Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (34 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 133
Figure 6.1
Testosterone among American veterans who faced different amounts
of combat in Vietnam. Higher-testosterone soldiers saw more combat.
Testosterone in this study was measured from serum rather than
saliva, which is why the values are higher than those in graphs in
earlier chapters.
gerous that the pilots were asked to make only one run each. Vann, however, flew every mission. He wrestled two-hundred-pound boxes of ammunition into the back of the plane, held a third in his lap, and took off with the pilot. He also carried a bag of hand grenades. The plane flew twenty or thirty feet off the ground, over bare terrain with no cover except for the smoke and dust from the mortar and artillery shells exploding all around. When they passed over the surrounded Americans, in isolated pockets about a hundred feet across, Vann would throw out a box of ammunition. As the pilot pulled away from the drop, Vann threw hand grenades at the North Koreans for good measure. The planes were not hit by enemy fire, in part because of luck and in part because infantry soldiers, unless carefully trained, will misjudge the speed of a plane flying close to them and miss when they shoot at it. Vann made twenty-seven flights across the battlefield the first day and forty-two more over the next three days, until the surviving Americans were finally rescued.
Fifteen years later, Vann was a civilian adviser in the Vietnam war,
 
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where he pursued women as tirelessly as he pursued the enemy. He had two mistresses and many girlfriends in Saigon. His friends noted that he often made love to two or three different young women a day, an activity that would have exhausted most men but seemed to invigorate him. After his last sexual liaison in the evening, he would settle down to reading reports and writing memos late into the night.
After I studied the Vietnam veterans data, I read a book about mercenary soldiers, and they sounded to me like a pretty rough bunch. These men (and occasionally women) attack with weapons, strength, and skill. They risk their lives and they are callous toward their enemies. They like stories of fighting and war, and they read
Soldier of Fortune
magazine and
Shotgun News
. They are competitive among themselves, and the toughest ones look down on the others and call them "wannabes." It is difficult to study their testosterone levels, because they are hard to find. They are usually not listed in the phone book, although a few years ago, I did find one former soldier offortune who lives in Florida and has a 1-800 telephone number. I asked him if he could put me in touch with some of his former colleagues, because I wanted to ask them to participate in a testosterone study. He told me that would be nearly impossible, because American soldiers of fortune at that time were mostly in Bosnia, the Ukraine, and Rwanda. We talked for a while, and what he told me indicated that mercenary soldiers have characteristics that go along with high testosterone. They fight, live on short rations, make camp under harsh conditions, and leave their families for long stretches of time.
Unlike soldiers, scientists lead quiet lives, and, on average, they have testosterone levels lower than those of combat veterans. Nevertheless, based on what we know about testosterone and occupational choice, there is reason to think high-testosterone behavior has a niche in the usually quiet world of science. Scientists spend a long time in school, and people who stay in school longer are usually lower in testosterone.
10
Sitting in school year after year requires too much patience and submissiveness for many high-testosterone people. However, some high-testosterone people manage to complete advanced academic training and even achieve eminence as scientists. Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally were a pair of macho physiologists who were bitter rivals until they won a Nobel prize together for discoveries about hormones in the
 
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brain. They raced each other for seven years to reach the prize,
11
with each seemingly as interested in beating the other as in discovering the secrets of the brain.
Many physicists are introverted, stable, and cautious, but some of the most creative and productive ones have been described as having "impatient masculinity," being brutal, insensitive, and predatory.
12
As with trial lawyers, physicists are a varied bunch. There are two types of high-energy-particle physicists, experimentalists and theoreticians, who are as different from each other as if they came from two different tribes.
13
Theoreticians work with abstract ideas. Experimentalists work with equipment, and they compete with each other for access to the high-energy beams in the atom-splitting particle accelerators they need for their experiments. The usual best way to succeed in science is to pick the right problem and pursue it diligently, but for some scientists the search for knowledge is almost like combat.
As with physics, other occupations have specialties that would seem to appeal to high-testosterone individuals. In the world of business, repo men steal back cars from owners who fail to make their payments, overenthusiastic IRS agents threaten citizens with punitive action, and businessmen cross over the line to engage in organized crime. In opposing the larger society, terrorists commit violent acts, revolutionaries work for changes in the political system, and extremists work to preserve or destroy the environment. It seems reasonable to speculate that testosterone should help wherever there are harsh personal relationships and a premium on toughness. For example, good bail bondsmen have to chase down their clients who skip bail, and like private detectives, they work without the support that police and other law officers have. Hector Cora, a young bail bondsman who was a friend of my student Denise de La Rue, would go into crack houses to bring back clients who had run away. Hector now has a law degree, and not surprisingly, he specializes in criminal defense. Some men hunt other men for a living. Howard Safir, of the U.S. Marshal service, headed a team of men who hunted down armed fugitives and brought them back to justice. He said, "There is no hunting like the hunting of armed men, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it never wish to do anything else thereafter."
14
Some people make professions out of other people's recreational
 
