Pod Insights Modern Wisdom What Makes Men And Women Different? - Dr Carole Hooven About this episode Dr Carole Hooven is Co-director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and an author.
Testosterone is a hell of a drug. It causes many things to happen in both men and women. But it's dividing opinion even more than it's dividing the sexes. This isn't great for calming conversations, bridging differences or finding common ground however it's a fascinating topic to dig into.
Expect to learn what it's like for women who go on testosterone to feel what male sex drive is like, why male deer in Scotland grow antlers and fight their best friends for a few months every year, whether maternal instinct is a myth, why testosterone even exists at all, the differences between male and female orgasms, whether sex is a spectrum and much more...
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#testosterone #gender #evolution
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00:00 Intro
00:30 Is Maternal Instinct a Myth?
09:55 The Demonisation of Motherhood
17:05 Why Do We Have Testosterone?
24:47 Men’s Natural Instinct to Objectify
32:24 How Women Can Understand the Male Sex Drive
37:27 Orgasm Differences Between Genders
46:36 Is Sex a Spectrum?
56:28 Differences in Arousal Between Genders
1:07:59 Why Hand Grip Strength is Important
1:13:13 Where to Find Carole
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Transcript 13,162 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 If you're a female who then goes on to transition, I have heard now from several people who lived as females and then transitioned that their libido went through the roof. They were shocked by it. They were disturbed by it. Most of them said, I get it now. I'm looking at this other person, whether they're attracted to men or women. I can't stop thinking about their body parts.
0:26 Chris Williamson? I have been looking forward to speaking to you for quite a while because you shared an article by Chelsea Conneboy in the New York Times called "Maternal Instinct Is A Myth That Men Created." She says that "The maternal instinct is a social construct generated and upheld by the patriarchy to impel women to raise children and keep them out of the workforce." However, partway down, you shared a quote that was quite revealing, I think. This is from her "New research on the parental brain makes clear that the idea of maternal instinct as something innate, automatic, and distinctly female is a myth, one that has stuck despite the best efforts of feminists to debunk it from the moment it entered public discourse."
1:10 Chris Williamson? What are your thoughts on Chelsea Conneby's article, Carol?
1:14 Speaker 00 Well, I have a lot to say. Most of it is not good, and I feel kind of bad about that because Chelsea was probably pretty excited about having her article in the New York Times, and she probably worked really hard on it. And I think her heart is in the right place. I think the, there are lots of articles kind of like this, but this is one of the most egregious example of this particular kind of article, maybe that I've ever seen. New York Times, you know, it's not super surprising it was printed in that particular outlet. But...
1:52 Speaker 00 So I said, I think her heart is in the right place. And I guess I think that people who write these kinds of articles, especially from a kind of feminist point of view, are grasping at straws to find something kind of real and biological that will support the idea that women should have equal rights and equal opportunities, you know, relative to men. And while that goal may be laudable, actually, I don't, yeah, well, that goal may be laudable, and we can talk about that goal later. What is not laudable, and what really bothers me as a scientist, is the idea that anyone
2:34 Speaker 00 believes and that intelligent people are promoting the idea that in order to secure anybody's human rights, whatever you think those rights should be, we have to basically lie. Of course, there's a maternal instinct. You know, we don't need to kind of twist the facts of biology to support anybody's rights. We don't have to distort reality. We have to, you know, we can tell the truth and fight for people's rights. Those are different things. Like, what exists in nature is not the same thing as what people's human rights are. We decide, us humans, we decide what we want and what kind of society we want, regardless of the facts of nature.
3:18 Speaker 00 And sort of, I don't, I think conflating those two things is dangerous from many perspectives. But this is, it's just also blatantly false, and pretty much everybody knows it. So it is like an example of the emperor is actually not wearing any clothes, and nobody is saying so. I want to say so.
3:41 Chris Williamson? Prove to me that maternal instinct isn't a myth that men created.
3:46 Speaker 00 Okay, did men... So first of all, it kind of annoys me because it gives men a hell of a lot of power.
3:54 Chris Williamson? Well, we-
3:54 Speaker 00 Men are very powerful, but they can't do that.
3:56 Chris Williamson? Get to completely control how you act. We get to dictate how it is that you interact with your children.
4:02 Speaker 00 Yes, and you get the rest of society to believe it's something so stupid. It's like somehow you magic men have gotten us all to believe that there is something innate about moms wanting to care for their children in a way that is different and more intense than the way that fathers do. So I can, you know, one way to try to prove it to you is to just take human culture out of the mix. Look at every mammal that is not exposed to human culture. Well, not even exposed, but look at every non-human mammal.
4:40 Speaker 00 And the females are the ones, in 95% of those mammals, who are the sole providers of any kind of parental care for their offspring. Of course, they have an instinct. Of course, that is part of being a mammal. And there's only 5% of mammals, or even a smaller percent, in which the males contribute any parental care. Humans are one of those species. That's part of what makes us really interesting. But males have the choice to invest in their kids. The kids can survive without the father. They typically cannot, at least in a natural environment or in an ancestral environment.
5:23 Speaker 00 It would be very tough for them to survive without their mother. And so, yes, there's a difference between men and women in the degree to which we invest in our offspring. Not only do we have the comparison with non-human animals, we have mechanisms. We know what some of these mechanisms are, hormonal and neurological, that contribute to maternal care. And, I mean, I could go on and on about the science. And there's just nothing-
5:56 Speaker 00 Bad about this. You know, it's great that fathers invest in their kids. It's great that moms can have the choice to invest less than their partners. You know, moms can go out and go to work. That's what I did. I, you know, had somebody else take care of my baby for the most part during the day while I was at work. I pumped my milk. But if I didn't want to pump my milk, or you know, have a deep desire, it's not, men didn't give me that desire. I mean, that idea is sort of insulting to me.
6:24 Chris Williamson? It sounds like you may have been one of the poster children, poster women, for someone that was liberated from this maternal, at least in terms of the restriction on their ability to continue with their career and research and stuff that you're doing at Harvard. It seems like you would be a flag waving, card carrying person for that, and yet still don't believe it.
6:49 Speaker 00 Um, yeah, it is something I did. I didn't really want to do that. I wish I could have stayed home with Griffin, uh, who's now 13, um, for much, you know, for a year rather than a few months. And he was close by, so I did get to take off my shoes and run a couple of blocks to, um, breastfeed him like three times a day, which was great. And most moms do not get to do that. And that's really painful for them because they have a maternal instinct. It's painful if your breasts are full of milk and you have to, you know, have a machine squeeze it out rather than having your kid's lips suck it out.
7:24 Chris Williamson? I imagine it's also quite painful just to run if you've got breasts that are full of milk and you're jogging down the street. Just generally, it's challenging.
7:31 Speaker 00 That's a good point.
7:32 Chris Williamson? Well, I also saw-
7:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, but I didn't feel the pain because I was so motivated.
7:36 Chris Williamson? You're so maternally, so maternally pushed by the patriarchy. Uh, so there's a great response to this, uh, that was done in Quillette. According to this view, the parental blood brain is essentially a blank slate filled with expectations, experiences chiefly dictated by social expectations for women and men. In other words, women's and men's parental brains and associated behaviors would be the same with the right social mores and behavioral expectations. As he says, pretty much all are- Mammals, the men don't have any male parental investment.
8:11 Speaker 00 Males, yeah.
8:12 Chris Williamson? The claim fails to consider that males do very little parenting in the vast majority of animals, especially those, including humans, in which males compete intensely for status. As it happens, humans are among the exceptions to this pattern. Men invest considerably more in children than do the males of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, who are uniformly deadbeats. Later in the article, he said, "Brain patterns can be used to correctly identify whether the owner is a man or a woman with 93 to 96% accuracy." Have you seen this?
8:43 Speaker 00 Yes, yes. Okay, but that, so can I just make two responses there? So, one is, the other aim of the article, which I really did think was important, and it was too bad that this particular goal got weighed down with all this kind of crap science. The goal was to show the ways in which society has, in some ways, because there are, or there are thought to be, but in reality, there are these biological differences, the authors seem to think that this has given license to men in particular to help to create policies and expectations that limit women's ability to do what they want to do, whether
9:28 Speaker 00 they want to, you know, what kind of parent they want to be, how invested they should be in parenting. So that's a good goal, right? Just because we have a maternal instinct doesn't mean that we should do anything in particular. It doesn't even mean we should have kids, or that we should be the ones to stay home with them. But that's a separate point from whatever the science says about maternal instinct. So that was thing one.
