. The uniforms came in many colors, including scarlet, blue, black-green, and tartan plaid. Trim included heavy gold lace and purple facing. Cavalry officers wore fancy boots with spur slots, and gunners wore tight trousers. The old soldiers may have been rhinos on the battlefield, but they were peacocks at evening mess at Sandhurst.
Despite the emphasis on regimental affiliation, all the men were brothers-in-arms. They were friendly toward soldiers in other regiments, and they quickly forgave personal disagreements. Nevertheless, they would have never forgiven an insult to their regiment, if there had ever been such an insult. There wasn't, though, because everyone at Sandhurst knew a slur against a regiment would be a dangerous threat
 
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to the basic values of the group. When he learned about the intensity of regimental loyalty at Sandhurst, Keegan said, "Tribalismthat was what I had encountered."
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The distinction between us and them, between our people and everyone else, is a basic social distinction.
4
In colonial times, America consisted of a group of villages, each containing people who knew each other well and mistrusted outsiders.
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We have advanced to larger units, and now we mistrust people outside our region, occupation, or social class. The distinction is emotionally loaded. Once we know "we" are different from "them," we conclude that we are better and that truth, virtue, and God are on our side. Much of the strife in the world results from this kind of thinking, which studies show is more common among men than women. In studying ''Social Dominance Orientation," researchers found that men were more oriented toward social dominance than women. Survey data showed that more men than women favored inequality among social groups, military programs, and punitive public policy, whereas more women than men favored equal rights and social programs.
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The sex difference raises the possibility that testosterone plays a part in "us-versus-them" thinking. Perhaps this is true because men have evolved over thousands of generations fighting each other, and the same hormone that contributes to their fighting makes them quick to label someone outside their group as inferior or as an enemy.
People are especially quick to divide others into friends and enemies in hard and threatening times. When the living is easy, people are more generous. In 1999, in anticipation of a Y2K disaster, late-night radio talk shows raised questions about how those who were prepared for the crisis should deal with those who were not. Should they share with neighbors who came to beg? Should they shoot beggars who might turn into thieves? In environments where resources are limited and threats from predators are frequent, nonhuman primates bond together more tightly within their groups and become more hostile to those outside their groups.
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If high-testosterone individuals respond more readily to threat, they may become leaders and warlords in the fighting and violence that follows a national or ethnic threat.
Testosterone partly explains individual differences in violent behavior, but it can't explain why one group is more violent than another.
 
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Cultural values and history are important in determining group behavior. For instance, the American South has a history different from that of the rest of the country, and for generations it has been more violent. There are many reasons for this, but psychologist Dick Nisbett has identified the Scotch-Irish herder ancestors of many Southerners as one of the reasons. Scotch-Irish herders held to a tradition that emphasized tribal values of personal honor and defense, which when transplanted into the South gave a boost to violent personal conflict.
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Joining the Club
Tribal values are not instincts; they have to be learned. In primitive tribes, there is no formal schooling, and people learn on the job. The hunter learns to hunt, the farmer to farm, and the physician to heal by watching others who can do these things. Tribal values are passed from one generation to the next. Without our history and the social rules of tribal values to guide us, we would be much like other animals. We would follow our natural inclinations and go off in our own directions. Some of us are naturally more happy, lazy, sad, sociable, creative, selfish, helpful, or competitive than others. Those of us with higher testosterone levels lean toward sex and dominance. Throughout long eras of human history, local initiations and social rules have kept societies stable and predictable. These forces have helped to control the high-testosterone individuals who might otherwise cause trouble.
The roles of men and women vary from tribe to tribe, but the role women have in bearing children and caring for them is important everywhere, no matter what needs or challenges face the tribe. The role of men in caring for children is less universally important, and a man's main usefulness to the tribe may come from hunting, fighting, fishing, traveling, or other activities. Because child bearing is important everywhere, the role of women is more predictable than the role of men.
This difference between the sexes is reflected in the initiation ceremonies of men and women, in what they must do to show they have "joined the club" and deserve to be treated as full-fledged members of society. Tribes, clubs, and other groups have initiations in which new members learn how to act, what to think, and what secrets they should know. They learn what is expected of them. In primitive tribes, initiations
 
