Modern Wisdom - #544 - Dr Carole Hooven - What Makes Men And Women Different?

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

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... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 10% discount on all of MASA’s Chips at www.masachips.com/modernwisdom use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy T - https://amzn.to/3CHRI8o  Follow Carole on Twitter - https://twitter.com/hoovlet  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Carol Hoeven. She's 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 strivers 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. This was a pretty moving episode. Carol is obviously very emotionally connected to the work that she does. She is concerned about putting forward opinions that are out of vogue, I suppose, in the academy. And I find it very charming. Her work is pretty robust. And she seems like a very nice person, just trying to do her best in a community that really doesn't like what she's got to say.

I appreciate that she was open and honest and vulnerable today. And yeah, if you enjoy this, go and pick a book up, Tee or Go and check her out on Twitter at Hoovlet. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Carol Hoovan. I'm not sure if you're going to be able to do it. Carol Hoeven, welcome to the show. Chris, thank you so much for having me. You've already made me laugh more than I have in a week, I think. I have been looking forward to speaking to you for quite a while because you shared an article by Chelsea Conner Boy 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, part way 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 is 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. Well, your thoughts on Chelsea Connoby's article, Carol?

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 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 its 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 well, 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 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. We don't need to twist the facts of biology to support anybody's rights. We don't have to distort reality.

We can tell the truth and fight for people's rights. Those are different things. 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. I think conflating those two things is dangerous from many perspectives. But this is 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.

Prove to me that maternal instinct isn't a myth that men created. Okay. say so. Prove to me that maternal instinct isn't a myth that men created. Okay, did men, so first of all, it kind of annoys me because it gives men a hell of a lot of power. But we men are very powerful, but we can't do that. Completely control how you act. We get to dictate how it is that you interact with your children. Yes, and you get the rest of society to believe 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 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. 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 an ancestral environment, 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 horm 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 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 to care of my baby for the most part during the day. Well, 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. 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 wave in card carrying Person for that and yet still don't believe it Yeah, it is something I did I didn't really want to do that. I wish I could have stayed home With Griffin who's now 13 for much you know for a year rather than a few months and he was closed by so I did get to Take off my shoes and run a block to 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 have a machine squeeze it out rather than having your kids lip suck it out. 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 is challenging. That's a good point. Well, I also saw it.

You didn't feel the pain because I was so motivated. You're so maternally pushed by the patriarchy. It's a great response to this that was done in Kuala'at. 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 mammals, the men don't have any male parental investment. Males, yeah. 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 banalbos, 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? Yes, yes, okay, but that, so can I say it 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 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 author seemed to think that this has given the 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 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. And things two about, yeah. Interjector, 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 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 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 rubbed 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 woman.

Yes, yes. That is a great example about why this kind of article that appears so often and 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 is though, you know, you're just doing

what men want you to do. 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 little area as necessarily and figure out which are male and which are female, but that machine learning can do that with a really

high degree of accuracy. So 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. One question is whether it is, so one challenge to that is that it's life experience that leads to these differences. If they exist, then it's all due to the patriarchy, and that that leads men to behave in certain ways and interacting socially in certain ways. because 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. 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. 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. I wonder if Chelsea Connerboy 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, vasopressing 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? Like, what do you think is going on here? Even that's even the women that aren't, that haven't given birth to them, that maybe aren't even genetically related, that are just doing the whole alloparentity,

the modern version of alloparenting stuff now. Like, yes. What? It blows my mind that people can be so ostensibly pro female, and obviously anti-mother. That blows my mind. That blows my mind. Yeah, I don't even know where to begin.