9:54 Chris Williamson? Just to interject there, the naturalistic fallacy, presuming that because something existed in nature, that it's something which is laudable and desirable in the modern world. I wish that we could just dispense with that entire line of argumentation. Every single time that I see it, I go, right, okay, men used to fight for dominance physically. We have laws that stop you from punching people in the street, even if you both see the same attractive woman in front of you, right? Like, obviously, obviously, no one thinks that this is the case. My main problem with this...
10:27 Chris Williamson? War on motherhood, war on the pedestalization of mothers as mothers, and the assumption that if you are a mother that decides to stay home and build a family while your partner goes to work, that you've been rube'd into doing this by the patriarchy, that you're somehow a second-class citizen. To me, saying you can do whatever you want, yes, but if you're to say the maternal instinct is a myth that men created, the subtext to that is if you fell for it, you're an idiot. You're a fool.
10:56 Speaker 00 Woman, yes, yes. That is a great example about why this kind of article that appears so often and in kind of liberal outlets is so damaging. Because, yes, this is something that is natural, basically natural. There's a lot of variation in how it's going to be expressed, but there's nothing wrong with getting, you know, gaining immense pleasure from devoting yourself to something that is natural, if it gives you pleasure and that's what you choose. And if it doesn't hurt anybody else, you know, there's no reason to stigmatize that as though, you know, you're just doing what men want you to do.
11:39 Speaker 00 But then there's the issue about whether you can tell male and female brains apart. So my understanding is that what you just said is totally correct, that human beings, scientists say, can't just look at brains, say, under a mic, you know, little areas necessarily, and figure out what, which are male and which are female, but that machine learning can do that with a really high degree of accuracy. It does appear that there are systemic differences in the brain that differentiate male and female brains on average. There's, you know, a fair amount of overlap and variation, but we have different brains.
12:23 Speaker 00 One question is whether it is, so one challenge to that is that it's life experience that leads to these differences, you know. If they exist, then it's all due to the patriarchy. And that, that leads men, you know, to behave in certain ways and interacting socially in certain ways. And because they're, you're performing masculinity in society, that performance and the reception to that performance is going to condition your brain to develop. In different ways from a woman's brain. You know, and there may be, there is, I think, some truth to that. But I don't think there's any way that explains male female brain differences on average.
13:08 Speaker 00 We also have lifetime differences in exposure to testosterone and estrogen. Those steroid hormones also have lasting impacts on brain organization, starting extremely early on in fetal development. So, yes, society is important. Yes, society, you know, just like we see with maternal instinct. There's an initial difference there that is shaped, you know, that difference is then plays out in modern society in all kinds of ways. And if men, if the patriarchy, whatever you think that is, can somehow exploit female labor, maybe that happens. But that doesn't mean that this difference doesn't exist or isn't innate in some way.
13:50 Chris Williamson? I wonder if Chelsea Conneboy has kids. Based on the women that I've spoken to who have had kids, once that hormone cascade gets released, it's a hell of a ride and it's a hell of a way for you to stop all of the progesterone, for men even, you know, like vasopressin getting released, baby lying on the chest. Why is it that when you pass a baby's head around, everyone wants to take a nice big whiff of it? What do you think is going on here? Even that's even the women that aren't, that haven't given birth and that maybe aren't even genetically related that are just doing the whole alloparent, the modern version of alloparenting stuff now.
14:27 Speaker 00 Yes.
14:29 Chris Williamson? It blows my mind that people can be so ostensibly pro female and obviously anti mother. That blows my mind.
14:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, I don't even know where to begin. I completely agree with you. One thing that I do when I teach my class, and we get into the sex differences part, and we talk about sexual development, like how over our developmental trajectory, we become male and female, and then what happens in puberty, and how the hormones work on our bodies and on our brains. We have different, there are different aspects of our environment that are salient to us. So, men are much more likely to stare at women's breasts,
15:28 Speaker 00 and that when they're walking down the street, or you know, any cues of female fertility. Those vary by culture, but there are some that are pretty standard. And so, I, if I do look at a woman's breasts, it's out of some sort of competition, or I'm trying to evaluate my own self.
15:47 Chris Williamson? Your intrasexual competition is showing, Carol.
15:50 Speaker 00 Something like that, yeah. So, if a guy does it, it's for mating purposes, and sort of paying attention to what's in the environment that might be reproductively beneficial to him. Women are much more likely, and I do this, and I just hit menopause at 56. So, when I see somebody with a baby go by, I just cannot, I'm one of those women you just described. I love babies. I want to smell them. I kind of want to like, take a bite of some baby fat or something. And it's, they're so attractive, and I've always loved that. Of course, there are some women who don't like babies, who don't ever want kids.
16:33 Speaker 00 But what we're talking about is patterns on average. We pay attention to those aspects of our environment, environmental stimuli, that we evolved to pay attention to. And so, I think you're totally right. That's evidence that the fact that these patterns exist across the planet, and in chimpanzees, little adolescent chimpanzee females especially, want to get in on the baby action when there is a baby around. And that's something males are much less likely to do.
17:06 Chris Williamson? What does testosterone do? Why do we have it?
17:10 Speaker 00 To help you men convert energy into offspring.
17:15 Chris Williamson? Men, yes.
17:19 Chris Williamson? My friend Bridget halfway through her show all the time just screams the word women. I'm just gonna start going, men.
17:26 Speaker 00 Wait, fantasy?
17:27 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
17:29 Speaker 00 Okay.
17:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's what it's for. It's a reproductive hormone. It's not all about sex. It's about
17:39 Speaker 00 how like same thing as estrogen. It is about, first of all, the physical stuff. You've got to have your penis and testicles and vas deferens and everything you need to, you know, produce your sperm and ejaculate, right? But imagine having all that stuff and not being attracted to not, you know, wanting to use it, basically. Imagine not wanting to.
18:05 Chris Williamson? Having all of the weaponry, but none of the motivation.
18:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, like in a red deer. I wrote in my book about red deer. They grow these huge weapons on their heads every season, only during the height of the mating season, the height of the rut. And they testosterone is what helps to promote that growth and the sharp antlers and the velvet coating coming off. But if they didn't have any desire, if they just like walked around being friendly to every other male, that would just never happen. Evolution doesn't give you weapons and sperm and then no desire to use it.
18:43 Chris Williamson? I'm right in saying that the males that grow these antlers during the rut, when they're trying to mate with the females, they're friends. They're with their mates, being much more docile and much more chill.
18:56 Speaker 00 Yes, that's what's so cool about seasonal breeders. And this is why I went to study to Scotland to to hang out with the red deer during the rut, because humans aren't seasonal breeders. You guys are just masculinized. You have puberty.
