Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (15 page)

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Authors: James McBride Dabbs,Mary Godwin Dabbs

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BOOK: Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior
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lot to do with his dedication to his cause, but testosterone probably played a role, too.
9
Differences in intensity of focus go along with differences in cognitive style, which is easier to see in groups than in individuals. The average group of women will consider a problem longer than the average group of men, talking more about causes, complexities, and a variety of possible solutions. Members of the League of Women Voters study and discuss a problem until they reach a consensus about what action to take. A Marine platoon seizes a hill with little discussion, following the simple words from "The Charge of the Light Brigade":" . . . not to reason why . . . but to do and die." The League takes a more feminine approach, and the Marines take a more masculine approach. Detective Dave Robicheaux, the hero of the novel
The Neon Rain
, explains his high-testosterone approach to problem solving this way: "I simply had to set some things right. And sometimes you don't set things right by being reasonable. Reason is a word I always associate with bureaucrats, paper shufflers, and people who formed committees that were never intended to solve anything. I don't mean to be hard. Maybe I'm just saying that what works for other people never worked very well for me. . . . "
10
Men like Robicheaux think action is the best way out of a fog of confusion. Sometimes they are right, and their logic grows out of the demands of insoluble problems. They try to get rid of problems as quickly as possible, while most women try to understand problems first. Quick action works well in combat, where delay can get one killed, and it may work in a barroom fight, but it is a poor way to handle foreign policy, the continuing problems of everyday life, or sometimes even a stalemated war.
Soldiers, not inclined to let indecision paralyze them, sometimes kill arbitrarily. In Vietnam, American troops might get orders in the morning that as of noon, civilians who until then were being treated as refugees and helped in a protected area would immediately be treated as enemies to be killed in a free-fire zone. The situation was absurd, but action was demanded, and a novel solution began to appear on the back of soldiers' T-shirts: "Kill'em all. Let God sort them out."
Simple thought and action are consistent with low verbal skill. A larger vocabulary encourages complicated thought, not speedy action.
 
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The less time spent considering possibilities, the easier it is to keep a positive frame of mind. Perhaps consistent with the need for positive thinking, higher testosterone is associated with lower verbal ability,
11
and men in general are less skilled with words than women are. On average, women do better than men on verbal tests: women do almost twice as well at listing synonyms, and they can make longer lists of words beginning with the same letter.
12
It is true there are more male than female names in literature, but the number of famous men may say more about limited opportunities for women than the literary superiority of men. Furthermore, some male names in literature, like George Sand, are the pen names of women. Literary men might be surprised to learn that men have less verbal ability than women, and they may not like the idea that there is a trade-off between verbal ability and masculinity. Nevertheless, it is true that both boys and men who are high in testosterone are at a disadvantage when it comes to using language well. Grade-school children who are high in testosterone are likely to have learning disabilities.
13
High-testosterone men are more likely than low-testosterone men to have blue-collar jobs. Men in white-collar jobs are on average higher in verbal ability and lower in testosterone
14
than men in blue-collar jobs.
Limited verbal ability makes it easier to accept simple solutions. President Bush showed an instinct for the simple logic of testosterone in speeches he made in his 1992 bid for reelection. He did not bore his followers with campaign speeches about the knotty points of economic and foreign policies. Instead, he used metaphors about sports and war and talked about winning and losing; like the misguided general in
The Neon Rain
, "his acetylene-blue eyes looked at you with the unflinching clarity of a man who was never inhibited by complexity or moral doubt."
15
Unfortunately for Bush, a lot of women voted in 1992, and they found Bill Clinton's complicated platform and introspective excursions more appealing than Bush's simple solutions and moral certainty. However, it is important not to overstate the difference between men and women when it comes to politics. On September 25, 1995, Atlanta radio station WGST reported a listener poll indicating that 40 percent of the listeners to talk shows geared to the tastes of "angry white men" were women.
Nevertheless, the law of averages comes into play when men get
 
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together and talk. The men are apt to sound more like President Bush than President Clinton. They may not talk about war, but their conversation centers around action and activities. At my brother Dick's farm in South Carolina, getting ready for a picnic to celebrate survival on the anniversary of Hurricane Hugo, men sat around the fire cooking barbecue through the night and into the morning, and their conversation followed the male pattern.
First, they talked about the task at hand. They talked about the right-size pig to cook (100150 pounds), the temperature (260°280°F), how long to cook before turning (56 hours), the merits of wood and gas, the merits of oak, hickory, pecan, and other kinds of wood (white oak was best), the difficulty of managing a fire on cold ground, and how to judge temperature by the sound of dripping fat. As the night passed, the men remembered other years, other barbecues, large crowds at the hunt club, nineteen pigs cooked at once, cooking in cold weather, killing pigs, how to do it, and how nobody raises pigs anymore.
Later, they talked about hunting: small animals, large animals, birds, the reappearance of turkeys, snakes, large snakes, many snakes, a non-poisonous snake that can spread its neck like a cobra and scare you half to death, watching fights between rattlesnakes, almost stepping on snakes, deer, hunting stands for deer, the average distance at which deer are shot (50100 yards), the curiosity of deer, the pet deer at home that drinks coffee and eats cigarettes, different kinds of rifles, taking a four-year-old son hunting two years before he is old enough to carry a gun, the loveliness of walking with one's wife in the canopied forest of the swamp, and seeing raccoons sunning themselves on branches there, before Hugo toppled the beautiful trees.
When dawn arrived some of the men took a break to go hunting, unbothered by the drizzle, keeping only their rifle scopes dry, and later they went home, cleaned up, and napped. They returned to the barbecue later in the afternoon to visit and talk. Occasionally they made brief mention of the people they knew: the hunter who could hit a deer at 500 yards with his M-1 rifle; another hunter who was too lazy to build his own deer stand and was always borrowing one of theirs; and the guy who slept through a previous barbecue, leaving all the work to them. But mostly they talked about events and action. They spent little time on feelings, anger, frustrations, or problems. They talked about the
 