I completely agree with you. One thing that I do when I teach my class on, 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 aspects of our environment that are salient to us. So men are much more likely to stare at women's breasts and that when they're walking down the street or 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. Your infrastructural competition is showing, Carol. Something like that, yeah. So if a guy does it, it's for, you know, 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 in 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 they've, oh, I've always loved that. Of course, there are some women who don't like babies who don't ever want kids, 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. 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 like 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. What does testosterone do? Why do we have it? To help you, men, convert energy into offspring. Men, yes. My friend Bridget halfway through her show all the time just screams the word,

women! I'm just going to start going, men. Wait, fantasy. Yeah. Okay. Um, yeah, that's what it's for. It's a reproductive hormone. It's not all about sex. It's about like it's same thing as estrogen. It is about first of all the physical stuff. You've got to have your penis and testicles and vast deference and everything you need

to produce your sperm and ejaculate, right? But imagine having all that stuff and not being attracted, wanting to use it, basically. Imagine not wanting to- Having all of the weaponry, but none of the motivation. 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. I'm right in saying that the males that grow these antlers during the rut when they're trying to mate with the females, their friends, their with their mates, being much more docile or much more chill. Yes, that's what's so cool about seasonal breeders. And this is why I went to study to Scotland to hang out with the red deer during the rut, because humans aren't seasonal breeders. You guys are just masculinized.

You have puberty. 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 hair on because they want to have a lot of sex with a lot of females. That's what 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 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 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 how we got into that. Oh, okay, what does 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 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 increase

propensity to take physical risks to be competitive with other males, 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 dominant-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.

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 and you can invest in those kids and ensure they're survival, that could be just as good if not better a strategy depending on your status and your abilities, then 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 really successful

strategy. That requires lower testosterone for a while. Does that mean that men who have high testosterone are higher in state-to-seeking behavior? No. It means so really the individual differences in testosterone in men within the healthy, normal range predict very little about libido or physical aggression or anything else. It's really about the changes that you experience throughout the day, throughout the seasons, and it's all in response to what your environment is, your social environment in particular.

So those changes are meaningful and 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. You have the sight of your kid. You have your partner there. If you didn't have that stuff, that change in testosterone and probably do nothing. What about depression? Does testosterone relate to that at all? Yeah, it does seem to. So one interesting finding about testosterone is that when females transition 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 that 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 length there. 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. This would make sense because women on average are more neurotic than men. Is that what's the... There are also more... What's the personality trait? Your autosysm. Yeah. The higher in neuroticism than males are.

Yeah. All right, I really want you to get into this. What happens when females go on test after a run? How do they report alterations in their experience of life? So what was puberty like for you? Fantastic. Why? Because I could get an erection with a gust of wind that was at the right angle. And you didn't mind that. Of course I did. It was just hilarious.

I just found it absolutely hilarious. Okay. But so you got a lot of erections. Were you, would you say that that was correlated with any psychological state of mind? 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.

But that's so funny. Oh, I know. 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. Interesting. Yeah. 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. Yeah. So, obviously, girls are also getting having an increase in libido, but the number one psychological change, in addition to feeling, for a lot of people, obviously an increased sense of freedom to express who they are. But the number one psychological change is a, again, and there's variance here, and that's important to say. 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. They know. Okay. Thank you. I just, yeah, have been on the receiving end of people saying, well, I 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. 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 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 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 sounds like such a stereotype. But when they were living as women, the target of their attraction

was a whole person. It was much more about the whole human being in relationship to them. Then on male levels of testosterone, it was more objectified. The target of their sexual attraction was more objectified. It didn't prevent intimacy, but there was a whole other aspect to sexuality that 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 know, think that guys are just being assholes when they might look at their 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 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 wanna see that. I would guess that my very small amount of exposure to the gay cruising scene is that men do tend to wear outfits that allow themselves to be objectified more easily. That is right. That's right because that's what men want.

They know their market. They know the market. 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. There must be a lot of freedom in that.

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 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 Bus, who could use 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. Right.