19:12 Speaker 00 I mean, you're even masculinized as kids. You have rough and tumble play. You're different than girls on average. Again, tons of variation. So you can't really see the effects of testosterone the way you can in a seasonal breeder that is super chill with his, you know, bachelor mates, right? They hang out and they're friendly outside of breeding season. They don't have weapons. They're not making sperm because there's no females who can get pregnant. They're like, let's all get along. Once the females become fertile and they get a whiff of her, they really want to accumulate, not that they're possessions because the females can leave, but they want to accumulate a harem because they want to have a lot of sex with a lot of females. That's what
19:53 Speaker 00 they're driven to do. In order to do it, they have to really fight and beat their competitors. And the ones who have the best antlers and are biggest and strongest and most fierce and who scare the other ones off because they're roaring all the time and like literally parading around and showing how big and strong they are, they're the ones who have the most sex. And the other lonely ones up in the hills above are just watching the dominant males with the big harems just do thinking like, how can I get in here? Do I have the balls to literally, you know, to challenge him? And most of them never will and they won't, they'll die without, you know, producing any kids. So I don't even remember why, how we got into that. Oh, okay. What does
20:36 Speaker 00 testosterone do? That's what it does, but you can't see it in human males as much because you guys are always basically horny and, oh, you know, have a baseline higher propensity for physical aggression. It doesn't just come and go so dramatically like in all these seasonal breeders. So just to answer your question, it helps you have the physical capacity in terms of muscle mass, in terms of sperm, in terms of strength, in terms of ability to get an erection, and it coordinates all that stuff with what you need psychologically and behaviorally, which is Increased propensity to take physical risks to be competitive with other males,
21:20 Speaker 00 whether that requires the physical risks or not. If you can't get in a bar fight, you're going to go play football or basketball or whatever sport you do. And you're going to want to be the best at that sport because that really helps you dominance wise. Girls like that. You're also going to compete in terms of your profession and you're going to be ambitious. And it coordinates all that stuff because that's what you have to do to maximize your reproduction. And it helps you be a good dad by going down when you have a baby. So, and that's also what we see in non-human animals. It's not all about going and getting as many females as possible. It's about being a devoted partner and father. Because if you can have one female's reproductive output,
22:06 Speaker 00 and you can invest in those kids and ensure their survival, that could be just as good, if not better, a strategy depending on your status and your abilities than going out on the open market and trying to compete. And maybe you get somebody pregnant, maybe you don't. If you have one mate and you invest in her and the kids, then that can be a really successful strategy. And that requires lower testosterone for a while.
22:32 Chris Williamson? Does that mean that men who have high testosterone are higher in state-seeking behavior?
22:37 Speaker 00 No. It means, so really, the individual differences in testosterone in men within the healthy, normal range predict very little if, about libido or physical aggression or anything else. It's really about the changes that you experience throughout the day, throughout the seasons, based, and it's all in response to what your environment is, your social environment in particular. So those changes are meaningful and that the changes that you have when you have a kid or when it goes down are meaningful because you're in an environment where care for your offspring really helps you reproductively. And you have the smell of your kid.
23:21 Speaker 00 You have the sight of your kid. You have your partner there. All, if you didn't have that stuff, that change in testosterone would probably do nothing.
23:29 Chris Williamson? What about depression? Does testosterone relate to that at all?
23:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, it does seem to. So one interesting finding about testosterone is that when females transition to live as men and they're going through a gender transition, they, a lot of them, report that their mood improves and not apparently just because they're happy that they're actually transitioning. Because we see the same thing in men, there's certain forms of depression in men who have relatively low testosterone that seems to improve in some men when they are supplemented with testosterone. And so there is a link there.
24:15 Speaker 00 I don't think it's very well understood, but it does, there are also in trans men, they say often that when they have their testosterone injection, if that's how they're getting it, that they get a mood boost from that. And then that wanes kind of over time.
24:31 Chris Williamson? This would make sense because women on average are more neurotic than men. Is that what's the, they're also more, what's the personality trait, neuroticism? Yeah, they're higher in neuroticism than males are. All right. I really want you to get into this. What happens when females go on testosterone? How do they report alterations in their experience of life?
24:57 Speaker 00 So what was puberty like for you?
24:59 Chris Williamson? Fantastic.
25:01 Speaker 00 Why?
25:02 Chris Williamson? Because I could get an erection with a gust of wind that was at the right angle.
25:06 Speaker 00 And you didn't mind that?
25:07 Chris Williamson? Of course I did. It was just hilarious. I just found it absolutely hilarious.
25:12 Speaker 00 Okay. But so you got a lot of erections. Were you, would you say that that was correlated with any psychological state of mind?
25:22 Chris Williamson? I had an obsession with the Spice Girls for quite a while. That was like, that was a hot thing for me. And there was five of them as well. So it was like a variety pack.
25:30 Speaker 00 Oh, that's so funny.
25:33 Chris Williamson? But yeah, I mean, you're constantly thinking about sex. I think you begin to, or at least I was more attuned to status as well during that time.
25:42 Speaker 00 Interesting, yeah.
25:43 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I finally actually started to realize what kind of a social hierarchy was going on. But yeah, I mean, the prevalent thing was what was going on between my legs.
25:52 Speaker 00 Yeah. So obviously, girls are also having an increase in libido. But the number one psychological change, you know, in addition to feeling, you know, for a lot of people, obviously, an increased sense of freedom to express who they are. But the the number one psychological change is a, again, and there's variance here, and that's important to say, not everybody.
26:16 Chris Williamson? You don't need to present that caveat. Yeah, everybody knows. Everyone that's listening is reasonable, and they have got sick of me saying on average enough.
26:24 Speaker 00 Okay, thank you. I just, yeah, have been on the receiving end of people saying, well, I didn't, that didn't happen to me. And yeah, this is all on average from here on out. So the number one change people experience is this, for a woman, for somebody who's been living as a woman, a really sort of overpowering and even shocking obsession with sex. Because it's not, especially for females who transition later in life, and they are used to being the target of sexual, you know, intense sexual desire.
27:03 Speaker 00 And even a lot of these people are lesbians, and they have resented the way that men have looked at them or looked at their breasts. Obviously, you know, a lot of women do resent that. But if you're a female who then goes on to transition, I have heard now from several...
27:23 Speaker 00 Uh, trans men, people who lived as females and then transitioned, that their libido went through the roof, they were shocked by it, they were disturbed by it. Some, um, felt that this is okay because this is what it's like to be, live as a man. But most of them said, "I get it now. I'm looking at this other person, whether they're attracted to men or women, I'm attracted to their butt, I'm attracted to their boobs. I can't stop thinking about their body parts." And they described having a change in their patterns of attraction where when they were living, and I'm not even making this up, it's so, it sounds like such a stereotype, but when they were living as women, the target of their
28:07 Speaker 00 attraction was a whole person. Like the, it was much more about the whole human being in relationship to them. And then on male levels of testosterone, it was like more objectified. And the target of their sexual attraction was more objectified. It didn't prevent intimacy, but there was a whole other aspect to sexuality that, um, opened up. So that is the number one thing that people have said. And they said it gives them a huge amount of insight into men and empathy for men, because this is something that they have to deal with and learn how to deal with socially. And women are just like, you're, you know, think that guys are just being assholes when they, um, might look at their
28:52 Speaker 00 breasts or something. And yes, you know, guys should not look, like stare at women's breasts in ways that make them uncomfortable, but it is something that, uh, women don't really understand because we're not like staring at guys' penises or something a lot. Like that's just not a thing. And that's why men don't wear clothes generally. Where, you know, they're outlining where their penis is showing because we don't really want to see that.
29:19 Chris Williamson? I would guess my very small amount of exposure to the gay cruising scene is that Yes. men do tend to wear outfits that allow themselves to be objectified more easily.
29:32 Speaker 00 That is right. That's right. Because that's what men want.
29:38 Chris Williamson? They know their market. They know the market.
29:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's not what women want. And they know how to advertise what they have to other men. And gay men don't have women like putting on the brakes and telling them what their sexuality needs to be like. They can just, everybody already gets it. They're already men. And I think that's great. You know, there's must be a lot of freedom in that.
30:01 Chris Williamson? Based on my friends that talk to me about cruising grounds, without, as soon as you remove the gatekeeper from a sexual interaction, there's all hell breaks loose. So it seems like a basically just a failure of cross-sex mind reading, this sort of objectification concern, we don't really understand what's going on. That's not to say that there aren't men out there who don't cross the line, blah, blah, blah. I remember I had a conversation with David Buss, who used this example where he said, if there was a pair of rocks on a beach that looked quite a bit like boobs, the man would look at the rocks and think,
30:36 Speaker 00 Right.
30:36 Chris Williamson? "Pretty nice, pretty nice rack you've got there, madam." And my point being that men will objectify pretty much anything. They have, am I right in saying they have a purpose-built reward mechanism for looking at things that are sexually gratifying as well?
30:50 Speaker 00 Yes. I mean, there's a whole interesting dopamine circuit there. So that testosterone appears to condition a dopamine rise when there's reproductively salient stimuli in the environment. So it encourages an adaptive response to whether it's aggressive.
