Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior [Hardcover]

James McBride Dabbs (Author), Mary Godwin Dabbs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 25, 2000

Since the early 1970s, when studies of testosterone first gained wide public attention, this principal male sex hormone has taken the rap for a range of characteristics or behaviors, including low intelligence, rape and "road rage". The truth is both remarkably more complex and more interesting scientifically.

From prehistory to the present, testosterone has played a significant role in the development of human society as well as in romantic, marital and parental relationships. It affects women as well as men in such areas as language ability, cognition, and spatial orientation.

Interweaving intimate case histories with first hand scientific research, Heroes, Rogues and Lovers engagingly explains the animal within us all, revealing testosterone's function in human evolution and its role in surprising links between animal and human behaviors.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

To understand how life works, you must understand testosterone. This male hormone--which is present in both men and women--determines who leads society and how it is led; the professions we choose, and in some cases, how well we do in them; and in some cases how long we live--after all, the high-testosterone guy tends to be a risk-taker.

Author James Dabbs, a social psychologist, has been studying testosterone for decades at Georgia State University, and many of the studies coming out of his lab have made headlines. To pick just one of dozens of examples, he and his colleagues found that high-testosterone soldiers were more likely to get in trouble with the law, use drugs and alcohol, and have 10 or more sex partners in a year. The more testosterone one has, the more wild oats one feels compelled to sow.

Of course, testosterone isn't a static thing; it rises with feelings of victory and accomplishment and crashes with feelings of defeat. Dabbs takes us through the world of testosterone--from the basic chemistry to how it affects love, work, and society--and makes it literate, erudite, and outrageously entertaining. Snippets of Shakespeare are used to make a point alongside stories of high-testosterone female prisoners. Men will find Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers a glorious explanation of their hormonal core, while women can use it to understand the men in their lives, and even themselves--after all, testosterone increases libido in geese as well as ganders. --Lou Schuler

From Publishers Weekly

In the past three months, testosterone has become a hot topic on TV magazine and talk shows, online and even in the New York Times Magazine. Dabbs, a former researcher of social psychology at Georgia State University, "move[s] between science and anecdote, example and principle, theory and fact" to explain everything you wanted to know about testosterone but were afraid to ask. Unfortunately, much of what he serves up as science yields many claims that are scientifically unsupportable. Dabbs has drawn many of his conclusions from testosterone studies he and his students conducted that generally did not follow strict scientific testing procedures, on populations including "college students, prison inmates, trial lawyers, athletes... [and] construction workers." Unfortunately, this leads to such hilariously generalized statements as "high-testosterone men, on average, are leaner, balder, more confident... and likely to favor tattoos and gold jewelry." Or, "high-testosterone men are more likely than low-testosterone men to have blue-collar jobs." Explaining that high-testosterone people have "limited verbal ability," Dabbs cites the sports metaphors that former President Bush used in his speeches as showing "an instinct for the simple logic of testosterone." He also claims that women and men with high testosterone "have characteristics in common with James Bond, Night Man, Buffy the Vampire Slayer [and] Indiana Jones"Ahardly a scientific statement. Aside from these fanciful extrapolations from his research, Dabbs does not address critiques of traditional scientific inquiry as articulated by scientific gender specialists such as Anne Fausto-Sterling or Donna Haraway. Although written in an entertaining style, the book ultimately tells us more about the cultural myths surrounding testosterone than about the hormone itself. (Sept.) COMPLICATED WOMEN: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood Mick LaSalle. St. Martin's, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 0-312-25207-2 ~ Movie quiz: who said, "I'm in an orgy, wallowing. And I love it!" Madonna? Demi Moore? Koo Stark? No, it was Norma Shearer in 1931's Strangers May Kiss. In this breezily written, engaging look at the position of women in pre-Code Hollywood pictures, LaSalle uncovers a host of actors (some, like Ann Dvorak and Glenda Farrell, now almost forgotten) and films that broke social barriers with their frank portrayals of female sexual desire and freedom. Contradicting prevailing film theory that claims the 1940s as the golden age of women in film, LaSalle boldly posits that the best women's movies were made before 1934, when the studios were forced to follow the notorious Production Code. According to the author, pre-Code Hollywood films reveled in nonjudgmental, often quite serious, portraits of women characters exercising enormous sexual, personal and social freedomsAfrom sex outside marriage to having their own careers. "The Production Code," LaSalle notes, "ensured a miserable fate... for any woman who stepped out of line." Drawing upon movies, reviews, social trends such as rising female college admissions and even the writings of feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, he makes a solid case that the freedom women gained in the 1920s changed America, and that this change was reflected, and reinforced, in films. Along the way, LaSalle offers a variety of revealing insightsAsuch as his observations on the anti-Semitism of Roman Catholic clergy in their war against HollywoodAas he entertainingly traces the careers and early work of such major stars as Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford and the once-famous Ruth Chatterton. Photos not see by PW. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies (July 25, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071357394
• ISBN-13: 978-0071357395
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,702,594 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Readable report on the latest research, September 20, 2001

