male (but not female) testosterone fluctuates in response to winning or losing dominance contests

Researchers at Duke University and the University of Michigan examined the testosterone levels of students around the time of the 2008 presidential election. Men who voted for John McCain exhibited significant decreases in testosterone upon learning that he lost, whereas the testosterone levels of men who supported Barack Obama were stable. This effect remained even after controlling for political values, intensity of support, alcohol consumption, and social environment. Meanwhile, despite having political feelings similar to men, women exhibited no significant difference in testosterone levels regardless of which candidate they supported. These findings are consistent with earlier research showing that male testosterone fluctuates in response to winning or losing dominance contests.

Stanton, S. et al., “Dominance, Politics, and Physiology: Voters’ Testosterone Changes on the Night of the 2008 United States Presidential Election,” PLoS ONE (October 2009).

summary from the Boston Globe, 15 November 2009.

Comment

This study leads me to think of several possibilities:

1. What is the emotional feedback for males that varying levels of testosterone produce? Do males seek dominance contests because of the testosterone effect? Has this been studied? Is there literature on this?

2. I'd like to see more of this sort of study around sports contests. In my self-observation about sports I have come to believe that I 'invest' myself emotionally in the contest. For instance, some years I choose to invest in one team or another in the World Series and other years I choose to "care less." When I do invest myself emotionally in a team I notice that I tend to either feel elated with a win or depressed by a loss. Sometimes I try to talk myself out of the feelings (especially the depressed ones associated to a loss) by telling myself that "it really makes not a wit of difference who wins this game", but my rational self only helps my mood so much. Again, do males tend to seek the dominance contest in the "big game" because we need the testosterone kick? Are we testosterone boost seekers?

3. Is this study a bit of evidence for the proposition that females might be more steady rational leaders around contested issues, such as affairs of state that have the potential for warfare? Are females less likely to enter into dominance contests for what they promise emotionally/chemically? I don't think we have enough evidence yet to confirm this hypothesis, but this study (and others?) are a start.

She’s just not that into it

by Kevin Lewis | October 4, 2009 | The Boston Globe

It goes without saying that men are aggressive. But that’s exactly the problem, according to psychologists. They asked men and women to imagine various conflict scenarios and found that men systematically overestimate the prevalence and social approval of aggression, even while having mixed feelings about it themselves. Moreover, men assumed that women viewed aggression as more attractive than women actually viewed it, and, indeed, the number of fights that men reported being in was correlated with how much they thought women approved aggression. In addition to increasing the risk of conflict, there was evidence that men’s misperceptions about aggression may take a psychological toll, in the form of lower self-esteem and alienation from peers.

Vandello, J. et al., “Men’s Misperceptions about the Acceptability and Attractiveness of Aggression,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (forthcoming).

She’s just not that into it - The Boston Globe

MAY I SUGGEST (lyrics)

Copyright © Susan Werner

May I suggest
May I suggest to you
May I suggest this is the best part of your life
May I suggest
This time is blessed for you
This time is blessed and shining almost blinding bright
Just turn your head
And you'll begin to see
The thousand reasons that were just beyond your sight
The reasons why
Why I suggest to you
Why I suggest this is the best part of your life

There is a world
That's been addressed to you
Addressed to you, intended only for your eyes
A secret world
Like a treasure chest to you
Of private scenes and brilliant dreams that mesmerise
A lover's trusting smile
A tiny baby's hands
The million stars that fill the turning sky at night
Oh I suggest
Oh I suggest to you
Oh I suggest this is the best part of your life

There is a hope
That's been expressed in you
The hope of seven generations, maybe more
And this is the faith
That they invest in you
It's that you'll do one better than was done before
Inside you know
Inside you understand
Inside you know what's yours to finally set right
And I suggest
And I suggest to you
And I suggest this is the best part of your life

This is a song
Comes from the west to you
Comes from the west, comes from the slowly setting sun
With a request
With a request of you
To see how very short the endless days will run
And when they're gone
And when the dark descends
Oh we'd give anything for one more hour of light

And I suggest this is the best part of your life

Life Lessons From a Dying Friend

8/31/09

Dear Friends:

As many of you know, back in September of 2003, I experienced a medically inexplicable "miracle" remission that lasted five years; a remission that enabled me to slow down and explore the Spiritual side of life. I trained and practiced Reiki healing, and strove, with mixed results, to become a less insufferably driven writer, teacher, partner and friend.