31:11 Speaker 00 Or sexual, or for women breastfeeding, or you know, maternally oriented. And I should just say, just to get back quickly to the maternal instinct, there are some studies that show that women who have postpartum depression, who feel like they don't have a maternal instinct, tend not to have the same dopamine increase around, um, when oxytocin goes up for breastfeeding, it usually, uh, conditions this dopamine rise. And women who report not having a maternal instinct, don't have that same dopamine rise. They desperately want to, but they feel like, I don't really care if this kid, you know, I'm not motivated
31:51 Speaker 00 to have, to breastfeed this kid. So, yeah, I think that testosterone does condition men to respond. And this is, of course, society can, um, exaggerate or nudge around the expression of these differences. But yeah, of course, there are these differences. We pay attention to different things. There seems to be, you know, to me, there's tons of evidence that it is differences in sex hormones over the lifetime that set us on these different trajectories. Um.
32:24 Chris Williamson? Do you think that women can appreciate what sex drive is like for a man without going through a short course of testosterone and getting jacked at the same time?
32:35 Speaker 00 Um, I think I, in writing the book and just talking to so many men, I mean, it's taken a huge amount of work for me. I, I, I always do this. I get very emotional about this. Um, and I've, I've been, some people have given me a hard time for that because I'm not being a good feminist or something. I'm not man-hating enough. Um.
32:58 Chris Williamson? Shame on you.
33:00 Speaker 00 No, but I really, I mean, it's okay. It's funny. It's about sex, but it's also kind of tragic because I feel like. This is what nature, these are the ways that nature has shaped men. It's easy for women to, and I understand, and I have been angry myself about the way that men sometimes behave.
33:22 Speaker 00 I don't even know what you, what did you ask me?
33:24 Chris Williamson? Is it possible, is it possible for women?
33:26 Speaker 00 To under, yeah. So, no, I guess I do feel like I have an understanding, and you're gonna laugh, but I had a, I had a dream when I was writing the book, that I felt this kind of attraction, I think it was to a woman's body, just like standing around in the kitchen. This was in the dream. And I, in the dream, felt like, how can I, like, she was just a problem, standing in the way of me being able to touch her body. And I had to figure out, I was like so drawn to her body, and I had to figure out how to deal with her to get to the body. And it was a really strong drive, and I felt it only in the dream.
34:10 Speaker 00 And when I woke up, I felt like, oh my God, this must be it. It must be that women are almost standing in the way of men being able to have their bodies. Then I felt like, I get it. And if that's what testosterone is doing, I feel bad for the men. Because in the dream, I knew it was wrong and bad of me to not pay attention to this woman, but it was like, I had to have the body. And it was almost like food, and I was starving, and I had to have it.
34:40 Chris Williamson? That's
34:40 Speaker 00 And I just felt like, oh my God, if that's it, then I feel really bad for everybody judging.
34:47 Chris Williamson? That is a nice summation.
34:49 Speaker 00 Judging men.
34:50 Chris Williamson? It's a nice summation of what it's like. I think the male sex drive really does seem to have been pathologized, I think, in recent years. And I spend a good bit of time in the gym, and I find it as interesting to watch other guys when girls in gym leggings walk past, because I get to see this Mexican wave of eyeballs, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. Like, everybody will turn and look. All of the guys have just, I'm in between sets, or I'm doing whatever, or someone will be talking to their friend, and they'll be looking at their friend like that, just over their shoulder. Staring past them as some girl walks past in the distance.
35:30 Chris Williamson? And I understand the point that you're trying to make there about the fact that you are castigating men for an innate, inbuilt reward mechanism that they didn't choose to have. And saying that anything close to acting on that is toxic masculinity and it is you being part of a patriarchal superstructure that's oppressively keeping women down and blah, blah, blah. And there is basically nothing else that I think we would get to at this stage of modern society where someone's innate preferences would be treated with so much distaste, you know?
36:12 Chris Williamson? Why would it be the case that the way someone is built? Can you imagine if you said this to somebody that's gay? To say, well, yeah, look, you know, you've got this particular.
36:23 Speaker 00 Yeah, but I, oh, yeah. But I think the reason is, you know, because of sexual assault and sexual violence and just male violence in general, and you just happen to be a member of the group that's responsible for all that bad stuff. So I think it's different than like maternal instinct or being gay because it's, you know, when taken to an extreme or if left unchecked, then we're all in trouble because it's powerful and kind of scary. However, any woman could have been born male. And so I don't see why women get to be so judgy because if any of the women who are
37:07 Speaker 00 saying, who are throwing around this term toxic masculinity, if they were born male, would they, what would they do? How do they even know what it's like to be a man? They, they don't. And that is step one is to understand what is going on and to try to listen and have some empathy.
37:27 Chris Williamson? Can you explain the changes in orgasm quality, duration and sensation that people go through when they have to? I'm not making this up. This was you, right? That had a look at some of this stuff?
37:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, I just, I have to say here especially, I know that there's variation because I've, people have told me who have transitioned that they don't have these kinds of orgasms. But according to the literate, the scientific literature and most of the people I've talked to, this is the case. And I did not know, I feel that I should have known this before. I did not know that men and women have a really different, um, I mean, obviously the orgasm experience is different because men have a penis and women have a vagina. But what I didn't know is that a woman's orgasm is much more likely to be a longer
38:17 Speaker 00 lasting, full body, uh, experience. The men's orgasm is more likely to have more intensity at the peak, but be, uh, shorter lived and more localized to the genitalia, like to that area. That is on average. And I've had a couple trans, more than a couple trans people tell me they prefer, and even a trans woman who detransitioned. So she went from living as a woman to then living, uh, as a man with high testosterone for four years, fully masculinized, looked, you know, a hundred percent like a man. And then she
38:58 Speaker 00 detransitioned. So she was able to talk about what it's like to be, live as a man as a woman. Um, if that makes sense. She said she likes the orgasms off of testosterone and, uh, appreciates the access to her full range of emotions that she felt was limited on testosterone. And this is also consistent with the scientific literature. Were you on Joe Rogan recently?
39:25 Chris Williamson? Yes.
39:26 Speaker 00 Okay. So I was also on and we both cried a fair amount.
39:32 Chris Williamson? I listened.
39:33 Speaker 00 And we talked about crying. Okay. He is this very matt, really like really masculine guy. He takes a lot of testosterone and he was bawling his, bawling his eyes out. That is unusual. So going on testosterone usually stops or like really greatly reduces crying. Um, and coming off it, uh,
39:57 Speaker 00 Increases crying back to sort of typical female levels, which are much, much higher than male levels. Um, yeah, you only asked about orgasms, but I think, uh, it's that full body kind of emotional experience that is associated with more of an emotional connection, more access to a wide range of emotions. And I'll just say that people describe, and again, the literature suggests this is true, that going on testosterone makes it harder for men to access these emotions, except for anger. It's not that anger necessarily goes up, it's that out of all the emotions, that is one that is most easily, uh, accessed.
40:38 Chris Williamson? That's interesting. Have you heard the quote, I think it's Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or someone that says, "After copulation, the devil's laughter can be heard." And what he's talking about is post-nut clarity or kind of the-
40:51 Speaker 00 Oh, my God. Yes.
40:53 Chris Williamson? Post-coital depression that some men deal with.
40:55 Speaker 00 Sorry, post, I hope my students see this because they taught me in this, was this this past spring? Um, so they gave talks, they gave, it was a seminar and they were giving little talks and someone joked at the end of the talk about post-nut clarity. And I love my students and we have close relationships. And, um, so I had no idea, I had no idea what that was. Um, and he explained it to me and all the students were, were like, yeah, everyone knows what that is. Um, yeah, and it makes sense. Does your viewers, I assume, know what post-nut clarity is?
41:38 Chris Williamson? I think so, but I mean, I'm gonna guess, is that a male phenomenon? Do women have post-nut clarity?
41:43 Speaker 00 Um, I imagine, I mean, if they're drunk or something, then, you know, when it actually happens-
41:53 Chris Williamson? End of one here, Carol, you, come on.
41:58 Speaker 00 I don't think so. I don't know.
41:59 Chris Williamson? Okay, so I
42:01 Speaker 00 feel right for me, but I'm probably pretty typical.
42:05 Chris Williamson? I think that could be true.
