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“Goodbye, beliefs in sex differences disguised as evolutionary facts. Welcome the dragon slayer: Cordelia Fine wittily but meticulously lays bare the irrational arguments that we use to justify gender politics.”―Uta Frith, emeritus professor of cognitive development, University College London
Many people believe that, at its core, biological sex is a fundamental, diverging force in human development. According to this overly familiar story, differences between the sexes are shaped by past evolutionary pressures?women are more cautious and parenting-focused, while men seek status to attract more mates. In each succeeding generation, sex hormones and male and female brains are thought to continue to reinforce these unbreachable distinctions, making for entrenched inequalities in modern society.
In Testosterone Rex, psychologist Cordelia Fine wittily explains why past and present sex roles are only serving suggestions for the future, revealing a much more dynamic situation through an entertaining and well-documented exploration of the latest research that draws on evolutionary science, psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and philosophy. She uses stories from daily life, scientific research, and common sense to break through the din of cultural assumptions. Testosterone, for instance, is not the potent hormonal essence of masculinity; the presumed, built-in preferences of each sex, from toys to financial risk taking, are turned on their heads.
Moving beyond the old “nature versus nurture” debates, Testosterone Rex disproves ingrained myths and calls for a more equal society based on both sexes’ full, human potential.
- Sales Rank: #16536 in Books
- Published on: 2017-01-24
- Released on: 2017-01-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.60" h x 1.00" w x 6.60" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of January 2017: Fine knocks it out of the park with her smart and eye-opening investigation into why we give credit to (or blame) testosterone for so many behaviors. With a writing style that reminds me of Mary Roach and her gift for seeking out the ridiculous, Fine puts under the microscope our assumption that testosterone is the wonder hormone that makes men risk takers and competitive and, in its absence, women less so. This might sound like heavy stuff—like the gender studies classes I avoided in college—but Fine invites you to laugh with her as she punctures outdated notions and points out obvious weaknesses in the mighty social (not scientific) barricade of sex-specific dogma and the daily throwaway comments that carelessly reinforces that wall. After reading Testosterone Rex, my new resolution is to never say "Boys will be boys" again. Because while boys are, of course, boys, we owe it to them—and to girls—to understand that they are not defined by this single hormone. —Adrian Liang, The Amazon Book Review
Review
“Fine’s funny, spiky book gives reason to hope that we’ve heard Testosterone rex’s last roar.” (Annie Murphy Paul - New York Times Book Review)
“Testosterone Rex is that rare combination of revelatory science, trenchant analysis, and understated humor that makes it not only a pleasure to read but an invaluable resource. The next time someone solemnly explains to me why evolution has caused men to be competitive and women not, women to prefer childrearing and men to race cars and run corporations, men to be promiscuous and women coy, I plan to whip out my well-marked copy of T. Rex and cite the science that says they’re wrong.” (Sharon Begley, author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain)
“Fascinating [and] bold. . . . Fine has written a book that’s not only well-researched and convincing but also . . . delightfully humorous.” (Barbara J. King - NPR)
“Full of witty gems you’ll want to underline and read aloud, Testosterone Rex gleefully debunks myths about the nature of masculinity and femininity. Without denying science or ignoring evolution, Cordelia Fine shows how biology, far from limiting our possibilities, extends them.” (Marlene Zuk, author of Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live)
“In this witty corrective, psychologist Cordelia Fine examines the fraying “biological big picture” of sexual selection, and corrals findings in evolutionary science, neuroscience and endocrinology to add nuance to it.” (Barbara Kiser - Nature, “Best Science Picks”)
“Exciting, eloquent, and effective. Deftly weaving together research from anthropology, biology, neuroscience, and psychology, Fine shows exactly why and how the myth of testosterone and maleness plays out and why it is false. This book is not politically correct; it is good science.” (Agust�n Fuentes, professor of anthropology, University of Notre Dame)
“The expression ‘essential reading for everyone’ is usually untrue as well as a clich�, but if there were a book deserving of that description this might just be it.” (Antonia Macaro - Financial Times)
“Goodbye beliefs in sex differences disguised as evolutionary facts. Welcome the dragon slayer: Cordelia Fine wittily but meticulously lays bare the irrational arguments that we use to justify gender politics.” (Uta Frith, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development, University College, London)
“In addition to being hopeful, Fine is also angry. We should all be angry. Testosterone Rex is a debunking rumble that ought to inspire a roar.” (The Guardian)