Writing? In time, I left writing behind. Just walked away. No regrets. Never again. Done. Politics? Too stressful. No mas. Done. I devoted more time to my first love, music, and spent as much time as possible in the wild.

So it went for five years. I re-entered the work force as an assistant trailer hitch installer for U-Haul. Up to my elbows in grease all day. Learning how to read blueprints, solve problems and to drill through metal under the patient tutelage of the lead, Grandma Butterfly. Her story was such that working with her was like working side-by-side with a living beat poem.

Butterfly earned the same minimum wage I did. And--so that U-Haul wouldn't have to give her benefits--was designated as a part-time employee even though she worked 60+ hours per week. In order to feed her financially struggling children and their children, Butterfly made weekly stops at a local food bank.

For my part, I found trailer hitch installation to be absorbing. However, the pay wasn't high enough to enable me to make a dent in my medical debt. In time, I returned to teaching, and augmented my income by counseling ex-convicts and establishing a Reiki practice.

Teaching, counseling, Reiki, music, wilderness. Couldn't ask for more. Setbacks? Yes. Some life-threatening, all annoying. And none worth going into. Better to focus on the good, and the good was very good. A good life. A sweet life. One I savored all the more because I'd come so close, on so many occasions, to losing it.

Then? In September of last year, the miracle remission came to an end. My decline was precipitous. And much to my consternation, even as I was forced, for reasons of health, to resign from three jobs I loved, the literary muse awoke.

I did my best to resist, but the poetic frenzy is the poetic frenzy. Moreover, since the locus of this untreatable hence fatal flare is my brain -- well, the secret to permitting the muse to take over is simple: bypass the intellect. Don't think. Hence, with an increasingly compromised intellect -- with windows of lucidity closing daily -- bypassing the intellect was a breeze.

Within a matter of weeks, and against my will, I had an outline for a book I never wanted to write. An outline, mind you. Just an outline. I had no obligation to sweat every word in an attempt to turn that outline into a living breathing entity, aka a story. No way was I about to embark on this project. No way no way no way. And I stuck to my guns. For a week.

Then in mid-February, I met up with Barry Lopez: friend, mentor, whose every word, written or spoken, is in service to the Sacred. Barry Lopez is the Thoreau of our times. A National Book Award winner, yes. But above all a decent and generous man. A light house to many, myself included, for when we met, 25 years ago, I was most certainly drowning. My old friend took one look at me and before I had a chance to break the news to him, he broke it to me: He said "Bobby, your time is short. Please write the book."

How could I say no to this great man, this friend of the land and all who love it and mourn its passing? How, above all, could I say no to a cherished friend? So. I stand at the edge of the River. I stand there and yearn to go Home. I yearn in the deepest way. I miss my dad. I miss Bobby Kennedy. I miss the Blessed Mother.

Sometimes, during windows of peace, during windows of lucidity, during times, in short, when I ought to be at the computer, I just lie on the couch, reach over for my 15-year-old bodhisattva dog, Three Bears, and pet her soft ears, her soft soul. And weep because the time is soon, and when it comes I'll go with joy. But even as Home floats towards me and I float towards Home, I tell them, "Not yet, not quite yet. I have a promise to keep."


Writing from the middle of the crossing, writing from a place of transcendent death makes for a quiet life. I walk Three Bears. I enter the wilderness of my soul by playing Leonard Cohen's repertoire. I spin a yarn, the final yarn. I spend time with the people I love.

Looking back on my life I suppose I feel like Lou Gehrig must've felt. Yes, I know it's corny. Yes, I know: writing is an assault on cliché. (Except when it isn't.) But I really am the luckiest man alive.

Except, that is, when I'm not. I'm not St. Francis, people. I don't praise suffering while in the midst of it. Indeed, while in the throes, I have been known to utter "not nice" words as my proper Bostonian Ma might put it. Many many not nice words.

Still, during periods of peace I know in my heart, in my blood, in my bones, how fortunate I am. And I know of my good fortune (albeit in the head if not the heart) when the already-swollen brain goes on an inflammation bender, and, by so doing, renders me unable to write, to do much else besides lie on the couch and remember.

