#testosterone rex

[variousqueerthings]

Those who think in gender-essentialist ways are more likely to endorse the gender stereotypes that are the foundation of intended and unintended discrimination in the workplace. They are more likely to feel negatively toward power-seeking women, relative to men. 

They are more likely to allocate child care in a traditional way. They are more likely to prefer that the husband earns more in a heterosexual marriage, and to expect to make traditional work-care trade-offs. 

Women encouraged to take an essentialist view of gender become more vulnerable to “stereotype threat”—the reduction in performance and interest in traditionally masculine domains triggered by negative stereotypes about women.

Gender essentialist thinking makes men evaluate sex crimes more leniently, and makes people less supportive of progressive gender policies and feel more comfortable with the status quo. 

- Testosterone Rex, Cordelia Fine

[probablyasocialecologist]

In Testosterone Rex, the psychologist Cordelia Fine argues that it is the way in which risk-taking and competition are defined and measured that gives the impression that men “naturally” excel in certain fields, and women don’t. It isn’t that women don’t compete or take risks—anyone defining competitiveness as exclusively masculine has never seen a mother trying to get her kid into the “right” school—it’s that researchers have conceptualized risk in traditionally masculine ways, focusing on entrepreneurial behavior, extreme sports, and sports betting, to name a few examples. Whereas, for women, Fine says, “quit[ting] or scal[ing] back your job when children arrive is a significant economic risk. Going on a date can end in sexual assault. Leaving a marriage is financially, socially and emotionally risky. In the United States, being pregnant is about twenty times more likely to result in death than is a sky dive.”

Katrina Karkazis, The Masculine Mystique of T

[sixth-light]

Just finished Cordelia Fine’s “Testosterone Rex” for book club, and, uh. How do you write an entire book on the effects of testosterone on humans and never mention trans people? In 2017? 

(I mean, I think I know the answer, but mostly it’s just a suspicious, echoing silence). 

[ecnef]

Last time I looked, it was largely taxpayers and society that, via “financial socialism,” 78 covered the costs of the decisions that brought about the global financial crisis. And, to my knowledge, there are currently no data investigating links between sex differences in testosterone and the taking of “risks” where benefits are reaped for oneself , but losses are underwritten by others.

Cordelia Fine, Testosterone the

[variousqueerthings]

A striking demonstration comes from research investigating the risks people perceive from technological, lifestyle, and environmental hazards (like nuclear power, smoking, and ozone depletion). These studies routinely find that women perceive higher risks to themselves, family, and society from such hazards.

[...] Flynn and colleagues then subdivided the sample by ethnicity as well as sex, and discovered that one subgroup stood out from all the rest. Society seemed a significantly safer place to white males than it did to all other groups, including nonwhite men. 

[...] Flynn and colleagues then established that it was a particular subset of white males who were particularly cavalier about risks: those who, in response to the social justice movement’s currently fashionable suggestion to “check your privilege,” would take significantly longer than others to complete the task. These men were well educated, rich, and politically conservative, as well as more trusting of institutions and authorities, and opposed to a “power to the people” view of the world. A number of studies have now replicated this socalled “white male effect” with other large U.S. samples, and the research points to it being “not so much a ‘white male effect’ as a ‘white hierarchical and individualistic male effect.’” 

[...]

Interestingly, a recent study conducted in the more socially egalitarian and gender-equal Sweden failed to find the “white male effect.” This national survey of nearly fifteen hundred households found that, all else being equal—and in stark contrast with the U.S. data—Swedish men and women had very similar perceptions of lifestyle, environmental, technological, health, and social risks. 36 The survey found instead just a “white effect,” with people from foreign backgrounds, who are subject to social disenfranchisement and discrimination, perceiving risks as higher than did native Swedes

- Testosterone Rex, Cordelia Fine

(bolded by me)

[myopinionisimportant]

God, Professor Cordelia Fine is so smart and so funny. She's my academic equivalent of Terry Pratchett.

In her book Testosterone Rex she brings up an oft-repeated claim (which I'm pretty sure I first heard in high school - my wife says she never did, but then her school had a nicer culture than mine) that "one man can produce as many as 100 offspring by indiscriminately mating with 100 women in a given year, whereas a man who is monogamous will tend to have only one child with his partner during that same time period." So, (says David Schmitt of Bradley University, with whom this claim apparently originates) it makes sense that men want a lot of partners while women only want one. Blah blah my prejudices are actually just science blah.

Okay, says Professor Fine, let's take a look at those numbers.

Assume the man can find a willing woman, and persuade her to have no-strings-attached unprotected sex (which sounds like it would be a bit of a challenge in the modern age, and even more so through all of preceding human history and prehistory). Assume he manages that feat 100 times in the course of a year. Assume that he restricts himself to women over twenty and under forty, assume that he always has enough sperm kicking around to successfully inseminate someone, even assume that he's restricting himself to women who are currently ovulating.

(she does not say "assume that he is always having the kind of sex likely to result in pregnancy," which also seems pretty unlikely to me. You're saying this man wants to sleep with a different woman every three days, and he's not going to cum on someone's titties even once? Impossible)

Even in this vanishingly unlikely scenario, given the roughly 8% chance that such encounters would result in a child, our hypothetical man's chance of making a hundred babies is given at...

That's more than one hundred zeroes after the decimal point. Seems improbable. Perhaps more crucially, Fine suggests that "a promiscuous man would need to have sex with more than 130 women just to have 90 per cent odds of outdoing the one baby a monogamous man might expect to father in a year." So the idea that men are wired to sleep around while women are made to seek one single partner seems...unsupported. Or, as Professor Fine acidly concludes:

"And they say feminists are wishful thinkers."

[catloverkid00]

just finished "Testosterone Rex" by Cordelia Fine (also the author of "Delusions of Gender" - which I haven't read yet), and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in psychology and breaking down the made up ideas we have about the sexual binary.

To summarize, she argues that there is no such thing as a "male" or "female" brain, and most differences in the psychology of (cis) men and women comes down to conditioning/social pressures; any differences in social status are due to patriarchal pressures rather than (cis) women's lower testosterone levels.

She obviously gives way more sources than I can provide in a Tumblr post (and I listened to the audiobook so I can't easily cite any of the studies she mentioned) but I really appreciate her thorough deconstruction of so many things people say that annoyed me but I had to evidence to back up my distaste for.

There were a few sentences throughout the book which I think were poorly worded, as a trans person. But I don't think that negates the many excellent arguments she makes.

[adoratato]

Cant sleep because I feel shit but I did finish one of the books I was reading