Woman: An Intimate Geography (45 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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child molesters. The therapy has its detractors, and rightfully so. Not only does the punishment smack of barbarism and anticonstitutionalism, but it can have tragic results. Some child molesters who were castrated have ended up killing their young victims rather than stopping at molestation. The loss of testicular androgen dampened their sex drive and made erections difficult, but their aggression was unslaked, and, furious with their failure to perform, they lashed out at the unfortunate objects of their pathological urges.
Men who are hypogonadal whose testosterone levels have, for a variety of clinical reasons, dived into the subnormal range say they feel more aggressive and angrier than they did before, not less, and when their androgen levels return to normal they feel calmer, happier, at ease with themselves once again. So it is with all our hormones thyroid, sex steroids, cortisol. Too much or too little, it doesn't matter. We feel dis-eased, out of sorts, crotchety, aggressive.
If the link between testosterone and aggressive or dominant behavior in men is a mess, that for women is the floor under your refrigerator: you don't want to think about it. Female athletes don't have a testosterone spike before a competition, and they don't have a spike if they win a competition. Female trial lawyers are hardly more blessed with testosterone, on average, than female tax attorneys are. In one study, researchers sought to determine if the aggressiveness of a woman might track the rise and fall of her testosterone levels throughout the menstrual cycle, peaking at the phase when the egg is ripening and when androgen output is highest. Two dozen women were subjected to multiple rounds of a fast-paced game called the "Point Subtraction Aggression Paradigm," in which a person is given the option of either pressing a bar one hundred times to raise her score by one point, worth ten cents, or pressing another bar ten times to knock a point off the score of an unseen (and fictitious) opponent. The player is then provoked by the periodic subtraction of a point from her score, which is attributed to the hostility of her imaginary opponent. The researchers found no correlation between a woman's relative testosterone concentration and the chance that she would greet the provocation tit-for-tat, pouncing irately on her subtraction bar rather than staying focused on raising her own tally. What the researchers did find, however, is that women who reported suffering from premenstrual syndrome were generally more

 

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bellicose throughout the month, and more likely to press the "get that sucker" bar, than the women without PMS were their testosterone levels notwithstanding.
Testosterone is lawless, unmanageable. In one study, the higher a female prisoner's testosterone level was, the more likely she was to have committed a violent crime like murder than a nonphysical offense like embezzlement. In another study, the correlation did not hold. Investigators have found that female inmates with high testosterone display more domineering and intimidating behavior than low-T prisoners do, and, conversely, that the low-Ts are "sneaky," "manipulative," and "conniving," acting like "snakes in the grass," according to the assessments of the prison staff. But let's bring some perspective to this study, a little aggressive extending of our cat's claws. The high-T women in the sample population were also younger, on average, than the lower-T women. Youth has its perquisites. When, you're young, you have quite a bit of muscle tissue. You still think death is exciting and provisional. As a rule, people in prison have a history of bad habits too much smoking, too much drinking, too many drugs in too many corrosive combinations and so the older you are, the weaker, sadder, and more shopworn you are likely to be. Better to connive in the grass than to confront in the flesh.
Testosterone is oversold. We think too much of it. It is not what we need or want in attempting to understand the roots of a woman's aggressiveness. I don't know if testosterone is meaningful to a man's behavior, or if a man can feed off a testosterone high that comes in the wake of a personal victory and take the high and catapult from there to greater achievement. Men have a lot of testosterone, and they probably put some of it to behavioral use. The body does that: it takes what's available and plays with it, though the use will be deeply influenced, and often overruled, by experience, history, social constraints, and the placebo effect of a brain that wants to believe. But the fact that men have more testosterone than women and may use that hormone, unconsciously or even consciously, to exaggerate and prolong a response and sensation just as some women can play the strings of their sexuality and orgasmic capacity when estrogen peaks at midcycle doesn't much matter to the outcome. There are other ways to ascend to a throne of our specifications, or to grasp at liberation and transcendence. We

 