“There aren’t many psychologists out there writing books that make me laugh out loud and want to stay up late reading, but Cordelia Fine does the trick. With Testosterone Rex, Fine brings her signature irreverence and meticulous research to such old chestnuts as the obvious evolutionary benefits of promiscuity for males, women’s natural risk aversion (note: childbirth is about twenty times more likely to be fatal than is skydiving), and of course the idea that testosterone caused the Great Crash of 2008. Read this book because it’s fun, but also because it’s a great antidote to lazy thinking and entrenched sexism.” (Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, author of Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Difference)
“[Fine] convincingly and entertainingly demonstrates that, despite stereotypes, such characteristics as risk-taking, competitiveness and nurturing are not “essential” to one sex over the other and cannot be blamed for the lack of equality between males and females in contemporary society.” (Clara Moskowitz - Scientific American)
“Cordelia Fine’s Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society does the public service of deconstructing the biological and societal tenets on which the continued inequality of the sexes is largely founded. . . . Using humor and her uniquely accessible academic writing style, . . . [Fine disrupts] what we think we know about gender difference.” (Katie Klabusich - Rewire)
“A fascinating, greatly contemplative discussion of sex and gender and the embedded societal expectations of both.” (Kirkus Reviews)
About the Author
Cordelia Fine, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne, is author of the much-acclaimed Delusions of Gender and A Mind of Its Own.
Most helpful customer reviews
35 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent review by Gregory Cochran
By homeowner
Excellent review by Gregory Cochran:
I’ve just finished Testosterone Rex, by Cordelia Fine. In this book, she argues against the existence of innate psychological differences between the sexes. She does not want her readers to believe that men and women have different natures – apparently because such differences, or belief in their existence, would prevent social equality of the sexes. Personally, I think the more important question is whether it’s true. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Rather than talk much about differences between the sexes, which would do her case no good at all, she talks about testosterone’s role in creating such differences. Testosterone is a strawman theory, here. Sex differences might be caused, in part or in whole, by biological factors other than testosterone: would disproving an incorrect testosterone-based theory make the differences go away? On the other hand, it might confuse people enough to reduce or eliminate belief in such differences. People are fairly easy to confuse.
Sex differences can be pretty big. Men are about 8% taller, but they have 90% greater upper body strength (about three standard deviations) and 65% greater lower body strength. They run faster, jump higher. Teenage boys routinely beat professional female athletes, as when the Newcastle Jets U-15 team recently defeated Australia’s national women’s soccer team 7-0.
There are psychological differences as well. Boys prefer rough-and-tumble play, girls prefer ‘intimate theatrical play’. Boys and girls have different toy preferences: boys like trucks, while girls prefer dolls. Interestingly, we see similar sex differences in play in other young primates, such as vervet and rhesus monkeys. Young chimpettes are known to carry a stick around, sticks that seem to be stand-ins for future babies – like dolls. Since other primates that are not exposed to anything resembling human socialization [they can’t talk] show similar play preference patterns, socialization is unlikely to be the driver of those patterns in humans, no matter how much Fine would like that to be the case.
Girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia are exposed to high levels of androgens before birth: their play styles are more like those of boys, and they (like boys) are better at spatial rotation tests than other girls. Fine suggests that CAH girls are socialized differently [due to their medical condition] , and that this may account for their boy-like play preferences. The female offspring of rhesus monkeys treated with testosterone during pregnancy also show male-shifted play preferences, such as tough-and-tumble play. Similar effects are seen in rats. Socialization is powerful !
Men are far more violent than women, far more likely to commit murder [and suicide], in every society. Obviously, if we see it everywhere and everywhen, the cause must be … climate change.!
Men take more risks, especially after puberty. Fine attempts to talk this away, as she often does. Her argumentative approach sometimes has a certain mad charm, as when she mentions her baby son rolling across the room to a power drill, juggling knives, and trying to plunge a running hair dryer into the cake mix. I guess that no truly educated person could believe in anything so obvious, so… She also steps up to ” No true Scotsman “. She defines what must be the only correct definition of a risk-prone personality – someone that tends to embrace every possible risk – and if those correlations aren’t perfect, how could there be such a thing as a risk-prone person? She reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld, trying to define away the insurgency in Iraq by explaining that real guerrillas must have a unified doctrine and central command, which would have been a surprise to the raggedy-assed Spaniards fighting Napoleon, the men that gave us the word.