Pretty nice, pretty nice rack you've got there, my dam. And my point being that men will objectify pretty much anything, I'm alright in saying they have a purpose-built reward mechanism for looking at things that are sexually gratifying as well? 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 or sexual or for women, breast feeding or 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 when the oxytocin goes up for breastfeeding, it usually 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 to breastfeed this kid. So yeah, I think that testosterone does condition men to respond. And this is, you know, of course, society can 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, do you think that women can appreciate what sex

drive is like for a man without going through a short course of test us around and getting jacked at the same time? I think I in writing the book and just talking to so many men, I mean it has taken a huge amount of work for me. I always do this. I get very emotional about this. And 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.

Shame on you. 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 end, and I understand, and I have been angry myself about the way

that men sometimes behave. I don't even know what you, what did you ask me? Is it possible for women? To under, yeah. So I guess I do feel like I have an understanding and you're gonna laugh, but 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 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. 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.

That's. And I just felt like, oh my God, if that's it, then I feel really bad for everybody judging. Oh my god, if that's it, then I feel really bad for everybody judging. That is a nice summation. 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 Jim Leggings walk past because I get to see this Mexican wave of eyeballs, wu, wu, wu, wu, wu, wu, wu, wu, wu, wu, wu, wu, like everybody will turn and look.

All of the guys have just been in between sets or I'm doing it whatever, or someone will be talking to their friend and they'll be looking at their friend like that just over there show. Staring past them as some girl walks past in the distance. 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 modern society where someone's innate preferences would be treated with so much distaste, you know? Why would it be the case that the way someone is built? And imagine if you said this to somebody that's gay, to say, well, yeah, look, you've got this particular... Yeah, but I, oh, yeah. But I think the reason is, is you know because of sexual assault and sexual violence and just mail violence in general and you just happen to be

a member of the group that's responsible for all that bad stuff uh... so i think it's different than like maternal instinct or being gay because it's you's 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 judgey because if any of the women 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 don't. And that is step one is to understand what is going on and to try to listen and have some empathy. 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 to look at some of this stuff.

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, 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 lasting, full-body experience. The

men's orgasm is more likely to have more intensity at the peak, but be 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 as a man with high testosterone for four years, fully masculine eyes looked, you know, 100% like a man and then she detransitioned. So she was able to talk about what it's like to be live as a man as a woman.

If that makes sense. She said she likes the orgasms off of testosterone and 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? Okay, so I was also on and we both cried a fair amount. I was.

And we talked about crying. Okay, he is this very mat really, like really masculine guy. He takes a lot of testosterone and he was bawling his eyes out. That is unusual. So going on testosterone usually stops or really greatly reduces crying and coming off it increases crying back to typical female levels, which are much, much higher than male levels.

Yeah, you only asked about orgasms, but I think 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 accessed. That's interesting. Have you heard the quote, I think it's Shorpinow or a nature of 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 post-coital depression that some men deal with. Sorry, I hope my students see this because they taught me, was this this past spring?

Some, 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 so I had no idea what that was.

And he explained it to me and all the students were like, yeah, everyone knows what that is. Yeah, and it makes sense. Does your viewers, I assume, know what post-nut clarity is? I think so, but I mean, I'm going to guess. Is that a male phenomenon? Do women have post-nut clarity? I imagine, I mean, if they're drunk or something, then, you know, when it actually happens,

then, if one here, Carol, you come on. I don't think so. I don't know. Okay. So I think for me, but I'm probably pretty typical. I think that could be true. No, I think because men are much more willing to lower what their standards are there.

So I think another another element of it is that posts, this is total bro signs, right? But come come with me here. Okay. Yeah. Post-Coydly, 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 the woman, but there is a greater need if the woman is just given up one of the main risk factors that she can in her entire

life. It makes more sense for 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 state of seeking. Maybe I should think about my position within the hierarchy

or other things that I've got going on that are gonna release a ton of asset press and another shit because maybe I need to do that in order, there's maybe a kid here in nine months time and I've 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. Takes it, have a period of evaluation. Yes, yes.