I think of the wilderness, the wolves I heard while canoeing solo for nine days in North Central B.C. years ago. Dwarfed by the Cariboos-- an astonishingly epic spur of the Rockies. There is no valley up there. The vast glacial peaks simply crash into the pristine lakes and rivers. Moose and eagles, black bears and grizzlies. The howls of the wolf packs every night. So many stars it took me minutes, some nights, to pick out the Milky Way. To find the North Star. And paddle as my late father taught me to do: using the North Star to guide me. There's no sun at night, of course. Which means, if it's not stormy, there's no wind. No chop. Just still deep water.

The music was the silence, then the sound of my paddle or a distant waterfall. I'd never felt so alone and at the same time so protected. By the stars that danced and pulsed; that lit up the glacial peaks; that reminded me of how small and insignificant I was, but that I was, simultaneously, a part of something more vast than the human mind can begin to begin to comprehend.

I think of the ex-convicts I taught. Some, many, were too predatory and violent to be set free. More than a few of those men told me they were, in fact, glad they were locked up, unable to shatter any more lives.

But then? There were the angels. Some are my friends, my brothers. These are men who performed acts of moral courage; acts that would do Gandhi proud. Prouder, even, for they did so in obscurity. In the bowels of Walla Walla prison. Where no one but God bore witness.

Risking their lives to save a fresh fish from getting raped, a fresh fish they didn't know from Adam. Simply because it was the right thing to do. Walking away from a fight, knowing that their rep would be destroyed, that they'd be viewed as weak, as prey. But deciding nonetheless that violence was not the answer, even if the price was death.

It was not by design but necessity that I spent the years after college getting beyond and beneath the shelter of wealth and academia; living in the America that was invisible back when I attended Harvard; working blue collar jobs (as starving artists must) burnishing my soul-- beginning to, at any rate-- with calluses. Living small paycheck to small paycheck. This was during the early 1980's.

Politics? Foreign policy? Reagan's policy of torture in El Salvador, Guatemala and God knows where else? We trained the death squads, the Atlacatl Brigade, right here on U.S. soil. We threw nuns out of helicopters, tossed them into the sea. The Flying Nuns, as our Black Ops folks, the CIA's worst kept secret, used to joke. Which, for some reason, The Great Communicator neglected to mention.

Me? I was framing houses, installing mobile homes, laying sewer pipes, doing whatever it took to get by. And I experienced the decency of those "Reagan Republicans" that were scorned by some I knew back east. Not because my east coast friends are scornful by nature. They would not be my friends if they were. But children of privilege (of which I am one) do not, sometimes, appreciate what our education provides: the ability to extrapolate. To see how a policy affects those beyond our town, our state, our borders. And our concomitant responsibility to take action.

Now I was receiving a different sort of education: acquiring a visceral understanding of what it means to be poor, and discovering that the poor, the folks on the margins, watch out for one another (because no one else will) in a manner and to an extent that I hadn't experienced while growing up in a time and place where we viewed economic security as a birthright.

Then? I began to publish and became a prison teacher. The hardest (and therefore the best) twelve years before I took ill.

Life? This bittersweet life? I've experienced the extremes of beauty and suffering and who could ask for more? So. A quiet end. Music. Tale-telling. Friends and family. Infusions, hospitalizations, yes, of course, but peaceful nonetheless.

One not marred by the rough and tumble of the politics I grew up with. (Massachusetts in the 1960's? And you wonder why I have Bobby Kennedy as well as lupus on the brain?)
No more political writing. No more. If I knew anything, just one simple thing, I knew that. Which pretty much brings me to the present.

While surrendering to the gentle and poetic musical muse, the cacophonous political muse awoke. I resisted. For an hour. Less. And then surrendered to an utterly ridiculous exercise: the writing of a personal letter to the President of the United States. Knowing that my letter would never but never reach the Oval Office, I did the reasonable thing: with a timeline of weeks or months, I took three weeks off from the final tale to write a letter that would never reach the addressee.

Sent it to my wise friend Arnie Miller. Who said, "Bobby, your audience isn't Obama. This is a Public Letter." Public. Got it. The audience was not the President. The audience was the body politic. Of which I am a part.