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mark the beginning of adulthood, a time when the older generation passes its values on to the younger generation. In a book called
Manhood in the Making
, David Gilmore describes the difference between initiation ceremonies for males and females.
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He says there are more initiations for males than for females, because the transition into adulthood is potentially less clear and more confusing for males than for females.
Nevertheless, many societies do have initiation ceremonies for girls, and the status of women in these societies is reflected in the initiation ceremonies. The festive Navajo Kinaalda is a menstruation ceremony. There is a great deal of singing and a ceremonial cake, and the honored girl runs as far as she can over the course of three days. For hundreds of years, the Navajos have been saying that the farther a girl runs during her Kinaalda, the longer and healthier her life will be.
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In contrast to the Navajo, the Sabiny tribe in eastern Uganda celebrates a girl's passage into womanhood with a brutal ceremony that ends her ability to feel sexual pleasure. A "traditional surgeon" cuts away her clitoris and labia minor with a razor blade as the girl's friends and family watch. She endures the pain in silence, because if she cries out she becomes an embarrassment to her family.
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Many girls throughout the world go through puberty without celebration or mutilation. For them, menstruation and the ability to have children mark the change from girlhood to womanhood. Biological markers and informal chats with their mothers are enough. Being able to have children is not all that defines a woman, but it is enough to let a girl into the club of women.
A boy's entry into the club of men is biologically less dramatic. Men have a fleeting role in the actual act of reproduction, and their responsibility for child rearing varies from society to society. In general, men spend more time on other roles and duties, which are defined by the needs and customs of their particular societies. Truk Island men fish on the open sea, and Samoan men fish in quiet lagoons. Not long ago, Masai men killed lions, and Samburu men stole cows. Manly skills vary from place to place and time to time, as do the ceremonies and rituals that underline their importance. Initiations do exist in the modern world, but they get less attention than they did in primitive society. Modern initiations today are pale remnants of old traditions. They exist in ceremonies like joining a fraternity, entering a new job, taking first communion, or having one's shirt bloodied after a deer hunt.
 
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Manhood isn't automatic, and initiations help control the raw power of masculinity and convert it into manhood. Testosterone is close to masculinity, and the social rules of right behavior are close to manhood. Men tell each other what it means to be a man, and what they say differs from society to society. Boys learn to follow these rules as they grow up. They look to others for guidance, and in primitive societies initiations reveal the secrets of how they should act. Engaged Maasai men in Kenya get to wear red mud and feather headdresses. Except for an occasional bachelor party, engaged men in the United States are mostly ignored. Some problems of modern society arise because the old initiations and traditions are gone or no longer work. A movie called
Once Were Warriors
describes strong and spirited Polynesian Maori natives living in a poor area in the city of Wellington, New Zealand. In earlier traditional tribal life, the men would be warriors and use their physical power to serve the tribe. But they had moved to the city and abandoned most of their tribal customs, and their daily activities were marked by disorganized and random violence. Many of the adolescent boys got elaborate traditional Maori tattoos, but they belonged to street gangs instead of the old tribes.
Everywhere, all over the world, men learn to "be a man." Some are more successful than others. When my father was in the Army, waiting to go overseas and fight in World War I, there was a soldier in his company named Lou. Lou would get very drunk and talk to himself. One night my father heard him staggering down the line of tents, muttering to himself, "Be a man, Lou. Be a man." Lou headed for the latrine, made a wrong turn, went into the wrong tent, and urinated all over the captain sleeping there.
When I was growing up, all young men registered for the draft, and most of them served in the armed forces. This was a powerful experience. Military service became a common memory that men shared for the rest of their lives. Universal military service did not ensure a cohesive nation, but it was one of the things that helped define citizenship. Young men today receive less instruction on what they should do when they grow up. They pay more attention to each other than to adults, and they lose the benefit of prior history and experience. Youth gangs have replaced tribes. Young people are free to do many things they could not have done in the past, but they are short on guidance. As one of my female colleagues said, after hearing me talk about testosterone, "Men are like ships, with large sails and small rudders."

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