After 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 the 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, has, has a birth defect or, uh, 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. I read a story about, uh, Charles Darwin, and I think Darwin ended up having 10 or 12 children with his cousin, actually. Beforehand, he's doing this marriage pros and cons list. In one of the potential cons, he actually... Right, right, I saw that. 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. If they die, then it would be sad. 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. 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 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 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's failed. And that's why his 10-year-old daughter's death

was the most painful one. So death is saving. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And that, when I lived in Uganda for eight months and I remember one of the women there saying that the reason they had so many kids is because you can expect a couple of them to die. You know, you can 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 have a hell of a lot of energy into him. Yeah. Is sex a spectrum? Don't give me that look. I am just a big change. It is not. No, it's not. The traits associated with sex can be on a spectrum, but sex itself is not on a spectrum. 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. Do intersex people disprove this? 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 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 exceeding, there's .02 percent of people who have genetic traits that don't match their sex. So they may have something that looks like a vagina, even though they're male, for instance, or they might have something that looks like 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 .02 of people who have guinattal 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. But that doesn't mean that we're not a species with two sexes, like almost every, like all mammals, for instance, and vertebrates, almost all vertebrates. So there are two sexes. We cannot change sex. There are other species that have two sexes, but can't date 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, 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 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. Rolling the lifespan forward a little bit, what about behavior differences in boys and girls

that are toddlers? I'm gonna 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? I, you might be wrong. 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 is that those come about because of differential exposure to testosterone in utero and shortly after birth. So male

babies have the 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 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 like 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. They're a little bit more effeminate 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 rats are the ones who like to tackle each other and have rough and tumble play, male 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 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 else you're not going to 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 a masculineized. Their play is masculineized.

They prefer boy toys more than girls who don't 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 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, and they're similar to what other animals do. It's like that Chelsea Conneby, where she said one that has stuck around

despite the best efforts of feminists to do bunk it from the moment it entered public discourse. 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. It's almost like it's in belt, almost like it's in belt. Are there any other any correlations or relationships between testosterone and gender identity or sexual preference?

Yeah, there aren't a lot. There aren't a lot. So what's interesting about men 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. 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, physical aggression. And so it's possible there's some timing difference in testosterone exposure or something in uterur. But there's no evidence for that. And then in women there's some evidence that increased testosterone in utero has masculizing 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, there's still more likely to be lesbians, more likely to have a male gender identity. So there seems to be some effect in females, but we don't necessarily see the same thing in males. And the data on the females is not super convincing to me. Why? Because there are plenty of lesbians who don't have congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

And we just don't have the ability to collect really good data on prenatal testosterone. Period, we have the 2D40, which you might have heard of. There's some evidence that lesbians might have more masculineized 2D40s, but I'm not super convinced by that. I learned from Christina Duranty, if you know her. Yeah, I know her name. 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 used 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, and she just threw it away at 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. No, they didn't. And she said, and I was like, well, 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, 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 stuck in there. We go lesbian said that. No, no, no, no, no, this is the straight woman, right? So you had these very more obvious, more conscious,

sort of, even though it's probably still subconscious, I'm all out there, obvious display of whatever you want to call it, like make an anonymity or whatever. However, they looked at non-verbal cues as well, stuff like body language, stuff like playing with the hair. And the lesbian women who were ovulating were showing more non-verbal cues of flirting to the guy who was a sex that they are not attracted to sexually.

I thought that was so, so interesting. 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. Significantly more bisexual women than there are bisexual men. Yes, yes. 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 if a woman says I'm heterosexual, sure vagina will lubricate. It's not, it's the vaginal photoplyphysmograph, which measures blood flow to the vagina. The guy uses it. Say that again. So the scientists do is they put a little ring

around the guy's penis. Yes. And as the circumference increases, But what the scientists do is they put a little ring around the guy's penis. And as the circumference increases, so it gets harder, you know, blood flow to the penis, that's the penile plethysmograph, can be consistent with his subjective reports of how turned on he is if he's telling the truth. And guys who say their heterosexual actually do show then objective arousal to the heterosexual stimulate, whereas women who say their heterosexual will, it's the vaginal photoplatismograph, which is this glass tube that works on light refraction.