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must shake off the yoke of testosterone and the feeling that we can't keep up without it, that men have the monopoly on the designated hormone of libido and hormone of aggression and hormone of heroes. It is not that. There is nothing to fear from testosterone.
Let us think about some of our phylogenetic sisters and what they have to say about the roots of female aggressiveness. The spotted hyena is one of my favorite examples. The spotted hyena,
Crocuta crocuta
, is an African carnivore that some people say is ugly, but they are wrong. The spotted hyena doesn't look like any other mammal. Its rear legs are shorter than its front legs, the better to run long distances. Its neck is mammoth, a redwood trunk of muscle, which powers its jaw and allows it to pulverize every bit of its prey, meat, skin, bones. The spotted hyena mashes bone to powder; its scats look like chalk. The face of the spotted hyena is a blend of felid, canid, ursid, and pinniped. The hyena soul is pure fury. A lion cub is born helpless, blind and toothless. A hyena pup emerges with its eyes open and its canines fully erupted, and it strains toward the throats of its siblings. Often one newborn pup will kill another. After the initial bloodletting ceremony, the survivor settles down and, in the universal spirit of the young, turns playful.
What makes the spotted hyena truly unusual, though, is its sexual appearance and behavior. As I mentioned earlier, the external genitals of males and females look alike. Each seems to have a penis and scrotum. But where the male's genitals are indeed a penis and scrotum, the female's apparent phallus is a combination of her vagina and clitoris, while her faux scrotum is fused labia. The female does everything through her phallus urinates, copulates, and gives birth. Her first birth, through that slender tunnel, is agonizing. She is ripped apart by the descending pup. Many female hyenas die during first parturition. For those who survive, subsequent births are much easier a fact that even a human mother can understand. The first is the worst.
The spotted hyena's exceptional genitalia have misled naturalists from Aristotle through Ernest Hemingway, who thought the animals were hermaphrodites. Even after realizing that there were two sexes, per usual, scientists were stumped by the hyena's behavior and social organization. Males and females are roughly the same size, yet the females invariably rule. They are the dominant sex. An older, larger male will capitulate to a younger, smaller female. Where does female preeminence

 

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come from in this species? On first pass, the answer appears to be . . . testosterone. Male and female cubs are exposed in the uterus to extremely high doses of testosterone, which is why the females emerge from the womb with masculinized genitals. The source of the testosterone is the mother's unusual placenta. In most mammals the placenta is rich in aromatase, which converts maternal androgens to estrogens, and low in the enzymes that transform precursor molecules into testosterone. The ratio of conversion enzymes in the hyena placenta is just the opposite: high in the enzyme that turns precursor steroids into testosterone, low in the aromatase that would make testosterone into estrogen. Thus the bloodstream of a fetal hyena flows thickly with testosterone, and testosterone, more than estrogen, has access to the hyena brain, where it again may be converted to estrogen, but in any event it's there, so it could be what makes for hyena scald, and why a pup snaps its canines viciously the moment it rips its way free of its mother's phallic vagina. And as the testosterone levels in the pups' blood fall in the weeks after birth, the pups become more manageable and playful, all in keeping with the hormone's reputation.
Yet the ways and means of our dominant female elude us. The testosterone levels of hyena pups drop in both sexes postnatally, and still the juvenile female remains more aggressive than the male. In adolescence and adulthood, the testosterone levels of the male climb considerably above those of the female hyena, as happens with sexual maturity in a male mammal, and still the female hyena refuses to budge. If there is a zebra femur under dispute, she wins. She ladies it over him. It's become a habit. But wherefore this habit, this taste for preeminence? Testosterone is not the whole story. Scientists who study spotted hyenas have looked at hyena brains with an understandable expectation that the prenatal exposure of all hyena brains to high doses of testosterone would masculinize all brains and that they would find very few if any differences between the brains of male and female hyenas. In fact, the areas of the brain that are larger in males than they are in females of many mammalian species are also larger in male hyenas, including regions that control sexual behavior. Female hyenas have "feminine" brains, and still theirs is a jabberwockying, osteophagous matriarchy.
One interesting observation that has emerged from hyena studies is the importance of a steroid hormone called androstenedione (spoken