42:06 Speaker 00 No, I think because men are much more willing to lower their standards or their
42:11 Chris Williamson? So I think another another element of it is that posts, this is total bro science, right? But come with me here.
42:19 Speaker 00 Okay. Yeah.
42:21 Chris Williamson? Post Coitley, it makes sense for a woman to try and pair bond more with the guy than the other way around. That's not to say that men shouldn't pair bond with with the woman, but there is a greater need if the woman has just given up one of the main risk factors that she can in her entire life, it makes more sense for so whatever the harsh light of the pillow or whatever you want to call it. Having seen that as a man may make you think, okay, let's just reassess my options here. Do I really want to stick about with this particular woman? Or should I see if there's something a little bit better out there? Maybe I should consider my status seeking. Maybe I should think about my position within the hierarchy or other things that I've got going on that are going to release
43:04 Chris Williamson? a ton of ass oppressor and another shit, because maybe I need to do that in order this maybe as a kid here in nine months' time, and I got to get myself to the top of the tree with regards to this. There are a lot more dynamics that I can think of that would encourage a man to not be all fluffy and nice after sex and would have this devil's
43:25 Speaker 00 Have a period of evaluation.
43:27 Chris Williamson? Yes, yes.
43:28 Speaker 00 Sex. Yeah. I mean, it does remind me a bit of the period of evaluation after birth, you know, in many natural fertility societies for women, where there is this period where there may not be a strong bond, because it may not make sense for the mother, you know, this would be an infanticide situation where it can be adaptive in some, I mean, that's very, very harsh to say, but if the mother cannot take care for whatever reason of her child, and she wants the chance to have another one, then in some cultures and hunter gatherers, that kid is just left if maybe there's
44:08 Speaker 00 Has a birth defect or, you know, but there's a period where it's easier to do that kind of before you feel bonded to the other human being.
44:18 Chris Williamson? I read a story about Charles Darwin, and I think Darwin ended up having 10 or 12 children with his cousin, actually. And beforehand, he's doing this marriage pros and cons list. And in one of the potential cons, he actually-
44:34 Speaker 00 Oh, right, right. I saw that. Yeah.
44:35 Chris Williamson? Yeah, but he highlights the potential issue, which actually he ends up encountering, which is that if he has children, maybe some of them will die. And if they died, then it would be sad. And he ends up losing, I want to say, maybe two to four of his kids. And I remember learning about the different ages that some of his children died at. And I will have got some of these wrong, but broadly, it's right. One in a toddler range, like a two to three year old, one around about 10 to 11, and then another one in the teens. And the author was making a justification for why losing a child around the age of 10 or 11 is the most painful age that you could lose them at. And I was thinking to myself, well, maybe it's because
45:20 Chris Williamson? you've spent so much time with them that you've sort of got to love them. And maybe it's when they're a little bit older, you feel like, well, at least they lived a little bit of a life or a whatever, and life got cut short. And, you know, the three year old, maybe you haven't had enough time to bond and blah, blah, blah. And he was like, that would be the nice justification at the front of your brain. Realistically, what you've realized as a father or a mother is, I got this child just about to the point at which they could procreate, and I could be a grandfather optimizer, and it failed. And that's why his 10 year old daughter's death was the most painful one.
45:52 Speaker 00 So devastating. Yeah. No, that makes sense. And that, when I, I lived in Uganda for eight months, and I remember one of the women there saying, saying that the reason they had so many kids is because you can expect a couple of them to die. You know, you, one or two are going to die if they have 10 or however many kids. So there's a different psychology around parenting when you're not sure about, when the conditions are tougher than they are today. And, you know, I only have the one kid. And so I put a hell of a lot of energy into him. Um, yeah.
46:36 Chris Williamson? Is sex a spectrum?
46:40 Chris Williamson? Don't give me that look.
46:41 Speaker 00 Uh, I'm just, it's a big change. Um, it, it is not. No, it's not. Uh, the traits associated with sex can be on a spectrum, but sex itself is not on a spectrum.
46:55 Chris Williamson? Do.
46:55 Speaker 00 And it doesn't have to be. You can still, males and females can express themselves however they want. It doesn't have to be limited by their sex, but yeah, there's only two.
47:06 Chris Williamson? Do intersex people disprove this?
47:10 Speaker 00 Uh, oh, it's not just, okay. First of all, you have to define what intersex is. This is a term that is thrown around a lot and statistics are thrown around. And, uh, the idea is that there's all of these people who are neither male nor female. And that is just not true. I mean, there are an exceedingly, there's point oh two percent of people who have genetic traits that, uh, don't match their sex. So they may have, um, something that looks like a vagina, even though they're male, uh, for instance, or they might have something that looks like
47:53 Speaker 00 a penis, even though they're female. But even in those very rare cases, they're still male or female. So intersex doesn't really mean having no sex or not being male nor female. There's exceedingly rare cases, much smaller than point oh two, uh, of people who have gonadal tissue of both sexes. And there we may not know whether they're male or female, or you might not even be able to say. Uh, but that doesn't mean that we're not a species with two sexes, like almost every, uh, like all mammals, for instance, and vertebrates, almost all. There's two sexes. We cannot change
48:35 Speaker 00 sex. There are other species that have two sexes, but can't they might be simultaneous hermaphrodites, or they might be sequential hermaphrodites, but they still have male and female. But mammals and most vertebrates are not that kind. We only have male and female, and we can't change our sex over the lifetime. But the point there is, it really doesn't matter for most things. Some things like maybe prison cells or sports teams, you know, where bodies really matter, then sex matters. And then we have a right to know what kind of what sex we're dealing with. But this scientific fact should not limit anybody's ability to express themselves. That is the point. And we don't need to pretend that there aren't two sexes
49:17 Speaker 00 in order to try to support, again, anybody's rights. And I just, this drives me crazy, because it's destroying science and the scientific method, and it's not taking us in the right direction, in my view.
49:33 Chris Williamson? Rolling the lifespan forward a little bit, what about behavior differences in boys and girls that are toddlers? I'm going to guess that testosterone plays less of a role at this stage than it would do when you look at an adult male and an adult female? Or am I wrong?
49:52 Speaker 00 I, you might be wrong. Um, it's, you know, I'm not sure how to quantify, but what's amazing about childhood is that, and the huge differences we see between girls and boys, um, is that those come about because of differential exposure to testosterone in utero and shortly after birth. So male babies have this spike of testosterone for a few months after they're born, and it is permanently changing the brain. And I guess the reason I think that's so important is because this occurs so early in life, and it occurs, I'm gonna say, despite
50:36 Speaker 00 The efforts of, despite socialization, because there are a lot of kids who are gender non-conforming, there are a lot of, say, boys who are gonna grow up to be gay, who don't have those typical masculine characteristics as a kid. They don't enjoy tackling their friends, and they want to hang out with girls, and they want to do more talking, and they want smaller groups, and a lot of those kids' parents are trying to socialize them as like typical boys, right? And those kids are getting bullied by their boy peers especially, and they can't help it. That's who they are. You know, they're a little bit more effeminate,
51:17 Speaker 00 or a lot more effeminate than a typical boy. So I do not buy that kids are socialized into these different types of behavior. There's just no evidence for that, and it parallels what we see in non-human animals, where male juvenile chimpanzees are more active and more physical, and prefer more rough-and-tumble play. Male, you know, rats are the ones who like to tackle each other and have rough-and-tumble play, and it looks like it's fun for them, and you can manipulate that rough-and-tumble play by changing testosterone exposure. So you can take a female rat and give her testosterone in the perinatal period, and she'll play
52:02 Speaker 00 like a boy. You can take a boy rat and deprive him of testosterone, and he'll play like a girl. And this makes sense, because this is a reproductive strategy that boys are practicing, or male animals are practicing through play. It's male-male competition. You gotta learn how to compete physically. You gotta learn what the cues are. You learn when to back off, and it has to be fun, or else you're not gonna do it. And this is an important skill for male reproduction. And then we know in humans that girls who are exposed to higher-than-average levels of testosterone are more, like, are masculinized. Their play is masculinized. They are, they prefer boy toys more than girls who don't
52:43 Speaker 00 have high testosterone. They have, you know, they're more likely to prefer rough-and-tumble play. So we see the same thing in humans as we see in non-human animals. So... That I think is strong. Those sex differences, I think, are really important because they haven't, those kids haven't grown up in society yet. They haven't experienced the patriarchy or whatever. You know, I don't like the word, actually, the patriarchy, but they haven't experienced as much gender socialization, which there is a huge amount in every culture. So the fact that we see those differences so young, I think, is really powerful evidence that testosterone shapes them, you know,
53:27 Speaker 00 and they're similar to what other animals do.