But crypts don’t lie. Teenage boys are twice as likely to die in accidents: you don’t see girls climbing down into the bear pit on a dare. To be fair, you don’t see boys do it twice. Young men are more likely to get killed making nitrogen tri-iodide, climbing Half Dome, or stealing copper from power lines. They can do it in a car, they can do it in a bar.
Almost all men are sexually interested in women, and the overwhelming majority of women are sexually attracted to men. I’ve heard that there are parallels in the animal kingdom. When you think about it, it makes a twisted kind of sense. Isn’t that a psychological difference?
Moderate differences in the average value of a trait can drive big differences out in the tails of the distribution. Men are only four or five inches taller than women, but all the tallest human beings are male. Men have a moderate edge in spatiovisual processing, but are overwhelming dominant – 100-1 – in the uppermost reaches of mathematics and science. Not just due to visuospatial differences, but that’s part of it. This also shows up in pool, which is not very dependent upon strength, but where the top men are much better players than the top women. Men’s advantage in spatiovisual skills likely plays a part in this. Jeanette Lee, when she was the top women player, said that there were ‘dozens of male players who could wax me.’ And, probably, even more that would have liked to.
Sexual differences are driven by selection favoring changes in one sex that lead to increased reproduction. This must explain men’s strength advantage, a product of competition with other males. Selection is the ultimate cause of psychological differences between the sexes, as well.
Generally, sexual selection is strongest in the sex with the greater reproductive variance. Usually, that means males – some have many offspring while others have few or none. Female reproduction varies less. Fine discusses a series of experiments by Angus Bateman [published in 1948] that led to claims of higher reproductive variance in male fruit flies. There were problems in those experiments – mistakes, technical problems and limitations. Some of the mutations used to trace paternal identity interfered with fitness and thus buggered the statistics. We wouldn’t have to use such a sloppy procedure today, but hey, it was 1948 – they didn’t even have the human chromosome count right. Yet similar studies have been done more recently on many other species – without those problems – and Bateman’s principle, that females are the limiting factor of parental investment, is generally true. Male reproductive variance is generally higher. So how does criticism of errors in a pioneering study refute a now-proven idea? That would be like claiming that Otto Lilienthal’s glider crash, where he died saying “sacrifices must be paid for” [which makes no sense at all] proves that Man will never fly. Fine’s fruit fly chapter is completely pointless. This lawyerly rhetorical technique, criticizing an early experiment in order to snipe at a well-established contemporary theory, was also used by S.J. Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, when he argued that Samuel Morton had skewed his measurements of skulls to fit his preconceptions. Which was untrue – but it wouldn’t have mattered a rat’s ass if Morton had screwed up, because the art has advanced very far since Morton’s time. Today we use MRI and CAT scanners to image skulls to millimetric precision.
Fine takes a stab at showing that there’s isn’t much point [in terms of extra evolutionary fitness] in men getting extra mates. She comes up with an unphysical and absurd example – mentioning how unlikely it would be for 100 one-night stands to generate an extra 100 babies. That’s totally irrelevant: all it shows is that she’s innumerate. Here’s the practical example: suppose some dude has a wife and a girlfriend next door. Suppose he has intercourse 50 times with each of them over a year – both are probably going to have a kid, while with just the wife , he would have had one. 2 > 1. Am I getting too abstract here? By the way, if sexual selection doesn’t really happen, what could explain men’s huge strength advantage? Eating Wheaties?
Fine seems to think that only producing a horde of extra kids could have any evolutionary significance – but she is wrong. One more kid is a big deal, fitness-wise. On average, over most of the human past, people only managed to raise two children to adulthood. In real life there are always other factors to consider, of course. Does he have enough resources to feed one more child? Is his girlfriend married, and will her husband be duped into raising someone else’s kid? Or will her husband get wise and clobber our protagonist?
