‘That Time’ for Women Is When Science Pins a New Fetish on Hormones

For 8 billion years or so, philosophers have been trying to show that women are victims of their raging hormones. Women, it was said, were irrational and moody for the week before menstruation, crazed and restless for the week of menstruation, and exhausted and morose for the week after menstruation. The only thing thought to be worse for women than menstruation was not menstruating; as soon as the irrational menstruating woman reached menopause, she became an irrational menopausal woman.

Now the latest incarnation of this idea is upon us, with front-page headlines coast-to-coast (in the Los Angeles Times: “Studies Tie Sex Hormones to Women’s Levels of Skills”; in the New York Times: “Female Sex Hormone Is Tied to Ability to Perform Tasks”). The skills in the studies involved tongue-twisters and “precise hand movements.” These abilities, of course, matter a great deal in real life, because women need to be able to say “Gerald, gather the ghastly greasy grossly glutinous garbage” five times in a row quickly, and because men need an excuse to justify their not doing the dishes or dicing the celery.

I never understood why women’s alleged verbal ability never suited them to be diplomats and auctioneers, or why their manual dexterity shouldn’t have suited them at neurosurgery. Hormones are sneaky things; for some reason, they suit people for just what society wants them to do.

Why was this front-page news? The post-election news slump is one reason. Another is that virtually any brain/biology/genetics/hormones research makes news these days. People are hungry for hard-science explanations of behavior; psychology is so, well, murky and vague. A third reason is that, after 8 billion years, people are still trying to find a biological basis for the psychological differences between men and women. When someone gets results, that’s news.

To put the latest news in perspective, I’d like to offer some headlines and science findings that are unlikely ever to make the front page:

“Male Sex Hormone Tied to Violence and Promiscuity”-- The one sex hormone that is reliably and unequivocally related to anybody’s behavior is testosterone, the “male” sex hormone, which is linked to aggressiveness and the sex drive. It doesn’t, of course, cause violence and promiscuity, any more than “female” hormones cause expertise in celery-dicing. (Both sexes have “male” and “female” hormones, but in different proportion.) Until this latest study of tongue-twisters and hand movements, the “female” hormones estrogen and progesterone have never been related to any behavioral changes at all in women. Women, of course, have known this for centuries, as they managed to go about their work, running businesses and families, while menstruating, premenstruating and nonmenstruating.

“Former Sex Differences in Verbal Ability Have Disappeared”-- One of the very things that hormones are supposed to account for is virtually gone: women’s supposed superiority at verbal ability and men’s at math. Janet Hyde, of the University of Wisconsin, put 165 verbal-ability studies together in a giant statistical hopper and found no average differences of any significance. Alan Feingold, of Yale, recently reviewed more than three decades of scores on aptitude tests and the SATs. By 1980 boys had completely caught up with girls on verbal ability and had halved the differences in “clerical abilities” (thanks, no doubt, to computers). Girls had caught up in verbal reasoning, abstract reasoning and numerical ability, and had halved the difference in mechanical reasoning and spatial relations. Have all our hormones changed?

“Studies Find Men Have ‘Menstrual Mood Swings,’ Too”-- Here’s news that will never make The Times. Men’s moods and physical symptoms (e.g. crabbiness, the blues, headaches, insomnia) vary over a monthly span just as much as women’s moods and symptoms do, but men don’t have a menstrual cycle to blame it on. If you ask men and women to fill out a daily “symptom checklist” for a month, you won’t find any differences. If you call the checklist a “Menstrual Distress Questionnaire,” men’s headaches magically disappear.

“Behavior Affects Biology”-- The news generally trumpets some version of “Biology Affects Behavior,” but the body and its environment are a two-way street. Hormones affect sexual drive, but sexual activity affects hormones. An active brain seeks a stimulating environment, but living in a stimulating environment literally changes and enriches the brain. Efforts to reduce our personalities, disorders and abilities to genes, hormones and brain structure thereby tell only half the story--and miss half the miracle of how human biology works.

I think, therefore, that there are two questions to be asked of this latest media blitz on the female hormone research: Is the study a good one; and so what? I don’t know how good the study is; it was reported at a convention, not in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and media hoopla is not the way to verify a study’s worthiness. But even if the study turns out to be brilliantly designed and to have gotten the results it claims, one must keep its findings in perspective.

In this case, the larger perspective is that hundreds and hundreds of studies have failed to link female hormones to women’s (or men’s) ability to work, play, think, cook, organize, pass exams or do anything else that matters. So we might ask: Why do we have hundreds and hundreds of studies of women’s hormones, and only a handful on men’s? Then we might recall the consequences that have always followed when society began emphasizing women’s “nature” and their biological limitations. You know what comes next: a glorification of women’s reproductive abilities and a denigration of their mental ones. I’m sure this is just an irrational worry; I must be premenstrual.