53:30 Chris Williamson? It's like that Chelsea Connerby, where she said, uh, one that has stuck around despite the best efforts of feminists to debunk it from the moment it entered public discourse.
53:41 Speaker 00 That's what I'm dealing with. The best efforts of feminists to debunk, like, a lot of what I'm saying. But it keeps coming back up.
53:48 Chris Williamson? It's almost like it's inbuilt, almost like it's inbuilt. Are there any, are there any correlations or relationships between testosterone and gender identity or sexual preference?
54:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, there aren't a lot. There aren't a lot. So what's interesting about men
54:10 Speaker 00 is, like we were talking about before, so gay men are very masculine in terms of their sexual psychology, right? They're sort of just typical men, except they want to have sex with other men. I mean, that's the only difference, really, in terms of the sexual psychology. So that's a very masculine phenotype. So, and that's one of the main things testosterone does is condition that male sexuality, right? So just from that evidence, I wouldn't expect there to be any lack of testosterone along the way, and there isn't that we know of.
54:50 Speaker 00 What is interesting is there are other differences in gay men, on average, that have to do with some ways in which they're feminized in terms of like occupational interests,
55:06 Speaker 00 physical aggression. And so it's possible there's some timing difference in testosterone exposure or something in utero, but I, there's no evidence for that. And then in women, there's some evidence that increased testosterone in utero has masculinizing effects on gender identity. So this is the same population of people I was talking about before who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, where they have high testosterone in utero, but it's normalized at birth. So even they go through a normal female puberty, they're still more likely to be lesbians, more likely to have a male gender identity. So there seems to be some effect in females,
55:49 Speaker 00 but we don't necessarily see the same thing in males. And the data on the females is not super convincing to me.
55:59 Chris Williamson? Why?
56:01 Speaker 00 Because there are plenty of lesbians who don't have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and the, we just don't have the ability to collect really good data on prenatal testosterone, period. We have like the 2D40, which you might have heard of. There's some evidence that lesbians might have more masculinized 2D40s, but I'm not super convinced by that.
56:27 Chris Williamson? I learned from Christina Durante, if you know her?
56:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, I know her name.
56:33 Chris Williamson? Yeah, so she did a really cool study where she got an actor to read a Hollywood script. This guy was trained. One of the characters that he played was a bad boy, and the bad boy had a twin, and the twin was a nerd, but they were both the same guy, the same guy reading a different script with a different hairdo and whatever. And they brought women in. It was to check about ovulatory cycle attraction and whether or not women would presume that the bad boy was actually a better long-term mate prospect. What are the sort of words that they use to describe him? Are they saying things like they think that he would clean up around the house and be a good father and so on and so forth? And does this change based on whether they are or are not ovulating? But the most interesting thing,
57:16 Chris Williamson? and she just threw it away, is this flippant line. She didn't just study straight women. She studied gay women as well. They brought gay women in to speak to this guy. And I was saying, well, look, like, if you're not attracted to the guy, presumably the gay women just didn't make any difference.
57:31 Speaker 00 No, they did. It did.
57:33 Chris Williamson? And she said, and I was like, well, you know, one of the examples was, one of the girls said to the bad boy, she was ovulating, one of the girls said to the bad boy, I'm going away to Vegas this weekend with my friend. Whereas to the nerd, she said, I'm going away to Vegas this weekend with my boyfriend. So little things that had snuck out.
57:51 Speaker 00 Wait, the lesbian said that?
57:52 Chris Williamson? No, no, no, no, no. This is the straight woman, right? So you had these very
57:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, I see.
57:57 Chris Williamson? More obvious, more conscious, sort of, even though it's probably still subconscious, a more out there, obvious display of whatever you want to call it, like make, make anonymity or whatever. However, they looked at nonverbal cues as well, stuff like body language, stuff like playing with the hair. And the lesbian women who were ovulating were showing more nonverbal cues of flirting to the guy who was a sex that they are not attracted to sexually.
58:27 Chris Williamson? I thought that was so, so interesting.
58:32 Speaker 00 It's interesting, but I am always skeptical of findings from one study, because I don't know anything about the study. It sounds amazing, but it is consistent with the idea that female sexuality is more flexible than male sexuality and more fluid.
58:48 Chris Williamson? Significantly more bisexual women than there are bisexual men.
58:51 Speaker 00 Yes, yes, yes. And that, you know, women, you know about the studies showing that when men watch pornography, their penis tells the truth, basically. So if a guy says, I am heterosexual, then if he's telling the truth, he gets an erection only to, in response to pornography that shows a man and a woman, and he really is not aroused when he sees two men interacting sexually. So.
59:25 Speaker 00 If a woman says I'm heterosexual, sure vagina will lubricate. It's not, it's the vaginal photoplethysmograph, which, which measures blood flow to the vagina. The, the guy uses-
59:37 Chris Williamson? Say that again?
59:38 Speaker 00 So that what the scientists do is they put a little ring around the guy's penis.
59:43 Chris Williamson? Yes.
59:44 Speaker 00 And as the circumference increases, so it gets harder, you know, blood flow to the penis, that's the penile plethysmograph can, will be consistent with his subjective reports of how turned on he is if he's telling the truth. So, and guys who say they're heterosexual actually do show then, um, objective arousal to the heterosexual stimuli. Whereas women who say they're heterosexual will, it's the vaginal photoplethysmograph, which is this glass tube that works on light refraction.
1:00:25 Speaker 00 So as the vagina is engorged with blood, that is taken as an index of sexual arousal, she will get this to all sexual stimuli, including bonobos having sex. Whereas the men, um, and that's in relation to watching some boring like travel documentary or something.
1:00:47 Chris Williamson? That's the control.
1:00:49 Speaker 00 Kind of evidence showing that, that female sexuality is in fact more fluid. And then we have all this behavioral evidence, uh, and it's just not sort of categorically rigid in the same way that male sexuality is. Of course, we have male bisexual men too, but you're right, they're much more rare than bisexual females. Also, there's a societal thing there too, that contributes, but-
1:01:08 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I think the societal thing is interesting as well, but there are many guys out there thinking, we all can get our girlfriends to watch lesbian porn with us now. Many of them.
1:01:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:01:20 Chris Williamson? Right.
1:01:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, women love lesbian porn. Heterosexual women typically love lesbian porn.
1:01:26 Chris Williamson? Objectively, the female body is significantly nicer than the male body. Like, we got, as a man, we got so the best end of the deal. Like, it's just, there is no-
1:01:38 Speaker 00 No, you're just a guy. You're just a guy. The male body, the well-conditioned male body is pretty nice.
1:01:44 Chris Williamson? You're wrong. I hate to tell you this. I know this is your area of subject. Anyway, did you see Linda Lindborg's meta-analysis looking at this strength of masculinity and testosterone predicting mating success and offspring viability? Do you see this?
1:02:02 Speaker 00 When did this come out?
1:02:04 Chris Williamson? Recently, within the last few months.
1:02:05 Speaker 00 Like, uh, I don't know. I don't think I did.
1:02:10 Chris Williamson? I'm gonna read you a little bit and put you on the spot. Here, we meta-analyzed the relationships between six masculine traits and mating slash reproductive outcomes. 96 studies, 474 effects, and N size of 177,000. Voice pitch, height, and testosterone all predicted mating. However, strength, muscularity-
1:02:31 Speaker 00 I did see this.
1:02:31 Chris Williamson? -was the strongest and only consistent predictor of both mating and reproduction. Facial masculinity and digit ratios did not significantly predict either. There was no clear evidence for any effect of masculinity on offspring viability. Please explain what the fuck I just read.
