Why do people explain learned behaviours using ideas connected to sex hormones?
The start point for this discussion is that science and scientific language now occupies a central place in how we understand social behaviours and even social worlds.
As Erickson (2005, 224) notes:
We live with science: science surrounds us, invades our lives, and alters our perspective on the world. We see things from a scientific perspective, in that we use science to help us make sense of the world – regardless of whether or not that is an appropriate thing to do – and to legitimize the picture of the world that results from such investigations.
These scientific stories help us to explain what is often assumed to be the natural differences between men and women. Lorber (1992, 568-569) suggests the origins of these ideas can be found within Enlightenment thinking:
When scientists began to question the divine basis of the social order and replaced faith with empirical knowledge, what they saw was that women were very different from men in that they had wombs and menstruated. Such anatomical differences destined them for an entirely different social life from men.
Connell (2005, 46) shares this stance; “since religion’s capacity to justify gender ideology collapsed, biology has been called in to fill the gap.” This ‘science of sex’ then becomes the foundation of the dominant classification system within modern western societies, thus categorising the individual, by which it “marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in him” (Foucault, 1983, 212).
These biological ‘laws of truth’ are then habituated and lived through the bodies, emotions, language, physical grammar and actions of groups and individuals. Here, then, “western ideology takes biology as the cause, and behaviour and social statuses as the effects, and then proceeds to construct biological dichotomies to justify the ‘naturalness’ of gendered behaviours and gendered social status” (Lorber, 1993, 568). Scientifically framed ‘natural’ sex is then ‘normal’ sex, and such normalisation becomes a central dimension our relationships with each other. Key within this process are ideas about the ‘sex hormones’.
The ‘male’ and ‘female’ hormones
Of particular interest for my work has been the part played in stories of manhood, by the ‘male hormone’. The examination of testosterone and estrogens has traditionally been the preserve of positivistic research within a variety of fields. However, interpretivist researchers have explored the origins of this knowledge in an attempt to challenge stories about what is stereotypically assumed about men and women. In this regard, van den Wijngaard (1997) has documented the part played by endocrinology in the Reinventing of the Sexes, while Oudshoorn (1994) describes in detail the political and cultural framing of research that produces scientific ‘facts’ about male and female hormones. More recently, Hoberman (2005) has explored the contemporary addiction to hormonal explanations of male behaviour within his excellent book; Testosterone Dreams. Each of these studies has done much to advance our understanding the way scientific knowledge about sex, bodies and biology takes shape.
What remains relatively underdeveloped within these accounts (although less so in Hoberman’s) is the use this biological stores in the framing of day-to-day life outside of the scientific community. The transfer of knowledge into popular understandings can be problematic:
Generally, when knowledge is transferred from fields where it was developed, to be used in other fields, various subtle details are sacrificed. Researchers in one field of study expect unequivocal answers from researchers in another field. Users of knowledge, such as doctors, are, if possible, even more interested in unambiguous information (van den Wijngaard, 1997, 93).
This process of simplification and characterisation can reduce the academic subtlety of the original research into simplistic binaries. In the case of sex hormones, this reduction of complexity results in testosterone being equated with men and estrogen with women, despite evidence suggesting a far more complex relationship. Hoberman (2005, 25) describes this process:
That both ‘male’ and ‘female’ hormones occur naturally in both sexes, albeit in different proportions, is not widely understood, because it does not conform to the hormonal folklore of our culture, which remains rooted in archetypes of hormonally determined masculine and feminine essences.
The transmission of scientific knowledge into ‘hormonal folklore’ is then intertwined with socially constructed assumptions about sex difference. Such stories of gender can override aspects of research that do not match popular ideas about makes men men and women women. Although this process has been shown to be pervasive it is not without challenge.
Within some of my research on boxing (Matthews, 2014) some men have described to me the their belief in the presence of testosterone as offered a causal explanation for aggression, violence and physical prowess. Obviously these men never tested their own hormone levels, or really even understood the underlying physiology of this process. And certainly they were not aware of research challenges these assumptions. Yet, their conviction in this regard was extremely firm.
While many may agree with these men, their uncritical acceptance is a crucial aspect of Hoberman’s ‘hormonal folklore’. He argues, “testosterone has infiltrated modern life in ways that often escape both our attention and our censure” (Hoberman, 2005, 277). Indeed, I found that such ideas acted as ‘floating signifiers’, able to represent a range of behaviours situationally coded as masculine. The ‘male’ hormone provided some men with a shorthand code for describing, explaining and justifying their perceived natural maleness, and with it, the ability to act in a manner which they understood as uniquely ‘male’.
Although not representative of all male dominated subculture, I would argue that the observations presented here certainly resonate with experiences in other ‘male preserves’ (the military, certain pubs and workplaces might be other good examples). This ‘biology ideology’ (Lorber, 1993) helped men perform behaviours that are stereotypically coded as masculine. Drawing on such simplistic pseudo-scientific ideas about ‘real men’ enables certain people to justify acting in aggressive and dominating ways that they knew where not appropriate in other areas of life.
So in learning to act in ways understood as masculine and also learning to justify these behaviours as an expression of ‘male hormones’, it was possible for a natural justification to be produced. This was a simple but also firm explanation for behaviours which enabled them to continue doing them. It’s all kind of simple really, but the real problem comes when such behaviours are damaging to others. For example, this process can be used to justify the ‘red mist’ which many men return to as an explanation for domestic violence. Challenging these ideas might help people to rethink how their behaviours, rather than being the product of some genetically determined male biology, are learned and as such can be unlearned.
If you’d like to see the original paper, you can download it here.
References
Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities. Cambridge, Polity Press.
Erickson, M. (2005). Science, Culture & Society: Understanding Science in the 21st Century. Cambridge, Polity Press.
Foucault, M. (1983). The Subject of Power. In H. L. Dreyfus & P. Rainbow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism & Hermeneutics (2nd Ed.), Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Lorber, J. (1993). Believing is Seeing: Biology as Ideology. Gender & Society, 7(4), 568-581.
Hoberman, J. (2005). Testosterone Dreams – Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping. California, University of California Press.
Oudshoorn, N. (1994). Beyond the Natural Body – An Archeology of Sex Hormones. London, Routledge.
van den Wijngaard, M. (1997). Reinventing The Sexes – The Biomedical Construction of Femininity & Masculinity. Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.