Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (7 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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of college women and a group of violent women from the local counterculture. Sylvia was higher in testosterone than the college students and right in the middle of the violent group. My friend took the graph to Sylvia at the café. Sylvia was delighted. She passed the graph around among her customers, telling them that her testosterone level was as high as that of most skinheads and devil worshipers. Sylvia seemed to think a high testosterone level was an asset, and in this her opinion was absolutely mid-American. My research assistants and I have found that almost everyonemen, women, high school dropouts, college graduates, reporters, prisoners, and stockbrokerswants to have a lot of testosterone.
Construction workers are no exception. As a group, they do have more testosterone than average, and they are proud of it. One of my former lab assistants, Denise de La Rue, had a friend, Mike Roseberry, who was a construction supervisor. Mike agreed to ask his work crew to provide saliva samples to be assayed for our testosterone study. They were enthusiastic about what they called the "Testosterone Olympics." They wanted to know their scores. I made a graph showing all the scores, but without saying who scored what. Intending to preserve their privacy, I sent them their individual scores in sealed envelopes. They were not interested in privacy; they were interested in competition. Pretty soon everyone knew everyone else's score, and as would be expected, because testosterone levels fall with age, one of the older men had the lowest score. The others immediately gave him a girl's nickname. Mike, like Sylvia, was pleased with his score. He called Denise and left a message, "Hey, Denise! I spit a ten. Not everybody can spit a ten."
The stereotype of a construction worker is muscular, tough, and sexy. Mike does not question the stereotype. Although many women give wide berth to construction sites, Mike doesn't see those women. He sees the ones who stop by and leave their telephone numbers with the men. Perhaps there is a difference in testosterone levels between women who do and do not find construction workers attractive.
A few years ago, while I was studying construction workers and testosterone, a living example of the stereotype appeared on the
Geraldo
show. He was lean, muscular, bald, bearded, and tattooed. His friends called him "Animal." With him were his ex-wife, his live-in girlfriend Michelle, and two of his eight other girlfriends. Michelle, who was
 
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wearing a short skirt and white cowgirl boots, had met him at a construction site. She had a tooth missing from a fight with Animal, but she said she had injured him in the same fight as well, and neither of them seemed to be holding a grudge about it. She had one child who they agreed was his, but there was some animosity between them about who the father of her other child might be. She said it was Animal; he said it was somebody else. Another point of conflict between Animal and Michelle was Animal's ex-wife, whom he continued to visit each week. Michelle and the ex-wife did not like each other, but otherwise the various women got along well and were happy to share Animal. No one in the group was talkative, though they all answered questions when asked. My first thought was that Animal, and may be his girlfriends, were suffering from what Alan Alda once called "testosterone poisoning,"
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but on television they made a mostly peaceful scene.
Sylvia, Mike, and Animal, like many people who are high in testosterone, are confident, tough, competitive, bold, energetic, attractive to the opposite sex, and they are frequently outrageous. They have characteristics in common with James Bond, Kinsey Millhone, Night Man, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, Sam Spade, and Xena the Warrior Princess. Fictional heroes and heroines let us experience life in dangerous times and on the risky edge of society. Every once in a while, a real macho hero makes the headlines and lifts the spirits of everyone. In the spring of 1999, Matt Moseley put good news on the front page. Moseley was the Atlanta fireman who, dangling from a helicopter line, rescued a crane operator trapped above a burning building. Then, two months later, a team of American women soccer players won the 1999 Women's World Cup and put good news on the front page again. Brandi Chastain kicked the winning goal and flexed her muscles on the cover of
Newsweek
,
5
and Women's Cup madness was in.
Most people have at least a vague idea about what testosterone is, and in spite of talk about "testosterone poisoning," they believe it is a good thing. When we ask people what testosterone is, they are likely to describe it in terms of football, the Marines, fighting, hunting, fishing, carburetors, tall tales, and sexual adventures. Sometimes they say," You know, it's guystuff."
"Guystuff" is just part of the testosterone profile. Researchers have
 
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been busy adding new details to what is turning out to be a complex and intriguing picture. My students and I have found that whenever our work is mentioned in newspapers or magazines, we hear from people who think their testosterone is high and want verification from an expert, or who think it is low and want to know how to increase it. I get calls from people who want their testosterone measured. Not all the calls come from men. Quite a few womenan opera singer in Connecticut, a business entrepreneur in Texas, a telephone sex operator in Chicago, and lawyers in San Francisco, Washington, and New Yorkhave called me.
Over the years, students approached me to study testosterone in lawyers, testosterone and violence in lesbian couples, testosterone and sexual intercourse, testosterone and the counterculture, and testosterone among fans at sporting events. Our research meetings took on a storytelling atmosphere, as students outdid each other in bringing new findings. We studied people ranging from ordinary to truly strange, and we began to uncover many links between testosterone and social behavior.
People who exhibit the qualities linked to testosterone are as varied as Bay and Pat Buchanan, O. J. Simpson, David Koresh, Madonna, Governor Jesse Ventura, Monica Lewinsky, Phyllis Schlafley, Eric Rudolph, George Steinbrenner, Clarence Thomas, and many members of the Kennedy family. Whether they are rogues or heroes, they are colorful people, and their exploits, escapades, and even their nefarious deeds capture our attention and fascinate us.
Measuring Testosterone
In order to learn about testosterone, and to separate it from social, cultural, and other biological influences, we had to measure it in a large number of people. We needed a measure that was simple, painless, and reliable. The standard technique for measuring testosterone is called radioimmunoassay, or RIA. Until recently, RIA measured testosterone only in blood. That limitation was a roadblock to researchers who needed a large number of samples from the general population. People balk at volunteering their blood for science.
Fortunately, I learned that RIA could also measure testosterone in
 