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, and that's in relation to watching some boring travel documentary or something. That's the control. Yes, kind of evidence showing that female sexuality is, in fact, more fluid. And then we have all this behavioral evidence. And it's just not categorically rigid in the same way that male sexualities. Of course, we have bisexual men, too, but you're right, they're much more rare

than bisexual females. Also, there's this societal thing there too that contributes. Yeah, I think this 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.

Yeah. Right. Yeah, no women love lesbian porn. I had a sexual woman typically love lesbian porn. I mean, 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... No, you're just a guy.

No. You're just a guy. No, no. The male body, well-cond addition to male body is pretty nice. 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? You see this? When did this come out? Recently, within the last few months. Like, I don't know. I don't think I am. I'm going to read you a little bit.

OK. And put you on the spot. Here, we met our meta-analysed relationships between six masculine traits and mating slash reproductive outcomes, 96 studies, 474 effects, an end size of 177,000. 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, please Explain what the fuck I just read. Yeah, so this if so 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? looked at hunter-gatherers, right? How many populations did you say they looked at? 96 studies, 474 effects, and n size of 177,000. I can't, it's hard for me to comment without going back to look at this study. So they found that facial... Voice pitch height and testosterone all predicted mating. However, strength

muscularity was the strongest and only consistent predictive 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 in offspring. Okay, so this makes sense. This makes, oh, on any measure of masculinity on offspring, offspring viability. Correct. OK, 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 that, yeah, 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 aren't the ones with the most, good dads aren't the ones with the most, good dads aren't the ones with the most masculineized faces. 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. Strength and muscularity was the strongest and only consistent person. 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 gonna be socially dominant, that gives them increased access to resources, which are gonna benefit their partner and offspring. The voice is a little bit surprising, but that, did you say voice is not?

Voice pitch, kite and testosterone predicted mating, but didn't predict mating reproduction. It wasn't, it was, sorry, it was the most consistent. Yeah, no, and that's, that's interesting because predicted mating, meaning number of mates, what was the mate? I gotta see, I haven't looked at that paper, but very briefly. It's fine, yeah, just all predicted. 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 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 that'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 go down a bit or vary a bit after puberty. Is there a relationship between pubertal testosterone and testosterone levels throughout the rest of your life? Yeah, so the other question I'm just gonna throw in there 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

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 going to go look it up and tell me I'm wrong, so I don't want to assert anything there, but I'm not sure there's a strong, if there is a relationship, I don't think it's strong. The other element which wasn't included in this study that I've I always come back to was being absolutely fascinating is the relationship between hand grip strength and pretty much anything that you care to care about for men. Everything. Can you explain that? Yeah. 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 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. And that is purely a function of testosterone differences. So it's not, I think you can find that a very strong difference there in where you have equally trained athletes, for instance, and you still have the male grip strength. Is it 50% or maybe even more?

More. I think it would surprise me if it was more. But it's correlated with a number of sexual partners. It's the strongest predictor of the number of sexual partners that you can have. So it must be because, well, I think because you don't have any other individual variable of physical strength because like in sports, in each sport, you're gonna have a different muscle group that, or high, or whatever, or VO2, or you know, where males have advantages and all of those on average, but it depends on your specific body type,

but grip strength is gonna 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 strength was the bet. What did say that again? I didn't know that the thing you just said. 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 life. What about money? I mean, yeah, okay. Is it better than like being loaded? But I don't think that you could genetic well 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. OK, if you control for everything else, but also you have a lot of populations that don't accumulate a lot of resources and mates are not being chosen based on a material wealth. And, oh, it's up until,

look at those, 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.

