Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (35 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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teen months of arduous rehabilitation, the fearless and fiercely competitive Muldowney was eager to get back to racing, where she continued to do well.
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The petite, attractive, and aggressive Muldowney is proof that dominance can look feminine.
Opportunities in some previously all-male occupations have been improving recently for women. Several years ago, I talked to two women who worked as petroleum engineers in the offshore oil drilling business in the North Sea, where most of their coworkers were men. Each of the women had a level gaze and a straightforward manner, suggesting complete self-confidence. Both were fashionably dressed, and one wore a diamond in her nose. They enjoyed high pay, long days on duty, and weeks of time off, which they used to travel and see the world. I measured their testosterone and found it higher than average for women.
Another mostly male profession is horse training, and women who do well in the business have to be rugged. I suspect they, like animal trainers at the zoo, have high testosterone levels. I talked with a woman horse owner about what trainers are like. She knew a woman trainer who handled a group of Arabian horses that were so difficult they had apparently caused a male trainer to collapse with a heart attack. The horse owner described the woman trainer as a forceful person with many boyfriends. The writer Beryl Markham was a horse trainer, too, training horses in Kenya in the 1920s. Markham succeeded in two masculine endeavors, horse training and aviation. She was the first person to fly the Atlantic solo from east to west, and that was in 1936. Only recently has the Navy begun to train women as carrier-based fighter pilots. Sexual discrimination is still stopping other tough women in other occupations, like Pam Postema, coauthor of
You've Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League: My Life As an Umpire
. She almost, but not quite, made it to the major leagues.
21
Like some of the men described earlier in this chapter, women can intermix toughness and gentleness. One such woman was a brave American soldier killed in the Persian Gulf war. Her grieving husband made a poignant statement at her funeral. He said, "I prayed that guidance be given to her so that she could command the company, so she could lead her troops in battle. And I prayed to the Lord to take care of my sweet little wife."
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When Should Testosterone Really Make a Difference?
Among animals, there is a species of desert tree lizard,
Urosaurus ornatus
, that includes two different types of males.
23
The two types differ in their dewlaps, the extensible throat fans they use to show off and communicate with others. One type has a solid orange or yellow dewlap, and the other type has a dewlap that is blue surrounded by orange or yellow. The blue lizards compete and fight to control territory. The others avoid fights and look for unclaimed real estate. Both types succeed well enoughthey survive, find mates, and reproducebut they go about things differently. High- and low-testosterone men, or women, are not as clearly divided into two groups as the lizards, but when all the characteristics that go with testosterone are taken into account, it may not be too far-fetched to think of high- and low-testosterone individuals as two specialized variations on the basic human model. From this viewpoint, it isn't surprising that they tend to seek out different kinds of work.
So far, we have looked at several occupations and thought about what would make them attractive to high- or low-testosterone individuals. Trial lawyers, New York taxi drivers, explorers, Masai Mara game poachers, travelers, professional football players, and sex industry operators have interests and abilities different from those of corporate lawyers, accountants, computer programmers, health care professionals, ministers, and managers. Testosterone brings energy, strength, sexual activity, certain spatial and mechanical skills, one-track mental focus, and panache. These traits make better competitors and predators than faithful and supportive partners. They are traits that should be useful to those in rough-and-tumble occupations, occupations that are often associated with low social status. The opposite traits, including steadiness, reliability, empathy, friendliness, sincerity, and deliberativeness, are associated with low testosterone and with success in many high-status jobs in the modern world.
Now we will describe studies that systematically examine testosterone differences among people in a wide range of occupations. The way that high levels of testosterone affect performance in various jobs is complicated, and when my students and I first started relating testosterone to occupations, we were sometimes surprised. We learned early
 
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on that white-collar workers as a group differ from blue-collar workers in many ways, including their testosterone levels. Not every occupation, however, fits neatly into one of these groups. Oil-field engineers, who are rugged outdoor workers with college degrees, have both white- and blue-collar skills. Oil-field engineers were a group that surprised us when we looked at them more closely.
We knew the two women who worked on oil platforms in the North Sea were high in testosterone, and we expected that men doing similar work would also be high. One oil-field engineering service company selects applicants in a testing session that survivors call a "weekend from hell." Applicants visit an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico and work for three days with little sleep. Those who make the cut are a tough group.
We studied nine of these tough new engineers who were working in field conditions. We found that nine months after they started, the four who were lowest in testosterone all liked their jobs and were doing well. Among the five who were highest in testosterone, one had been fired, two had quit, and one was actively looking for another job. Oil-field work is dangerous, and the service company is very safety-conscious. Men who are high in testosterone are attracted to the dangerous work, but on the job they feel restricted by the rules, supervision, and monitoring made necessary by safety concerns.
To understand the role testosterone plays in job selection, we accumulated testosterone scores from men and women in several diverse occupations. There were lawyers. There were people like Flame, a professional wrestler from Lovejoy, Georgia, who met us wearing a ski mask with flames painted up the sides of his face. There were the two women engineers from the offshore oil company in the North Sea and the nine men engineers from the oil-field service company. There were housewives, lobbyists, politicians, and a very successful door-to-door newspaper salesman. As we expanded our research from individuals to groups of people representing different occupations, we widened our scope and felt more confident about our findings.
Actors and Other Men
In one of our early studies, we looked at eighty-six men in seven occupations.
24
They were physicians, firemen, football players, salesmen, pro-
 