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saliva. Saliva is a good substitute for blood as a diagnostic fluid.
6
Saliva originates in a network of blood vessels near the salivary glands, and testosterone passes from the blood into the saliva. Measurements of testosterone from saliva are as reliable as measurements from blood. Further, when we tried collecting saliva samples, we found that large numbers of people would volunteer for our studies. Occasionally we did have to reassure them that we were looking only for testosterone, because saliva tests can also indicate whether a person has been using alcohol, tobacco, or drugs.
Using salivary measures, my students and I set up procedures and began collecting data. Over the years we analyzed saliva samples from more than three thousand college students, prison inmates, trial lawyers, athletes, heroes, construction workers, sex offenders, strippers, actors, wrestlers, and various others. We measured people several times each, to examine changes across the day and around important events. We also examined data on blood levels of testosterone from government records of about five thousand military veterans.
People often ask me what a high testosterone score is. When Mike Roseberry said he'd "spit a ten," that meant the concentration oftestosterone in his saliva sample measured ten nanograms (ng) oftestosterone per deciliter (dl) of saliva. That was a high score in his particular assay batch. In our lab, we run assays in batches that range from thirty to fifty samples each. In another lab run, Mike's score might have been a little different, but still high in his particular assay. Radioimmunoassays often take two days to complete, and there is normal analytic variability in every lab that performs them. Variability in results from assay to assay are due to slight differences in chemicals, procedures, and lab personnel. Because of this variation, we include a high control and a low control sample in each assay. The comparison with known values tells us more about the testosterone level of a particular individual than his or her "number." That is why when I describe individuals, I say they are "high," "medium,'' or "low," rather than they scored a "two," "six," or "ten." Scores from blood samples are about a hundred times higher than scores from saliva samples, but the numbers are highly correlated with each other, which means that one measure is as accurate as the other.
Although testosterone is not visible to the naked eye, and there is no single marker to reveal its presence, we learned during the course of
 
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our research that testosterone is related to traits that are readily observed. For example, high-testosterone men, on average, are leaner, balder, more self-confident, more rambunctious, less likely to have friendly smiles, and more likely to favor tattoos than other men. That is not to say that we can look at a particular individual and know with certainty what his or her testosterone level is. Many characteristics and behaviors that are related to high testosterone levels are also related to social, cultural, and other biological factors. Nevertheless, my students who are familiar with testosterone research can often look at pictures of experimental subjects and tell which subjects are high or low in testosterone. As my students and I become more familiar with what high-and low-testosterone people are like, we get better at predicting which research projects will be productive.
Testosterone is a hormone, and understanding it requires a general understanding of hormones and how they work. Hormones are molecules, tightly bound clusters of atoms, that carry messages from one part of the body to another. Hormone molecules can be small, because all they do is carry simple messages, but they must be numerous enough to spread throughout the body. Each person, man or woman, produces just a few milligrams of testosterone every day, but each milligram contains a million trillion molecules.
Endocrinologists, who study hormones, group hormones into families, in which members of the same family have similar origins and do similar jobs.
7
For example, in the brain there is a family of hormones called endorphins that spreads feelings of pleasure and blocks feelings of pain. Elsewhere in the body there are families of hormones that control growth, metabolism, storage of energy from food, and release of stored energy in emergencies. Testosterone and estrogen are the major players in the sex hormone family. They start off as cholesterol, one of the building blocks of the body. Cholesterol is converted into testosterone by the action of enzymes, substances that change molecules from one form to another. This conversion takes place in the testes, ovaries, and adrenal glands. Testosterone can then be converted into a more potent form called dihydrotestosterone by the enzyme 5-alpha-reductase, or into estrogen by the enzyme aromatase (so named because its products sometimes have an "aroma" like that of benzine). Testosterone can be converted into estrogen, but estrogen cannot be converted back into
 
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testosterone. It is an oddity of sex hormones that estrogen in males and females comes from testosterone. Both sexes have testosterone and estrogen, although men have more testosterone and women have more estrogen. The same individual can have high levels of both hormones. Stallions have high levels of estrogen and testosterone, as do football players and rattlesnakes.
8
Figure 1.1 shows the molecular structure of testosterone and estrogen. Testosterone molecules have twenty-one carbon and oxygen atoms. Removing one carbon atom changes testosterone into estrogen. The similarity of the two hormones is perhaps a metaphor for the similarity of men and women. Men and women are similar in many waysin their bodies, their minds, their hopes and fears. We should remember this underlying similarity when thinking about the ways in which they differ.
Figure 1.1
Molecular structure of testosterone 
(left)
 and estrogen 
(right)
. The circles
represent carbon and oxygen atoms in each molecule. Testosterone has one
extra carbon atom, shaded gray in the figure. The molecules are so similar
that you can merge them into a single three-dimensional image. If you cross
your eyes slightly and look at the tick marks above the figures, they will
gradually merge to form a new, third tick mark in the center. When the
center mark is clearly in focus, move your eyes down to the figure below
it, and a three-dimensional molecule will "pop out" into view.
Hormones operate by moving through the bloodstream from cells that produce them to target cells. When they reach the target cells they fit into receptor molecules, like keys into locks. What happens next depends on what the cells are designed to do. Cells are diverse, ranging from those that make up the brain to those that are parts of muscles, toenails, and eyelashes. In the nucleus of each cell, genetic material in

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