Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (24 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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Page 96
Growing up, Cindy was a tomboy, and as a young adult she liked to hang out with guys staying up late, shooting pool, listening to old favorites from the Grateful Dead, and drinking tequila. She amazed all her friends with how much tequila she could drink and remain standing. She amazed her women friends because so many of the guys she hung out with fell in love with her.
Not everybody is as comfortable as Cindy with the symbiotic relationship that chemical molecules have with magic. Most people believe in the magic of love, but many of them don't want to talk about the molecules, preferring to think of love in more romantic terms. Some people are offended by any scientific prodding into the psychology or biology of love. Senator William Proxmire once denounced two of my colleagues for looking at love scientifically, saying that love was a mystery, not a science, and he wanted it to stay that way. My colleagues agreed that love was a mystery, but they thought the senator should welcome all the help he could get in solving the mystery, given his own problems with divorce.
Oberon, the king of the fairies in Shakespeare's
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, had a view of love different from Senator Proxmire's. Oberon thought that love was fair game for scientific experimentation and practical jokes. Once, after a spat with Titania, the queen of the fairies, he used her as an experimental subject and the butt of a practical joke in a project that wouldn't get past a human-subjects ethics committee today. While Titania was sleeping, Oberon squeezed the juice of a cupid's flower, nowadays more often called a Johnny-jump-up, onto her eyelids, and said to her, "What thou seest when thou dost wake, Do it for thy true-love take. . . . " What she saw when she woke up was Bottom, a man with a donkey's head, and until the spell wore off she was madly in love with him. Shakespeare didn't mention the cupid's flower's active ingredient, but I suspect it might have been something like the phytotestosterone found in cotton.
Even though Titania thought Bottom was a beautiful donkey, he was a man, albeit of a different species from herself. In that respect, their love affair was oddly like one that took place on our farm when I was a child. We had a steer who fell in love with the mule named Belle. Belle would stand patiently while the steer tried to mate with her. This was
 
Page 97
doubly remarkable because a steer is a castrated bull, who should have no interest in sex, and a mule is the sterile offspring of a donkey and a mare. Oberon might have had something to do with their love affair, but more likely it was Mother Nature's doing. She has many devices, including erotic memories and the time-delayed effects of prenatal testosterone, to keep her creatures from losing interest in love and sex, which are too important to entrust entirely to hormones of the moment.
The world conspires to make us fall in love. Attractive partners, sweet memories, and tender feelings are part of the conspiracy, as are romantic settings. When it comes to romance and men between the ages of eighteen and forty, it appears that the setting is most effective if it goes beyond meandering streams and wildflowers to include something scary. Researchers went to Vancouver, Canada, to study love and fear on the Capilano Suspension Bridge.
1
This is a long pedestrian bridge that swings gently high above a deep canyon in a spectacular natural setting. Mary and I walked across it in 1992, and we can attest to the fact that the scenery, height, and uncertain footing make the experience both exhilarating and unnerving.
In the Capilano study, an attractive female graduate student stood in the middle of the bridge and asked men who were walking alone to help her with a research project concerning creativity in beautiful places. If they agreed to participate, she asked them to write briefstories about pictures she showed them. She also gave each man a slip of paper with what he thought was her first name and telephone number on it and told him to call her if he had questions about the research project. She did the same thing on a low, sturdy bridge nearby in a scenic wooded area. The men on the swinging bridge put more romance in their stories than the men on the low bridge did, and of the twenty men she interviewed on the swinging bridge, eighteen called the number she gave them. Only two out of twenty from the other bridge called. Another graduate student took all the calls and answered questions. The swinging bridge men's interest in the interviewer, along with the romantic content of their stories, indicated that being on the Capilano Suspension Bridge put them "in the mood for love."
People involved in dangerous or challenging activities are likely to experience psychological and physical arousal, which may be related to
 
