Testosterone Rex

Which of these directions we prefer is up to us: it’s a question for our values, not science. But that evolving science is showing that one time-honoured option is no longer available to us. It’s time to stop blaming Testosterone Rex, because that king is dead

That’s why everything—a doll packaged in pink, a sexist joke, a male-only expert panel—can seem trivial, of intangible effect. But that’s exactly why calling out even seemingly minor points of sexism matters.

These gender stereotypes operate throughout life both as expectations about the characteristics men and women have, and as gender norms dictating double standards for how women and men should behave, influencing people’s interests, self-concept, performance, and beliefs about capabilities in gendered domains. These gender stereotypes and norms are also the foundation of both conscious and unconscious forms of sex discrimination, like biased evaluations of performance and potential, and social and economic backlash against people whose behaviour isn’t in line with them.65 Gender stereotypes and norms can certainly harm and constrain boys and men too. But gender is a hierarchy. The higher prestige of males and masculinity is, some have speculated, why significant numbers of girls in middle childhood start to shun the “girl” toys and activities they have supposedly evolved to prefer, in order to become “one of the boys,” while there is a conspicuous absence of boys hoping to become “one of the girls.”66

Rearranging gender in the human developmental system involves the reconstruction of the social structures, values, norms, expectations, schemas, and beliefs that penetrate our minds, interactions, and institutions, and that influence, interact, and become entangled with our biology

Biologically speaking, our actions and dispositions are developed and could have been otherwise, given the right mix of developmental inputs at various points in our lives. If one wants to change the distribution of a given trait in a population, the task is not to overcome nature but to rearrange the developmental system

Despite a heritage of thirty-eight ancestors bred for aggression behind them, thuggish mice that were reared in a different way from their ancestors—with other mice, instead of in isolation—turned out no more aggressive than mice bred for generations to be gentle.45 A simple but critical change to the developmental system eliminated a typical, “adaptive” trait

As Paul Griffiths explains, it’s well accepted in evolutionary biology that even adaptive traits that increase reproductive success can take different forms, depending on environmental conditions.41 (Evolutionary Psychology, for instance, famously describes this in terms of a jukebox metaphor: various possible behavioural “tunes” are built into the genes, and which one gets “played” depends on circumstances.)

In other words, the developmental puzzle is not the one that Testosterone Rex so compellingly solves for us—how sex creates males who, beneath the cultural veneer, are timelessly, universally, and immutably like this; females like that. The real problem is how sex (usually) creates essentially different reproductive systems, while allowing the differences in men’s and women’s behaviour to be non-essential: overlapping and mosaic, instead of categorically different; conditional on context, not fixed; diverse, rather than uniform

And, regardless of our biological sex, life will likely demand we all, at some point, cherish and care for others; take risks; and compete for status, resources, and lovers

Understanding sexuality therefore requires us “to reconnect the genitals to the person,” as Carol Tavris puts it.15 For us, sex is not the means by which two well-matched reproductive potentials get together: we desire sexual activity as a person, in all our own unique, culturally crafted individuality, with a person, within our own particular cultural, social, and economic context. Presumably, that’s why other cultures’, and even acquaintances’, pairings and preferences can be so mysterious.