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activities. They succeed by putting strength, energy, and intensity of focus into tasks they enjoy. We found NFL players high in testosterone, and the same should hold for professional players in tennis, soccer, and basketball. I suspect testosterone is highest in people concerned with defeating or dominating other individuals, teams, or dangerous animals. My son, Alan, told me about animal trainers. He worked for a while in the education department at Zoo Atlanta and got to know some of the men and women who worked as trainers. They told him stories about how badly things can go wrong when a trainer makes just a small mistake.
Many animals may turn on their trainers, but elephants are the most deadly. Elephant training, when it is going well, is a fairly nonviolent but constant struggle for dominance. The trainer must understand the elephant's rules for dominance and let the elephant know that it is the trainer who is in charge. The trainer must always keep in mind the old cliché, "If you give an elephant an inch, he will take a mile, and some ofit might be over your dead body." One of Alan's friends at the zoo was a small woman who trained elephants. One day she was leading an elephant, who was usually handled by another trainer, through his elephant show paces. The elephant had been trained to suck up one trunkful of water from a trough and blow it toward the audience. He did it twice, which the trainer recognized as the opening gambit in what could become a dangerous threat to her authority and maybe to the audience. She tapped him with her training baton, and the elephant knocked the baton out of her hand. A woman in the audience, who did not realize the elephant was considering a rampage, started yelling accusations about cruelty to animals. The trainer managed to retrieve her baton, conceal her uneasiness, and stay in control.
Alan was impressed by her bravery. He said he thought large animal trainers, elephant trainers in particular, would be a high-testosterone group. I agreed with him. Alan and his friend collected saliva samples for me from a small group of trainers, a group too small for a proper scientific project, but which nevertheless revealed higher-than-average levels of testosterone.
Like trainers at the zoo, successful rodeo riders have to dominate large and dangerous animals. At the rodeo, the job is more physical than psychological, although psychology cannot be ignored. Rodeo cow-
 
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boys do not have to maintain their intensity of focus for as long as animal trainers do, but once cowboys are in the ring, they are engaged in double competition: they are in competition with the animals for dominance and with the other cowboys for points. The owner of the Bruce Ford Rodeo School described the natural competitiveness of his most promising students. He said, "There's one boy, you know, that's from Arkansas, that you can see the look in his eyes that he dreams of being a world champion. It's almost a scary look."
15
My students and I are familiar with that look. We've seen it in the photographs of high-testosterone subjects who participated in our study of testosterone and facial expressions.
Several years ago, a student told me he was interested in studying testosterone in "pathological liars." He knew a group of these people, and he described them as amateur confidence men. He said they "would rather tell lies than tell the truth" and enjoyed taking advantage of other people. He wanted to begin by collecting saliva samples from them, and if they proved to be high in testosterone, he wanted to do a bigger study. They turned out to be well above average. Although the student left GSU without going beyond the pilot project, his findings prompted me to do some library research on confidence men. I learned that they have distinguishing characteristics that are consistent with high levels of testosterone.
Like animal trainers and rodeo cowboys, confidence men understand the psychology of dominance. They use it with subtlety and charm to deceive and manipulate their marks into parting with their money. They rarely resort to violence or even appear aggressive. D. W. Maurer, in
The American Confidence Man
, describes a typical con man as "always traveling somewhere and seeing and doing new things. If he is in California, he looks forward to going to Florida, from there to the Caribbean, and so on. Then, too, he is always with young people. He acts and dresses like a young man, even when he is seventy. His talk and manners are up to date. I never saw an old pappy con man. Besides, con men never loaf around much. They are always actively rooting out a mark. Much of their time is spent in the open air. Nowadays you'll find the old-timers on any golflinks where they can get by."
16
Con men are as ruthless as Sam Spade, but Spade's hard-boiled approach isn't their style. They conceal their ruthlessness and use
 
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friendliness and feigned sincerity to win their marks' trust. A con man has to be a smooth liar and a convincing actor. Acting is a profession we have found to be related to high testosterone levels. There will be more about actors later in this chapter.
Recently, few women have been successful players in big-time confidence games. Maurer found only one full-fledged con woman, Lilly the Roper, who was recognized by her male colleagues as a competent professional. There are women in the smaller con games, but the big cons have been run mostly by men. One old-timer said there once were many women in the business, and there are still "plenty of women today who would make good, too, but they haven't the chance because they don't know any good grifters."
17
To be successful, even in the underworld, beginners need mentors.
Tough Women and Tough Work
Like Lilly the Roper and Britain's "Iron Lady," Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a few women do well in occupations, legal and illegal, that are dominated by men. Blackfoot Indian men admired "manly-hearted women" because they were tough, hardworking, and sexy. Manly-hearted women wouldn't put up with abuse, though, and the men didn't like that.
18
Like the Blackfoot men, most men are at least a little ambivalent about tough women. That means that being tough helps women get jobs usually held by men, but sometimes being tough is not enough. Even allowing for the fact that there are not as many high-testosterone women as men, there are fewer women in such occupations than would be predicted by testosterone scores alone. The shortage exists partly because men want to keep the jobs for themselves. Sometimes a woman has to be really tough.
Automobile racing, with its speed, action, grease, and carburetors, has been almost entirely a male domain, but a few really tough women have become successful racers. The "Queen of Drag Racing," Shirley Muldowney, told journalist Sam Moses, "I think the difference between me and the other guys is that a lot of them don't have, truly don't have, that
kick-ass
attitude."
19
Muldowney's "kick-ass attitude" survived a 250 mph crash that almost killed her in 1984. After five surgeries and eigh-

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