Steve: That is definitely really interesting if that is true.
So you think testosterone has no behavioral effects and has no effect on brain development? I heard guys who took T injections definitely noticed personality changes. But that’s really interesting anyway. So you think testosterone has no effect other than on physical things like muscle growth? Why are men way more violent than women? You think the black white violent crime rates has nothing to do with testosterone levels?
Hi Steve, testosterone injections are associated with anger, rage, irritability, high sex drive, aggressiveness, and possibly increased competitiveness.
Testosterone makes you want to fight and fuck. It also helps you be confident and competitive.
This is why men are so much more violent than women and in part why the Black-White-Asian crime differentials are the way they are. Absolutely testosterone effects criminal and antisocial behavior, with higher levels bringing more and lower levels brining less.
On the other hand, let’s face it, anger, rage, irritability, high sex drive, aggressiveness, and possibly increased competitiveness are also associated with criminality if you think about it enough, no?
The male brain is indeed masculinity in the womb in development. This creates the sort of base masculine core of the male that you can even see in very young boys. I describe that behavior below.
It’s just that I do not think testosterone has much to do with the sort of macho, hypermasculine or masculine posturing and thinking that men do, including an artificially deep voice, the way that they walk, talk, sit, stand, carry themselves, hand and arm movements, and all sorts of gestures. All of this, including the “way to think and act like a man” like what is the masculine thing to do in 100,000 different situations, and the particularly shut down or controlled emotions of men in the West strike me as learned behavior.
I say that because I feel that I learned all this stuff over a period of years, actually decades. And when I stop trying to do it sort of consciously, I revert back into my normal, passive, soft, quiet, rather wussy self, which I think is just my normal baseline personality that I have always had since I was a boy. The fact that I can ramp up and down this “masculine display” more or less at will shows to me that it’s learned behavior and that it is subject to willpower and agency.
It’s also why gay men act so different in all of these areas because I feel that their effeminate behavior seems to be learned also.
However, males are more competitive, confident, aggressive, and violent have a more intense sex drive than women. That all seems to be down to testosterone. Interestingly, gay men mirror straight men on all of these variables.
I think there is a sort of basic “masculine” core in males. You can see it in the violent roughhousing, getting dirty, playing with bugs and snakes behavior of even very young boys. It is upon this base that all of the leaned behaviors involved in “learning how to be a man” are built.
Basically, boys are taught to be men. When you see a man walking around with masculine display, he’s not that way due to his hormones. He got taught how to act that way over many years or probably decades. But the massive and often cruel and abusive “boot camp” style learning project in which boys are taught to be men definitely builds on a somewhat masculine core base that we see in the young boys above.
Same thing with women I would say.
So with this all-encompassing theory of masculine and feminine behaviors, I believe to utilize both biology, hormones, and learning and training into a single theory that avoids the problems of “gender is constructed” feminist nonsense theory and the “it’s all biology and hormones and humans have no agency” theory by combining both theories into one and saying that they are both important in the development of masculinity and femininity.
In other words, nature provides the clay (core masculinity or femininity) and culture is the sculptor. Sure it helped to have the clay to make the sculpture, but you could not have created this fantastic sculpture called Man or Woman with the sculptor working on it for months on end. You would just end up with a lame lump of clay. Good clay is not necessary to make a good sculpture, but it sure helps.
What do you think? Did I square the circle? How is my Single Unifying Theory?