Manly Thor's Day Special

If the meek inherit the earth, who will drive the big trucks?
Repeat after me: sometimes men are right and women are wrong!

I use the plural here advisedly because I mean that sometimes men in general are more likely to be right than women in general are. Most men are better at navigating than most women are and no amount of cheap shots about men not asking for directions will change that. Most men are also better at managing their feelings than most women and no amount of complaining about how men don't like to talk about their feelings will ever change that.

(BTW: there is a powerful clue here about how human beings fail. If you quickly give in and ask for directions, you'll never figure out how to find your way around and if you always talk about your feelings, you'll never figure out how to control them.)

Anyway, another thing women tend to be wrong about is testosterone. It's become a favourite bête noir in a certain kind of lazy, post-feminist thinking. Latest case in point, Margaret Wente (who, I should acknowledge, is often worth reading on other subjects). Responding to ads about new testosterone drugs she writes:

I really hope men ignore those ads. Of course they won’t, because testosterone is the core of their identity. But society has too much of it. Less testosterone is good for family life and good for the entire world. Men with lower levels of testosterone are nicer, more social and less aggressive. They’re a lot less likely to go out, get drunk and wrap their car around a tree.

It's not that that isn't factually true.  The problem is that it is factually selective. Because men who have less testosterone are also less likely to do hard physical labour, less likely to train for and work in dangerous jobs such as firefighting, police, operating powerful machinery and the military, and they will be less likely to push the boundaries to create new products and services.

Rather simplistically, Wente also concludes that the recent financial crisis is a consequence of testosterone:

 On the dark side, testosterone is implicated in the world’s financial woes. Perhaps you’ve noticed that not a single woman was involved with the reckless speculation that led to the debacle of 2008, and to the European banking crisis of today.

Actually, women voted heavily in favour of candidates who  passed all sorts of laws that hamstrung the "evil, testosterone-driven bankers" who were turning mortgages down based on applicants' credit histories and that sort of "niceness" had as much to do with the financial crisis as testosterone-driven speculation did.

But, as long as we're at it, if you want to get upset about all the bad things you think testosterone-driven behaviour in the market did, you also have to give credit for all the good it has done. To paraphrase a line from Camille Paglia: Hey honey, you'd be living in a mud hut if it weren't for testosterone.

As long as I got my rant up here, a final shot on this gem of a paragraph:

New research has found that men’s testosterone levels plummet as soon as they become fathers. (Not all fathers welcome this news, as you can imagine.) This explains why even the wildest and most reckless guys are tamed by fatherhood. According to the research, men who are involved in child care have testosterone levels that are lower still. No one knows exactly why this happens, but it makes evolutionary sense. “The real take-home message is that male parental care is important,” Peter Ellison, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, told The New York Times. “It’s important enough that it’s actually shaped the physiology of men.”

This would be very touching if we didn't live in a society where the value of male parental care has been systematically demeaned  for decades now.  A society where the law says that a woman is the only one who gets to decide whether she is going to carry her child to term and yet , if she does so decide, gives the man no choice but to be financially responsible for that child and will throw him in jail if he fails. A society where two thirds of divorces are triggered by women and yet the child custody law is heavily rigged in women's favour.

Wente has, in fact, got the real point exactly backwards. Evolutionary biology has recognized the importance of fatherhood, women have not and need to be reminded.

(By the way, a note to any women who have a man in their life who regularly puts his more testosterone-driven interests on hold to make their relationship work. If you really appreciate this guy, you should regularly make time to put on your best clothes, flirt with the guy and then give him a really good ... ah ... time.)

And, as long as I'm on this subject, testosterone is really good for women too. You may want to try exercising more, especially resistance exercise such as weight-lifting (as opposed to wimpy, girlie stuff like Yoga). Those things will drive your testosterone level up and will make you more assertive and less likely to be exploited, it will give you more energy so you'll be in a better mood and you'll get  a long better with friends, family and colleages and finally, it will increase your sex drive thereby improving your relationship with the man in your life.

Testosterone, it makes you a happier and better person. "Nice", on the other hand,  is derived from a Latin word meaning ignorant. It first meant, a simple-minded or feeble person. That we now have a culture where women such as Margaret Wente think they prefer "nicer men" says much more, and nothing good, about modern women than it says about testosterone-driven men.