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experiences and adventures of active lives. Their talk was a wandering thread that held them loosely together.
Women talk about different things. Around the barbecue fire, women would have talked more about people, relationships, and their feelings about things. When I told my sister Dorothy about the men at the barbecue, she laughed. She said she liked to listen to men talk. She said, "Men's talk is interesting, as long as you don't expect them to say anything meaningful." The way men talk is probably in part due to testosterone, but we do not know whether it is an organizing effect of testosterone on the brain long before birth, an activating effect of current adult testosterone levels, or a little of each. My students and I are beginning to explore that question. We want to see whether men begin to talk differently when they receive testosterone treatments. It would also be interesting to interview patientswomen being treated for hirsutism or men being treated for prostate cancerwho are taking testosterone-suppressing drugs.
Men sometimes spend long periods of time together and talk very little. Gus Grissom and Deke Slayton were two "good old boys" among America's astronauts, and they liked doing things together. In
The Right Stuff
, Tom Wolfe said the two would go hunting on weekends, or "wrangle a T-33 from Langley Air Force Base and fly cross-country, taking turns at the controls. Sometimes they would fly all the way to California and back, and it was likely that if they exchanged a total of forty sentences, transcontinental, they would come back feeling like they'd had a hell of an animated conversation and a deep talk."
16
Many other studies and observations show differences in the way men and women talk. At a senior citizens center in Baltimore, men and women were asked to talk into a microphone for ten minutes each. Both sexes talked about the center and the highlights of their lives, but men talked more about solitary activities and less about the people in their lives.
17
At the Old Soldiers Home in Washington, D.C., where men and women soldiers from World War II live, an interviewer asked two women whether they liked to tell old war stories. One of them said, "Nobody wants to talk . . . about those stories." The other one said, "The men do that. The menthey fight the war, but we have other things to do."
18
This does not mean that men, and high-testosterone people in gen-
 
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eral, do not think. Men and women score about the same on a measure called "Need for Cognition," which indicates how much they seek out information and think about it in making sense of the world.
19
Perhaps high-testosterone people think less about abstract things, or about subtle and complex social relationships. But we are all awake about the same number of hours, we move effectively through the world, and our minds deal with the problems that face us. I think high-testosterone people are more oriented toward a particular set of problems, ones that can be handled well with what I call simple thought and action. Maybe men, or high-testosterone men and women, are best at dealing with those problems.
Other problems call for the women's approach. With more careful analysis or a little more time, they are solved or cease to be problems. Many good solutions are compromises between acting too fast on the one hand and thinking too long on the other, and such solutions would benefit from a compromise between the male and female approach. By electing more women, voters are forcing compromise. Commissioner Jackie Scott of DeKalb County, Georgia, meets with Georgia legislators when state bills affecting counties are on the agenda, and she notices a difference in the way men and women legislators operate. Scott says the women, unlike the men, prefer reaching a consensus to rushing a vote.
Scott's observations are not peculiar to Georgia. National Public Radio's
Morning Edition
, with Wendy Kaufman reporting,
20
ran a segment on how women legislators are changing government. Washington State Representative Pat Hale suggests the difference in legislative style is historic. Women more than men have had to gain their ends "through collaboration and working through other people."
Women legislators want more information and pay more attention to how laws will affect individual citizens than their male colleagues do. According to Ray Wilkinson, chief lobbyist for the Boeing Machinists, male legislators, once they take a position on an issue, are close-minded. "But female legislators, they're more open and they listen better and they're more willing to listen to your opinion. . . . " Women are more open-minded and they want more openness in government. Rutgers University researchers report that women favor "government in public view rather than government behind closed doors." When the Senate was ready to debate whether or not President Clinton was guilty or
 
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innocent during his impeachment trial, all nine women senators voted for an open debate, but the majority of the men prevailed, and the deliberations were closed.
Different frames of mind sometimes foster suspicion and make it hard for men and women to work together. Calling the women legislators "we" and the men "they," Washington State Representative Maryann Mitchell told Wendy Kaufman, "We happened to all wear red jackets all on one day, and this place nearly went over the edge. They were sure it was some kind of a conspiracy. 'What's going to happen? What is it you're going to do? When are you going to do this thing?' . . . And so, of course, we had to play it to the hilt and say, 'We'll let you know when the time is right.'"
When suspicion is aroused, there is no easy formula to assure cooperation between the sexes. Maybe experience will help. After a while, men and women legislators should get used to each other and red jackets will be like blue pin-striped suits, just a popular fashion statement. We can progress further in the direction of cooperation by understanding the nature and origins of sex differences than by resorting to stereotypes and ideology.
Spatial Skills
Like most mysteries of the universe, the nature of spatial skills has been considered in literature. In
The Crossing
, Cormac McCarthy wrote a book about two boys, Billy and Boyd, riding into Mexico in the 1930s to search for men who had murdered their parents. During their long trip they had time to think about things, including horses' orientation in space. Boyd asked his brother whether he thought horses knew where they were and knew how to get back to where they came from. Billy was dubious, but he wanted to know how they did it if they did it. He wanted to know if Boyd thought horses had pictures in their heads of where things were. That made more sense to Billy than the possibility that horses could backtrack. Boyd said he didn't think horses backtracked. He thought they just knew where things were.
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Boyd was wondering if horses navigate the way that men do. Men and women differ in how they orient themselves and navigate, and some of this is related to testosterone. Men have a better sense for dis-

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