 

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in good, firm ladylike lilt, andro-steen-DIE-own). It is classified as an androgen the same chemical category as testosterone but it has never been viewed as an especially manly or exciting androgen. To the contrary. For years researchers dismissed androstenedione as a dull intermediary that signified nothing until its conversion into either testosterone or estrogen. It was assumed to be a product largely of the adrenal glands rather than of the gonads, and adrenal hormones have never seemed as sexy as ovarian or testicular hormones, because the adrenal glands of males and females just aren't different enough for those of us in thrall to sexual apartheid. Hyenas showed just what could be done with androstenedione. An adult female may not have as much testosterone as a male does, but she makes up for it with a profusion of androstenedione. The bulk of the hormone comes not from her adrenal glands but from her ovaries. For unknown reasons, a female hyena's gonads generate huge amounts of androstenedione. During pregnancy, the hormone is metamorphosed by the hyena's placenta into testosterone, which then infiltrates the bloodstream of the fetuses she bears. Yet even when the female isn't pregnant, her ovaries supply a steady current of androstenedione, and it could be this hormone that helps stoke her aggressive hauteur. Maybe, or maybe not. We don't know. What we can say is that androstenedione merits more attention than it has received heretofore. Feed, groom, and collar it, and you have a hormonal mascot of the furious female. In one study, aggressive teenage girls were found to have high levels of androstenedione in their blood. The researchers initially assumed that the findings were irrelevant, the result of the girls' being under stress and their adrenal glands' being hyperexcited, secreting excessive quantities of a number of adrenal steroids, including androstenedione. Now the researchers wonder if their subjects were really so stressed and adrenalized after all, or whether their ovaries were responsible for the androstenedione storm, with possible behavioral consequences or cadences for instance, a brash, demonstrative, in-your-face style. Relative aggressiveness scores notwithstanding, women have much more androstenedione than testosterone in their blood plasma four or five times the amount and a greater percentage of that androstenedione is free that is, unbound by blood proteins and so theoretically more accessible to the brain. A woman's andros-

 

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tenedione level equals that of a man. Here she is not muted. Here she has clay to play with.
I don't want to make too much of androstenedione, though. Testosterone isn't the only hormone that's overrated. All hormones are ultimately overrated, as well as poorly understood. But even though we know this mantra, we still get shackled by testosterone and need a new perspective to shake ourselves free. Hyenas have mighty jaws, ideal for cracking chains.
And don't forget our estrogen. That hormone too may catalyze a commanding, as opposed to a submissive or insular, spirit. In a study of female college students, Elizabeth Cashdan, of the University of Utah, found that women who had the highest blood titers of three hormones estrogen, testosterone, and androstenedione also had the most robust self-regard, tending to rate themselves as high on the peer pecking order. They also smiled infrequently, a rather unfortunate symptom of those who consider themselves important. Interestingly, the women with the most androstenedione were the likeliest to overstate their power, according themselves a much higher rank among their peers than their peers gave them when questioned. Androstenedione just may be the bitch's brew. But is it possible to have too much self-confidence? We think, oh, yes, certainly, and we think how pathetic are those who nurse delusions of grandeur; yet history has taught us that those who are wildly self-confident and repulsively self-promoting are the ones who end up not only obtaining power, out of sheer tenacity, but retaining it once seized. Can a woman have too much self-confidence? If an infusion of androstenedione could make a gal proud, I'd hold out my arm and help you find the vein.
And now I must reiterate the almighty fact that a hormone does not cause a behavior. We don't know what hormones do to the brain or the self, but we do know what they don't do, and they don't cause a behavior, the way turning a steering wheel will cause a car to veer left or right. Nor does the ability to behave in an aggressive or dominant fashion require a hormonal substrate. If hormones do anything, any little thing at all, they merely raise the likelihood that, other things being equal, a given behavior will occur. An estrogen peak at midcycle may make one's eros a shade brighter or tauter, nothing more. At the same time, it helps

 

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