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a temporary testosterone increase,
*
along with other chemical changes that prepare the body for action. Generalized arousal produces a state of emotional readiness to feel a variety of emotions, including love. Psychologists say the emotions people feel when they are primed by arousal are a product of "excitation transfer."
2
Our son, Alan, gave us a good example of excitation transfer. He told us about a couple he knows who married soon after falling in love at first sight atop Mt. Kilimanjaro. All the factors at work on the Capilano Suspension Bridge would have been at work there, but more so, and there would be the giddiness that comes with breathing thin air. It's likely a little extra testosterone would be part of the mix. If mountain climbers react to success as other athletes do, Alan's friends would have summited Kilimanjaro with victory testosterone in their blood.
Along with excitation transfer, the magic of love includes imagination, memory, thoughts of the future, and biological sleight of hand. Biology can be potent magic. Like testosterone, oxytocin, vasopressin, and other hormones we don't know so much about appear at unexpected moments to cast spells on lovers, using fakery and delight to transport them to another world. Lovers don't notice the hormones, just their effects. This magic works even on the smallest animals. A shot of the hormone oxytocin is as good as cupid's-flower eye drops to the mouselike female prairie vole. She is immediately attracted to any little male vole she is looking at when she gets her injection. The oxytocin focuses her attention on him and sends her a message that he is the most masculine of voles. There is a similar love potion for male prairie voles; for them it is the hormone vasopressin.
3
It's hard to tell if prairie voles have tender feelings when they mate, but in the case of people, love and sex usually go together, though not always. Prostitutes and their patrons have sex without love, and medieval knights in fourteenth-century France gloried in romantic love without sex. Puppy love is another kind of love without sex. We usually treat the romantic feelings that children have about girlfriends and
*
Temporary testosterone increases among chess players and athletes have been discussed in Chapter 4, and temporary testosterone increases among firemen will be discussed in Chapter 8.
 
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boyfriends lightly, but puppy love can be intense. When psychologist Elaine Hatfield asked a little girl about a boy she might like to marry, the girl burst into tears and cried, "I will never see Todd again."
4
She was only five years old, and she had known Todd at the preschool she once attended. He was gone now, and her parents had no idea of the depth of her feeling. Love can reach anyone at any age, but testosterone reaches its highest levels in late adolescence and early adulthood. That is when people are especially preoccupied with sex and likely to fall in love, and that is when we encourage people to fall in love and marry.
Better Than Monkey Glands
Joseph Mitchell wrote a
New Yorker
story about sexual potency attributed to eating terrapin, which was said to be "better than monkey glands."
5
People have long tried to gain animal powers by eating or injecting animal parts. In the 1920s, before doctors learned about tissue rejection, men had surgical implants of testicles or parts of testicles from executed prisoners, monkeys, goats, or other animals.
6
The operations remained in vogue until the apparent efficacy of the implants was revealed to be a powerful placebo effect. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats, famous for such lines as "O that I were young again," had an operation in 1934, designed to increase blood flow to his testicles, and he wrote of "lust and rage" surrounding him in his last years.
7
Some men think eating rhinoceros horn will make them potent. Eating rhinoceros testicle would seem to be a better bet, but no one recommends that. Many men would sacrifice the last rhinoceros on earth on the outside possibility that it might help. Others, who believe more in modern technology than folklore, provide a ready market for potency aids that are easier on endangered species.
However they try to do it, with powdered animal parts, Viagra, or high-tech pumps and splints, many men think that prolonging the sexual energy of youth into old age is important enough to warrant extreme measures. The libido that comes with puberty is very much related to testosterone, and testosterone injections can reduce the normal drop in libido that comes with age.
8
There is some risk associated with using injections to raise testosterone to above-average levels; for
 
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instance, prostate cancer is common among older men and is related to high levels of testosterone. Fortunately, high levels are not necessary for men to enjoy love and sex.
Doctors sometimes prescribe testosterone to increase energy and sexual activity. The effect is clear, though we do not know exactly how much effect there is for a given dose of testosterone. One patient told me about how he felt before and after he started taking testosterone. He was married, and before testosterone therapy he had sex about once a year. He was miserable, and his wife was too. After taking testosterone he had sex every week or two and was very happy. Marriage is more than sex, but a lack of sex usually brings home its importance. The man I spoke with started off low in testosterone, and an increase in testosterone might not have the same effect in a person whose level is average or high.
The testosterone levels of both members of a couple are important. A couple's decision about sex is not made by one person alone; it involves both people, and the likelihood of sex depends on both. We know more about testosterone in men partly because studying testosterone in women is more complicated than studying it in men. Women's testosterone levels change during their menstrual cycles, peaking around ovulation, which makes controlling for the time of month desirable when comparing testosterone levels among women.
9
Another reason we know more about testosterone in men is that it is called a male hormone and researchers are more likely to think of it when they are studying men. Nevertheless, women's testosterone is just as importantand sometimes more so. One study found that the sexual activity of a married couple could be predicted from the testosterone level of the female in the couple. In the study, forty-three couples charted their sexual activity over a three-month period, and researchers measured the wives' midcycle serum testosterone levels. The researchers found a strong statistical relationship (a correlation of
r
= 0.62) between the testosterone measures taken the day before ovulation and the frequency of intercourse over the three-month period. While higher-testosterone women did initiate sexual activity somewhat more often than did lower-testosterone women, researchers attributed most of the difference in frequency to the high-testosterone women's receptivity to their husband's advances.
10

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