But how to get it out there? Put it up on a major blog. Or two. Or three. Or four. Or six I was informed. (I meander. I write in spirals. The prerogative of those who've lost their minds.) I was saying: the blogs. As many of you know, I am a stubborn cuss when it comes to technology or doctors who misdiagnose me. I've made peace with my errant but truly compassionate physicians. When they tell me that my symptoms are imaginary, I only holler "Freud's hysterical women!" two to three times per minute. ( I've mellowed as you can see. )


Technology is a different matter. I was and remain a technological idiot. I will not budge. It will be a war until the bitter end. On this matter, there is no compromise. I fully intend to lose every battle. So there was no way that this public letter would go public, no way I would learn about blogging. Then? My friend, the astute and insightful writer, Paul Loeb, read my Public Letter to the President and offered his space on the Huffington Post, the Daily Kos, and several other major blogs so as to get the letter into the Public Domain. An uncommonly generous act. The letter was posted.

I woke up expecting another slow, gentle day of walking, music, writing, an intravenous infusion to keep me somewhat lucid and...

The letter had struck a nerve. The deluge commenced at six am. And as I was responding to the growing numbers of comments and emails, my technologically savvy assistant, Amy, reported that the letter was spreading to other posts, to blogs and websites that no one had sent it to, and the emails kept coming and... I never got to the music.

Confession. I've never before felt a moral imperative to get an essay, a novel, any piece of writing into the public domain. If people read my books, that was fine. If they didn't, well, as time went on, as my ambition diminished, I was happy enough to have been a solid triple A minor leaguer who once made it to the Show. For all of fifteen minutes. Which turned out to be fifteen minutes too long. Obscurity, I discovered, is a gentler place to live.

But this piece? This Public Letter? This piece felt different. I felt that moral imperative to put it out there. And thanks to my friends it happened.

The power of the Net is daunting, amazing, and more than a bit frightening. The Public Letter began to go national in a matter of hours. And the trend accelerated. Our new president may or may not have read it. But that is of no consequence. My friend Arnie is right. This letter was for the Public. A public that is ill-prepared for the adversity that lies ahead. (Except for the disenfranchised, the ones who became visible for two weeks in the aftermath of Katrina, and, just as swiftly, became invisible again. Not because they don't exist, but because we chose, as per usual, because it is easier, to avert our eyes. Our loss as well as theirs. For they are the ones who can teach hence prepare us. They are the ones who know what the rest of us are about to find out: that life isn't a Make-a-Wish Foundation. That life isn't, in fact, supposed to be easy.)

Illness and impending death has served two wonderful purposes. The first and by far the most important: an opportunity to re-connect with many I have missed.

The second, provided I die on schedule, a delicious opportunity to beat the banks. You see, given the size of my existing medical debt, a second miracle remission is simply out of the question. It would do more than amplify my existing and catastrophic medical debt: it would raise my debt at an exponential rate and the resulting stress would prove to be fatal, notwithstanding the fact that I'd already be dead.

True: that's a minor detail, or so the nice manager at the credit union told me. He said that dead or twice-dead, the credit union owed it to their healthy depositors to send me post-mortem bill after post-mortem bill until my debt is paid off. That they had a moral obligation to their healthy depositors to hound my gullible 78 year old mother -- to badger my old Ma aggressively -- even though she'd be in no way liable.

"I never thought about it that way," I told the nice banker.

"That's what all our dead clients say."

The first time I received Extreme Unction was in the fall of 1998. The second time I received Extreme Unction was in the fall of 1998. The third time I received Extreme Unction was in the fall of 1998. The fourth time was either in December of 1998 or January of 1999, I forget. What I do remember is this: when I hit number ten before the end of that year, I made a decision about those ten fingers of mine: I could either use them to count or play music.

Bobby

Robert Gordon is the author of When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man and The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison. He's written for Esquire, the Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, Ploughshares, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and taught writing in Washington State prisons, juvenile institutions and inner-city high schools. He wrote Funhouse Mirror while undergoing chemotherapy, collaborating with six of his incarcerated students to let their voices be heard. The book won the 2000 Washington State Book Award. As one critic wrote of Bobby Kennedy, "Gordon's vision is at once radical and healing. It teaches us a little about Heaven and a lot about Hell."

Published on the Internet by Paul Loeb.

Women at Risk

by Bob Herbert, New York Times, 08 August 2009.

"I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me," wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week’s shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women, wounded nine others and then killed himself.