Fine is inspired here by some work by Dorothy Einon, who attempted to show that a famous case, where Sultan Moulay Ismail (“the Bloodthirsty”) is said to have fathered 888 children, couldn’t possibly have happened. Einon was wrong: careful simulations show that it was possible, although Ismail did show real dedication. Fine manages to misunderstand Einon’s mistakes.
If you make a math model whose results that completely contradict common knowledge – if it predicts that the Saudi royal family does not exist, or that Miles Park Romney didn’t father 30 children – you would be well advised to recheck it. Just sayin’.
Fine goes on to criticize the ‘man-the-promiscuous-horny-hunter/woman-the-choosy-chaste-gatherer. It can’t be the case that men want sex more than women – why, if that were true, prostitution would exist. Ba-dum-bump. Among foragers, are men really the hunters, almost always? Of course they are: men have much greater upper body strength. Spears and arrows don’t launch themselves.
it is possible to argue against a too-simple version of that narrative. For example, in populations of European descent – the ones we’ve looked at – the rate of false paternity is low, around 1-2%, and has been for centuries. It is not the case that many women have children by alphas and trick betas into paying the bills.
Another approach would be looking at brains, trying to identify sex differences (or the lack of them) in brain structure. If men’s and women’s brains were indistinguishable, surely men and women be couldn’t be psychologically different. But that notion is a bit treacherous, since it assumes that we can detect all functionally relevant differences in the brain. We can’t – certainly not in living subjects, but not even in studies after death. How do you detect memories? Can we see the differences in the brains of border collies that make them want to herd sheep? Not yet. Fine discusses some work by Daphna Joel, a behavioral neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University. Joel thinks that there really aren’t differences between male and female brains. Oddly enough, other people, like Larry Cahill, can reliably identify a brain’s sex: no single currently measured feature is definitive (other than presence of a Y-chromosome) , but statistical approaches exist that can make that distinction almost perfectly. Women’s brains are smaller (even after adjusting for body weight), connectivity patterns are different, white/grey matter percentages differ, gene expression patterns in the brain are different, etc., etc. Daphna Joel is a bad source: she sees what she wants to see, and disregards the rest. Psychology seems to have a bad case of that, which is why we’re hearing about the “replication crisis”. Michael Inzslicht, a dealer in stereotype threat and ego depletion [and unicorns] , said ” As I said, I’m in a dark place. I feel like the ground is moving from underneath me and I no longer know what is real and what is not.”
The incidence of mental illness is not the same in the two sexes: dyslexia and autism are much more common in males, depression more common in females. Sex differences in brain structure ( could be differences in gross anatomy or down at the molecular level) must be responsible for these differences in disease incidence.
In talking about the effects of testosterone, Fine mention a kind of cichlid fish where dominance influences gonadal events – causation ( in part) goes from behavior to hormones, instead of hormones to behavior. Interesting. But is there evidence of a similar pattern in humans? No. Are humans so evolutionarily close to fish – in particular, cichlid fish – that any pattern we see in cichlids is an immediate heads-up, something that might be happening in humans? Christ no. Then what’s the God-damn point? If we’re talking logic and inference, there is none: Fine seems to think that random unconnected facts are just fine for confusing her audience, and of course she’s right about that. Or, more charitably and probably more accurately, they’re good at confusing her. Makes me miss ye olde-fashioned steel-making, pistol-packing, Cheka-loving Commies: one of them could write an entire book explaining how humans are really vernalized naked mole rats while still sounding intelligent.
If, in this book, Fine had at some point conducted a sharp analysis and found the hidden causal pattern in a web of data, or had a sound mathematical model that answered the key question, or even casually tossed off a few accurate thoughts about the central limit theorem or Simpson’s paradox, I’d have to think that she was a bad person – dishonest. I see no sign of that.
At the end of her book, Fine says that we’re all for sex equality. I can think of at least a billion exceptions to that statement – but let me say this: I’m for what works. Listening to Cordelia Fine is not going to make things work better.
0 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Four Stars
By Jack Doe
Great, well researched pop science but in a conversational style.
1 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Required reading for every citizen of the 21st century
By Amazon Customer
Fine writes in a way that brilliantly organizes and explains an issue of extreme complexity and even greater importance. She argues in a way that even the most adamant sexist can't help but agree with. Combine the two and the result is a book that is both delightful to read and monumentally impactful for the future of human society. For your sake and my own, please read it.
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