Exactly. I think that you're correct. But something else that it correlates with is mood stability over time for men. It's that guys that have... Inverse. Is it an inverse correlation? Guys that have a stronger grip strength report a greater level of mood, less depression. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, because it was my understanding that there isn't a huge testosterone relationship there. I don't know. Let me see. I do not hope that. 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? I think it was also affect or mental stability or reported levels of well-being

and depression. If you can send this back quickly, that will be appreciated. I thank you. It's always good to have an evolutionary psychologist. Have you ever lose your psychologist on your staff? Just on hand. It's not on my staff at all. He's just a friend. But he's always on WhatsApp. But yeah. Just on hand, it's not on my staff at all. He's just a friend, but he's always a wiser. But yeah. Have you found it? Our article aim 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, so you're your 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. A stronger relationship was observed between testosterone levels and grip strength among non-obes participants. 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 or obviously increased ability to put on muscle, but Yeah, thank you. No, this is great. This is great. I will send things over to you once we're done Look Carol Hoven ladies gentlemen if people want to check out the stuff that you do and follow online where should they go? Twitter I am at Hoovlet, HOVLET. And I have a website that I have to update, which is carolhoovin.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 start to post things. What's that? Chill it, chill it. What is it? Oh. So I have an Instagram. I'm trying to like start to post things. I don't want to chill it. Chill it. What is it? Oh God, I don't know. Come on. Come on.

Carol, the first thing you need to know about your Instagram is what your Instagram is. OK, right. I should be prepared. It's important Instagram, right? OK, do I just go to my story? How do I get who I am here? It'll go on your profile. This is. OK. Here, I'm just go to my story? How do I get who I am here? It'll it should you go on your profile. This is okay

Here I'm just gonna what's it say what's it say at the top? At Carol dot Hoven cool. Is that what yes Carol dot Hoven and there's me and Dr. Phil you look good Dr. Phil looks good as well It look good. Dr. Phil looks good as well. And there's, okay. Is that a doggo? You got a doggo in there? That's my cat. Oh, okay. That's my, I posted two pictures of my cat.

That's all, that's dumb. All right. I love my cat. Wishful identification for me with the cat, cat to dog misgendering there. And again. Good. See you, my little cat. All right. What else are we going to say?

What are you working on now? I've heard a rumor. I've heard a rumor that you're supposed to see more. What else are we 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? 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'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... 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 this stage like we do in women and have people feel happy about like you said it was great. 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 that is the book that I have kind of bubbling up. Well, I know that you spoke to Richard Reeves a little while ago. Yeah. And Richard was recently on the show and I absolutely adored his approach. Structural problems for boys and men. Structural problems that are being faced by boys, men, families, dads, son and so forth. And 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... Well, tell me because I want to write the book that's going to hit it the right time. I think it's looking at a holistic way to reintroduce masculinity into the conversation, I think is just an absolute. It is science-based way, you know, that's, that's like, It needs to be backed up. I mean, Richard did it from a different way, right? Like, he's a policy one.

A policy, yeah. 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 it with, like whatever gravitas you've got you're going to use. I think that you're perfectly positioned in order to write a book that discusses masculinity and becoming a man going from boy to men from a biological perspective. I would read the shit out of that. Can I just ask you something about it? Of course. And then we can go. Yeah.

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 I want not to be nervous at all 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 stigmatizing male sexuality, and that's so deeply ingrained. And I think I'm afraid, a little bit afraid,

which is weird, because I'm usually not at all. But that makes sense. But now that I'm saying this out loud, maybe this means that I absolutely have to write that book. I think the reason that you're concerned, it 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 I know about the changes you've made at Harvard over the last few years, it seems like, I don't know. Here's something I was thinking about, 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 to come out and really, really push a great positive message. And I think that at the end of the day, the free market's going to win with stuff like this. Like if you write an absolute storming book, let 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, it'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, in order to be able to finagle yourself. But 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,

fighting each other every other season? 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 support you, Joel support you, Richard will support you.

Tons of people, will. I can't just please don't, I don't want to be on there crying. That's okay. I'll Dean, Dean, make sure that the screen goes dark for a little bit on this. No, seriously, I really appreciate this. And 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 put in the proposal together But it seems clear 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. Thank you so much.