1:02:47 Speaker 00 Yeah. So this, if I'm remembering correctly, and please correct me if I'm wrong. They looked at all kinds of different populations, right? They looked at hunter-gatherers, right? How many populations did you say they looked at?
1:03:04 Chris Williamson? 96 studies, 474 effects, and N size of 177,000.
1:03:12 Speaker 00 I can't, I, it's hard for me to comment without going back to look at the study. So they found that facial-
1:03:20 Chris Williamson? Voice pitch, height, and testosterone all predicted mating. However, strength, muscularity was the strongest and only consistent predictor of both mating and reproduction. Facial masculinity and digit ratios did not significantly predict either. There was no clear evidence for any effect of masculinity on offspring viability.
1:03:35 Speaker 00 Okay, no, this makes sense. This makes, oh, on any measure of masculinity on offspring viability?
1:03:40 Chris Williamson? Correct.
1:03:43 Speaker 00 Okay, so first of all, the digit ratio, I wouldn't have predicted that it would have any relationship to anything. And that is because, A, I don't think it's a great measure of testosterone exposure in utero. And even if it is, how, I'm not even sure how that would predict offspring survival. Other than, yeah, I don't, I'm not sure there'd be a good relationship. The other one is masculinity, facial masculinity. And I don't see why that would predict offspring survival, because good parents don't, aren't the ones with the most, good dads aren't the ones with the most masculinized faces.
1:04:26 Speaker 00 In fact, that could be counter to the outcome for the child, because there is some evidence that facial masculinity is a product of testosterone levels in puberty, and that those guys are in fact, a little bit more physically aggressive, which is not necessarily good for offspring survival. There's other traits associated with facial masculinity. Strength, and it was strength.
1:04:54 Chris Williamson? Strength and muscularity was the strongest and only consistent predictor.
1:04:57 Speaker 00 Okay. That makes sense, because you have to be healthy to be able to put on that muscle mass. You have to be able to get resources in the form of energy from food. You have to be able to convert that into muscle mass and carry that muscle. It means you're not sick. Means, so healthy, strong men are, healthy men who are socially dominant, who can attain resources and then use those resources to grow big and strong, have good genes, for one thing. Not only do they have good genes, they're probably going to be socially dominant. That gives them increased access to resources, which are going to benefit,
1:05:35 Speaker 00 benefit their partner and offspring. The voice is a little bit surprising, but that, did you say voice is not?
1:05:44 Chris Williamson? Voice pitch, height, and testosterone predicted mating, but didn't predict mating and reproduction. It wasn't, it was, sorry, it was the most consistent.
1:05:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, and that's, that's interesting, because.
1:05:59 Speaker 00 Predicted mating, meaning number of mates? What was the mate? I gotta see, I haven't looked at that. I looked at that paper, but very briefly.
1:06:06 Chris Williamson? It's fine, yeah, just all predicted mating.
1:06:08 Speaker 00 So yeah, I mean, voice pitch is sexually attractive to women, and it is in some societies associated with dominance. It may not, I don't think that though any of those characteristics are associated with current testosterone level. I think that like with voice pitch, that really is a function of pubertal testosterone, and it's very important. And I have not seen evidence of the long-term associations between facial masculinity, voice pitch, and I could be wrong. I don't think I'm wrong about facial masculinity. I think that's really a function of pubertal testosterone, which can then, you know, go down a bit or vary a bit after puberty.
1:06:49 Chris Williamson? Is there a relationship between pubertal testosterone and testosterone levels throughout the rest of your life?
1:06:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, so the other question I'm just gonna throw in there is is there a relationship between prenatal testosterone, which I think is exceedingly important in shaping not only male bodies for the rest of their lives, but also their behavior. I think it's potentially even more important than what happens in puberty specifically. I think it's really underappreciated, especially in terms of sex differences. So there is no relationship between the estimates that we have of prenatal testosterone and adult testosterone levels. I, if I am remembering correctly, there is also not, this sounds wrong to me, but I don't, and I think I have looked into this,
1:07:42 Speaker 00 and I'm not sure there's a strong relationship between pubertal testosterone and later adult testosterone, but I could be wrong, and someone's gonna go look it up and tell me I'm wrong. So I don't want to assert anything there, but I, I'm not sure there's a strong, if there is a relationship, I don't think it's strong.
1:07:59 Chris Williamson? The other element which wasn't included in this study that I always come back to as being absolutely fascinating is the relationship between hand grip strength and
1:08:08 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:08:09 Chris Williamson? pretty much anything that you care to care about for men.
1:08:12 Speaker 00 Everything.
1:08:12 Chris Williamson? Can you explain that?
1:08:13 Speaker 00 Yeah. Um, so I think that hand grip is interesting because it's not one of the things that people typically work on. I think it's like a pure index of the effect of testosterone on someone's overall strength, and it's one of the best predictors of somebody's overall strength. And it's one of the largest sex differences. So, uh, and that is purely a function of testosterone differences. So it's not, uh, I think you can find that a very strong difference there in, um, where you have equally trained athletes, for instance, and you still have the male grip strength. Is it 50% or, uh?
1:08:56 Chris Williamson? Maybe even more, I think. Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if it was more. But it's like, it's correlated with, um, a number of sexual partners. It's the, it's the strongest predictor of the number of sexual partners that you can have.
1:09:08 Speaker 00 Grip strength?
1:09:09 Chris Williamson? Yes.
1:09:09 Speaker 00 So it must be because, well, I think because you don't have any other individual.
1:09:13 Chris Williamson? Yes.
1:09:14 Speaker 00 Um, uh, variable of, of physical strength because like in sports, in each sport, you're going to have a different muscle group that, or, or height, or whatever, or VO2, or, you know, where males have advantage in all of those on average, but it depends on your specific body type. But grip strength is going to capture all of that in a way that maybe no other single variable does. I didn't know that grip strength was the best. Would it, say that again? I didn't know that the thing you just said.
1:09:45 Chris Williamson? I'm pretty sure that I'm right when I say that grip strength is the single best predictor of the total number of mates that a man has throughout his lifetime.
1:09:53 Speaker 00 What about money?
1:09:56 Chris Williamson? I mean, into, I, yeah, okay.
1:09:57 Speaker 00 Isn't better than like being loaded?
1:10:00 Chris Williamson? But I don't think that you could genetic, well, however you would say, it's difficult to test for that in the same way that this is being tested for. I think it's stripped bare if you were to look at a man.
1:10:10 Speaker 00 Okay, if you control for everything else. But also you have a lot of populations that don't have, accumulate a lot of resources and mates are being, not being chosen based on, uh,
1:10:23 Speaker 00 Material wealth.
1:10:24 Chris Williamson? Yes. Us up until 15,000 years ago.
1:10:28 Speaker 00 That is amazing. That's amazing because it also, I mean, humans, in humans, it's not just physical strength that confers status and makes men attractive, of course. So that's really interesting. So maybe it co varies with some other genes that are expressed in the brain that have something to do.
1:10:48 Chris Williamson? I think that you're correct. Something else that it correlates with is mood stability over time for men. It's that guys that have.
1:10:57 Speaker 00 Inverse. Is it an inverse correlation?
1:10:59 Chris Williamson? Guys that have a stronger.
1:11:00 Speaker 00 Oh, it's positive?
1:11:00 Chris Williamson? Guys that have a stronger grip strength report higher, a greater level of mood, less depression.
1:11:09 Speaker 00 And, okay, I gotta, this is really interesting.
1:11:13 Chris Williamson? I'll send stuff over once we've finished.
1:11:14 Speaker 00 Okay, and I can, no, the grip strength thing, grip strength thing is interesting because it was my understanding that there isn't a huge testosterone relationship there.
1:11:25 Chris Williamson? I don't know. Let me, let me see now. Give me one second.
1:11:29 Speaker 00 Okay.
1:11:29 Chris Williamson? William, I'm on a podcast at the moment. Did you look at that study around grip strength correlated with male sexual partners throughout life? And I think it was also affect or mental stability or reported levels of well being and depression. If you could send this back quickly, that would be appreciated. I thank you. It's always good to have an evolutionary psychologist.
1:11:55 Speaker 00 Who, evolutionary psychologist on your staff?