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fessors, ministers, and actors. The physicians were neurologists and neurosurgeons at a large hospital, the firemen worked for city and county fire departments,
*
the football players were professional players on an NFL team, the salesmen sold heavy earth-moving equipment, the college professors were in arts and sciences, the ministers were Presbyterian clergymen, and the actors were full-time working stage actors. These occupations varied in ways that we thought would be related to testosterone, seeming likely to reflect differences in physical strength, assertiveness, aggression, benevolence, sensation seeking, social status, and economic status. For comparison, we added a group of unemployed men from a street corner labor pool. We expected they would be low because they would be depressed about being unemployed. Like the oil-field service company engineers, the unemployed men surprised us.
Most of the working men collected their saliva samples early in the morning at home and gave them to us later. The unemployed men were different. Two students, Denise de La Rue and Charles Cummins, set up shop on a street corner one morning and offered the men there five dollars each to participate. Word quickly spread about the spit-for-pay scheme, and a large and unruly crowd gathered. Some of the men tried to spit twice for double pay, and some tried to ''audition" by showing how well they could spit. The students ran out of money and the men became angry and rowdy, but the students escaped with the spit. In spite of our efforts on the street corner, we ended up not including these men in the study, because their scores were a bit high, and we thought this might be because their samples were collected too late in the morning to be compared with samples from the other groups. Later, when we had more experience collecting saliva samples, we realized that if we had taken samples from the unemployed men earlier, their scores would have been even higher. Depressed or not, unemployed men, at least the ones who gather on street corners, seem to have higher testosterone levels than men who have jobs.
Ministers were lowest in testosterone, actors highest, and the other groups in between. Actors and football players were close together, and the only statistically significant difference was between actors and foot-
*
We didn't learn much about firemen in this early study, but later Noel Fannin collected more data on firemen, and her work is described in Chapter 8.
 
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ball players on the high end and ministers on the low end. We would expect football players to be high in testosterone, because they are strong and their playing is violent, but the actors surprised us. We did two more studies on actors and ministers to make sure our finding was not just chance. In both these studies, ministers were low and actors high in testosterone.
Some ministers are also actors. Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert, and Billy Graham are television evangelists, saving souls before enormous crowds in staged electronic productions. Their showmanship and charisma set them apart from other ministers who are, as a group, quite different from actors. Actors seldom have steady work; they go from job to job, and their reputation is only as good as their last job. With every new job they have to convince a director they are the best available, and with every performance they have to win the approval of the audience. Ministers have steady work in stable organizations, and a few bad sermons will not hurt them. The groups differ in how they view themselves; actors take credit for their performances, while ministers give credit to God. Actors create a reality of their own, and ministers present the reality of God as defined by their religious doctrines. Actors want to be stars, while ministers want to help.
It is perhaps worth nothing that acting and fighting are both routes to dominance, and it is not unusual to see the two together. Audie Murphy, the World War II hero described in Chapter 3, became an actor after the war. Douglas MacArthur was a great general, one who always put on a good show and liked to dress for the part. In the 1930s, when he was serving in the Philippines as President Quezon's military adviser, MacArthur made himself the only American "field marshal" and designed his own uniform, an elaborately filigreed white tunic with black trousers. Eisenhower, who served under MacArthur in the Philippines, later said, "I studied dramatics under him for seven years."
25
Even George Washington had a flair for showmanship. He stitched together a uniform to make himself look impressive, hoping the Continental Congress would put him in command of the colonial army.
A
60 Minutes
segment in which Meredith Vieira interviewed Charles Dutton, a knife-fight killer turned actor, strikingly illustrated that fighting and acting can be important parts of one person's life. Dutton was a seventeen-year-old grade-school dropout when he was con-

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