We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.

Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.

I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.

According to police accounts, Sodini walked into a dance-aerobics class of about 30 women who were being led by a pregnant instructor. He turned out the lights and opened fire. The instructor was among the wounded.

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.

One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.

What was unusual about Sodini was how explicit he was in his blog about his personal shame and his hatred of women. “Why do this?” he asked. “To young girls? Just read below.” In his gruesome, monthslong rant, he managed to say, among other things: “It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason.”

I was reminded of the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in a rampage at the university in 2007. While Cho shot males as well as females, he was reported to have previously stalked female classmates and to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate photos of women. A former roommate said Cho once claimed to have seen “promiscuity” when he looked into the eyes of a woman on campus.

Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U. “What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.

A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.

There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.

We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

He won’t open up? There’s a reason

By Stephen Berman. Boston Globe, 3 August 2009.

A COUPLE sits on a beach on a brilliant July day. They’ve just had a picnic lunch, and are in that hazy sweet space of watching the waves and the gulls, the passing sailboat, or, far out, the tanker. They feel close.

The woman, wanting to feel even more close, asks: “What are you feeling, hon?’’

Startled, the man blinks, glances at her, and not knowing what to say, says nothing.

The woman asks, “Can you tell me?’’

The man, wanting to respond and trying to gather his thoughts and feelings to do so, still comes up blank. A sense of panic blossoms in his gut and rises to his chest, cold and damp as if clenching his heart. Trying to stay calm he says, “I don’t know.’’

“Sure you do. Can you tell me?’’

The cold rises into his brain, all ice. Through gritted teeth he says, “Don’t spoil it!’’

The woman, startled by his tone and the glazed look in his eyes, says, “I’m spoiling it?’’

Things go downhill. They wind up miles apart, staring at nothing.

What is going on? In our work leading gender dialogues between thousands of men and women, boys and girls, Dr. Janet Surrey and I have come to understand this as a “relational impasse’’ - the “dread/yearning impasse.’’ If the woman, yearning to feel closer, approaches, often the man starts to feel “male relational dread,’’ and retreats. In his head is a little voice: “Nothing good can come of my going into this, it’s just a matter of how bad it will be before it’s over. And it will never be over!’’

As one man put it: “I woke up this morning and she turned to me and I was in dreadlock!’’ The paralytic feeling of dread is familiar to many men. It contains a sense of failure, humiliation, shame, and paranoia. It is part of normal male development - and it is hell on relationships. Anything, even the cap let off a tube of toothpaste, can trigger it. Relational dread is a basic human experience, although the male and female versions may take different forms. This is the male version.

How does male dread develop? A patient’s story gave me a clue. When he was 6, he had been beaten up at school. He wasn’t hurt physically, but felt terrible. He walked home up the railroad tracks through the woods so no one would see him crying, and couldn’t wait to tell his mother. He went in through the back door into the kitchen, anxious to tell her. She was at the sink. She turned around, saw the tears, and with concern asked, “What’s wrong, dear?’’ Despite wanting to tell her, he said, “Nothing,’’ turned away and walked back out.

What had arisen was not just in him - after all, he walked into the kitchen intending to tell her. But when she moved toward him emotionally - in the interaction between them - he felt exposed, and dread suddenly arose and did its damage. It was a relational impasse.

Although we all - boys and girls - come into the world with a primary desire for connection, there is an early fork in the path. Many boys are pushed by the culture to disconnect from their relationship with mother in order to grow, and become less valued for their relationships and more valued for themselves; while many girls continue to grow in relationships, and are valued as the carriers of connection in the culture.

But scratch our surface and you find that we men desire connection every bit as much as women, and get sick and even do sick things - think of all the destruction wrought by male “loners’’ - if we don’t experience it. Given the chance, we’re just as good at it as women - witness the revolution in fathering in the past few generations, fathers as caregivers. Male relational dread may arise from time to time, but male relational love, living “in the we’’ with a partner or a child or a dog or a student or a shortstop-or-dancer-in-training, is right there in us, waiting to prevail. We men yearn more than anything to live not in the “I’’ or the “you,’’ but in the “we.’’

Stephen Bergman, MD, is a guest columnist. Under the pen name Samuel Shem, he is the author of “The House of God’’ and “The Spirit of the Place.’’