1:11:58 Chris Williamson? Just on hand. It's not on my staff at all. He's just a friend, but he, he's always on WhatsApp. But yeah.
1:12:05 Speaker 00 Oh, here we are.
1:12:08 Chris Williamson? Have you found it?
1:12:13 Speaker 00 Our article aimed to compare the association between testosterone levels and grip strength, which probably means they didn't find one, or else it would have been in the abstract or the title. Results. Oh, serum testosterone levels, I should know this, had a significant correlation with grip strength in all models. In addition, high testosterone levels were negatively associated with low muscle strength in all grips. Oh, I know. Wait, no, I know.
1:12:38 Speaker 00 A stronger relationship was observed between testosterone levels and grip strength among non obese participants.
1:12:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, that is not, that's interesting because overall muscularity is not always associated with higher testosterone. It may be within the guy where, you know, higher testosterone levels for that guy are associated with higher muscularity, or obviously increased ability to put on muscle, but.
1:13:11 Chris Williamson? Carol Hooven, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to check out the stuff that you do and follow you online, where should they go?
1:13:18 Speaker 00 Twitter. I am at Hoovlet, H O O V L E T. And I have a website that I have to update, which is carolhooven.com. And I'm trying to, this is very embarrassing, but figure out how to use Instagram. So I have an Instagram. I'm trying to like, start to post things.
1:13:39 Chris Williamson? What's that? Chill it. Chill it. What is it?
1:13:41 Speaker 00 Oh, God, I don't know.
1:13:43 Chris Williamson? Come on, Carol. The first thing you need to know about your Instagram is what your Instagram is.
1:13:49 Speaker 00 Okay, right. I should be prepared. It's important, Instagram, right? Okay, do I just go to my story? How do I get who I am here?
1:13:57 Chris Williamson? It'll, it should go on your profile. This is.
1:14:00 Speaker 00 Okay. Here, I'm just gonna.
1:14:03 Chris Williamson? What's it say? What's it say at the top?
1:14:06 Chris Williamson? At carol.hoven. Cool.
1:14:10 Speaker 00 Is that?
1:14:10 Chris Williamson? Yes, carol.hoven at the top.
1:14:12 Speaker 00 And there's me and Dr. Phil.
1:14:14 Chris Williamson? You look good. Dr. Phil looks good as well.
1:14:16 Speaker 00 And there's, okay.
1:14:17 Chris Williamson? Is that a doggo? You got a doggo in there?
1:14:20 Speaker 00 That's my cat.
1:14:21 Chris Williamson? Okay.
1:14:22 Speaker 00 That's my, I posted two pictures of my cat. That's old. That's dumb. All right.
1:14:26 Chris Williamson? Wishful, wishful identification from me with the, with the cat to dog misgendering there. And again, good, see, that's what we need to see more. What else are they gonna say? What are you working on now? I've heard a rumor. I've heard a rumor that you're working on another book. Is that true or not?
1:14:45 Speaker 00 Um, I'm going to be working on another book. I am working on some papers, some really, some papers I'm very excited about. And I have some things I'm trying to straighten out with my Harvard part of my life. So that's taking up some time. And yeah, I am, I've had a few ideas. I keep changing my mind about the book that I'm doing next. So I've got to get that squared away. I'm open to ideas. I really feel like I want to focus on this issue that we talked about earlier, this sort of male.
1:15:25 Speaker 00 Uh, I want to focus, I think, on male puberty and not stigmatizing it and helping, writing a book that helps young men and those around them and women kind of understand what it might be like and the challenges that young men have to face and how we can celebrate at this stage like we do in women and have people feel happy about, like you said, it was great. I want, I want my son, I want my son to have that feeling. And I don't want him to get any messages that he's bad for being, I don't want to end by crying, but, but that's, that is the book that I'm have kind of bubbling up.
1:16:09 Chris Williamson? Well, I know that you spoke to Richard Reeves a little while ago.
1:16:12 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:16:13 Chris Williamson? And Richard was recently on the show and I absolutely adored his approach. Structural problems for, of boys and men, structural problems that are being faced by boys, men, families, dads, so on and so forth. And I, if I was to bet money, I'm usually pretty good at being able to predict trends. I was a club promoter for a long time and we basically
1:16:33 Speaker 00 Well, tell me, because I want to write the book that's going to hit at the right time.
1:16:36 Chris Williamson? So I think it's, I think, looking at a holistic way to reintroduce masculinity into the conversation, I think is just an absolute.
1:16:44 Speaker 00 In a science-based way, you know, that's, that's
1:16:47 Chris Williamson? It needs to be backed up. Well, I mean, Richard did it from a different way, right? Like, he's a policy wonk.
1:16:51 Speaker 00 A policy.
1:16:51 Chris Williamson? Yeah, from, from Washington. So you speak in the currency that you have to come into it with, like, whatever gravitas you've got, you're going to use. I think, I think that you're perfectly positioned in order to write a book that discusses what it, like masculinity and becoming a man, going from boy to man. From a biological perspective, I would, I would read the shit out of that. And I think
1:17:14 Speaker 00 Can I just ask you something about it?
1:17:16 Chris Williamson? Yeah, of course.
1:17:16 Speaker 00 Just, and then we can, then we'll go.
1:17:18 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
1:17:19 Speaker 00 It's funny because I am outspoken about the science of sex and gender. However, I think I'm a little nervous about writing a book like that because
1:17:31 Speaker 00 I, and I want not to be nervous at all. Um, because I think so many people feel justified, and maybe this is exactly why I have to write it, that so many people feel justified in kind of, um, stigmatizing male sexuality and that's so deeply ingrained. And, uh, I think I'm afraid, a little bit afraid, which is weird because I'm usually not
1:17:55 Chris Williamson? Well, that makes sense.
1:17:56 Speaker 00 But now that I'm saying this out loud, maybe this means that I absolutely have to write that book.
1:18:00 Chris Williamson? I think the reason that you're concerned i- is a guide toward the fact that this is something which other people are also going to be scared about. The fact that other people are going to be scared makes it less likely that it's going to be written. The fact that I, from what, from what I know about the changes you've made at Harvard over the last few years, it seems like, I don't know. I, here's, here's something I was thinking about while I was listening to you talk earlier on. I don't think that the academy can continue running around with its hands over its eyes for that much longer. And I think that there's going to be opportunities for people like Richard, like yourself,
1:18:44 Chris Williamson? to come out and really, really push a great positive message. And I think that at the end of the day, the, the free market's going to win with stuff like this. Like if you write an absolute storming book, like no one could read Richard's stuff. No one could read Of Boys and Men and go, this is a guy trying to take away women's rights for themselves. So yeah, there's going to have to be some caveats. And yeah, you're going to have to be more hyperbolic and a little bit more like wordy than you need to, you know, in order to be able to finagle yourself. But I, I, I think that it would be a very valuable book. And what's the point of spending all of this time, learning all of this shit about the way that testosterone affects people and the upbringing and going and spending time in Africa and going and spending time watching fucking deer fight each other every other season?
1:19:27 Chris Williamson? Like, you're the person, you're the person to write the book. As far as I can see, you're the person to write the book. It's like, maybe this is one of the wars that you've got, maybe this is one of the hills that you've got to stand on. And there'll be a lot of people that would be here, I'll, I'll support you, Joel will support you, Richard will support you, tons of people will.
1:19:47 Speaker 00 I can't, just please don't, I don't want to be on there crying.
1:19:49 Chris Williamson? That's okay. I'll, Dean, Dean, make sure that the screen goes dark for a little bit on this.
1:19:54 Speaker 00 No, seriously, I really appreciate this. And, um, you're helping me, just talking to you about it, it's sort of convincing me this is actually what I should do. And I've been dragging my feet, putting the proposal together, but it seems clear.
1:20:09 Chris Williamson? Let's, let's, let's leave it there. Carol, I appreciate the hell out of you. I really appreciate your work. I think you're incredibly charming. Thank you for coming on.
1:20:17 Speaker 00 Thank you so much.
1:20:19 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
1:20:29 Speaker 03 Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
1:20:35 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.
1:20:39 Speaker 03 With great power comes great deniability.
1:20:43 Speaker 04 I'm not the first then.
1:20:44 Speaker 03 Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.
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