3.5 stars
I like Cordelia Fine and her work. Part of that, I’m willing to admit, may be confirmation bias — she clearly identifies herself as a feminist and is very upfront that her work is reflective of that viewpoint. But I was also trained as a scientist, and from that perspective my position is that many of her critics and detractors (and I’ll note here that for brevity’s sake I’m not including in this category people who have fundamentally sexist views and who probably simply cannot be reached) have crucially misunderstood the overarching theme of Fine’s research.
Testosterone Rex is Fine’s investigation into the field of evolutionary biology, and how conclusions drawn from studies in the field have influenced sociological hypotheses about human behavior, particularly with regards to gender roles. The launching point for this inquiry is how as a culture, rather reflexively, we attribute any and all stereotypically male behavior to men’s higher relative levels of testosterone, making that androgen a rather convenient biological scapegoat for basically everything that seems to separate men and women in society. Everything, from sexual selection and the advantages of male promiscuity, to the preponderance of men in the highest leadership roles in our various industries and governments, can be one way or another explained by the influence of testosterone and the according biological disadvantage women have with our devastating lack of it.
Fine sets out to examine and dismantle this, using the classically methodical approach of reviewing first the foundational studies that are most commonly cited in support of these positions, and then addressing any flaws that may exist already in that research. From there, she likes to find other studies that either fail to support, or that outright contradict, the findings of the primary study or set of studies. This, in the minds of many, is where her books and conclusions become controversial, because for so many reasons that are outside of the scope of this review, biological research involving humans lacks certainty and reproducibility, and you can probably find a study making just about any claim based on any small, random observation of a test group of humans (or animals, for that matter.) Fine, therefore, is often accused of disregarding the scientific consensus (basically, what the majority of the best studies have found) and cherry-picking a handful of other renegade studies to support her point.
That is a valid argument, if 1) you believe that Fine’s position is literally the null hypothesis of all of these historical testosterone studies, which would essentially be: there are no biological differences between the sexes and testosterone has no influence on sex and gender; and/or 2) that a true “scientific consensus” exists, in the sense that the data is actually strong enough to definitively support the vast swath of essentialist hypotheses that arise from various interpretations of that data.
Fine is not setting out to prove anything so drastic as the first point, and while challenging the second is the trickier task, I believe she does successfully introduce enough doubt into the picture that, at the very least, one ought to come away from reading her books with the impression that the case is not closed on biological differences between the sexes, and that ongoing interdisciplinary research is imperative. She amply demonstrates the ways that, occasionally, science and research themselves may be biased, because the conclusions that human researchers draw are absolutely influenced by what we already believe (or want to). In the face of inconclusive results, researchers absolutely posit theories about what they believe may explain their observations, and in the discussion sections of papers, it is not uncommon to make these unsubstantiated claims with the implication that continued research is needed to verify those hypotheses. The problem is that oftentimes, those “educated guesses” become the main takeaways of the paper, when the actual results don’t necessarily support them. Provocative, confident results are, after all, more attractive to the layperson than measured, careful takes littered with caveats.
But according to Fine, the caveats are many. Much of evolutionary biology’s claims about the natural order of human sexual and gendered behavior stem from observations of other animal species doing the same, but these popular theories both conveniently ignore the myriad other species that contradict the “laws of nature,” and are, crucially, mostly only observational in nature (and limited in the scope of their observation.) And when you’re trying to tie behavior to anything physiological, it’s a crucial mistake to assume that what is observed at one timepoint holds true across all conditions. For example, Fine discusses certain species where the “alpha” males in a group are the most aggressive and, accordingly, have the highest testosterone levels of all of the males. It would be easy to assume that the high-T led to higher aggression, resulting in his dominant position in the group. But further intervention studies, documented by Fine, show that testosterone levels are not themselves fixed, and that they can be in fact influenced by the environment. Removing an alpha male from the group doesn’t leave a void of alpha-ness; other males will then look to step up, and as they do, their testosterone levels rise to the occasion. So while there is a correlation between high-T and aggression/dominance in these observed species, it’s not necessarily the cause. An environmental factor (an opening in the leadership position) must trigger the impulse to be dominant, and whether the increased aggression is then either the cause or the result of rising testosterone is not immediately obvious without more sensitive testing.
All of this goes to say that, by Fine’s reasoning, while it’s clear that testosterone does play at least some role in behavior dynamics, it’s not a fixed biological characteristic that determines inflexibly the role of the organism in the social hierarchy. Through discussion of other studies in humans, she supports this position, by demonstrating through research what is also obvious to anyone with common sense: not all men are like this, and not all women are like that. Plenty of men are good at things women are supposed to be good at, and the same in reverse. And these humans are not freaks of nature — in spite of any rigid cultural insistence on gender roles, there is a very, very large overlap in the bell curves of men and women’s aptitude at their respective stereotypical skillsets.
I made a similar comment in my review of Fine’s other book, Delusions of Gender, but if there is any weakness in these books, it’s only that, probably by necessity, they become repetitive. Fine really wants to drill her point home and have a lot of support for it. It’s effective, but it does sound the same after several chapters. I also personally responded to Delusions better, being overall less familiar with neurobiology than other specializations and therefore more fascinated by the study methods and techniques detailed there in attempting (and often failing) to understand and explain the brain. Both books are accessible to non-scientists, and Fine’s own voice and humor are engaging and wry. Obviously, feminists will respond well to her, but as with any well-reasoned feminist arguments, I hope she gets read more widely outside of that sphere, as well.