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (Hardcover)

Males commit violent acts at a rate much greater than women. The vast majority of people in prison are males. One of the reasons is they have more testosterone pumping through their veins than women. Testosterone makes people take chances. It makes them more interested in sex and more aggressive. It makes them into "heroes, rogues and lovers," to quote the title of this interesting book. Testosterone tends to affect low socioeconomic status males more than high status males, and the effects of testosterone can be mitigated by learning. Women also produce testosterone, but at lower levels than men; however, what they do produce affects them more. Women are attracted to high testosterone males, but do not necessarily marry them. Women select males and thereby create the males that exist. We inherit our testosterone levels, and testosterone comes before rambunctiousness, not the other way around. (This last from pages 87-88.)

These are some of the facts gleaned from the research of Professor Dabbs, who is the head of the Social/Cognitive Psychology Program at Georgia State University. This book is a report on that research presented with examples, allusions and references to literature and the popular culture, leading to an easy read. Dabbs, along with his collaborator, his wife, Mary, "a former publicist with several feminist organizations," allows us to see the world through testosterone-shaded glasses, but without prejudice. Their report is balanced and fair. They give us the downside of testosterone and the upside, as implied in their title. The fact that theirs is the first popular full-length book (that I know of) devoted exclusively to the phenomenon of testosterone is the result of fairly recent technology that allows the measurement of testosterone levels from saliva samples. Previously, blood had to be used. Since most people are more willing to spit than to allow blood to be taken from their bodies, this technique opened up new possibilities for research, and Dabbs, who apparently has a fair amount of testosterone still pumping through his veins, got there first.

There are charts and graphs showing testosterone levels by occupation. Construction workers, actors, football players, con men (!), blue collar workers, etc., predicably are high in testosterone while clerical workers and clerics, counselors and farmers, etc., are low. Lawyers tend to be high, with trial lawyers and especially flamboyant defense lawyers the highest, with research lawyers the lowest. Relatively high testosterone levels correlate with masculine traits such as muscle strength, spatial ability, narrow-focused thinking, combativeness, while lower levels correlate with feminine traits such as sociability, more generalized thinking, verbal ability, cooperation, etc. Men tend to leap to action, while women tend to think about it first. Higher testosterone does not correlate with high economic status since our society rewards thoughtfulness, patience, and cooperation as well as hard work and being assertive. High testosterone males die younger but have more sex. This too is a predicable finding since it is a type of evolutionary strategy. Testosterone, in fact, might be seen as the chemical form of aggressiveness. Aggressiveness is getting there first with the most. It's a kind of strategy that often works. But there are problems as well as rewards in aggressiveness. First, it's costly; you use more energy. Second, you're not as sure in your actions so you make more mistakes, which is dangerous Third, you incite aggressiveness on the part of others, and that too can be dangerous. Fourth, sometimes getting there first may lead to no advantage. Finally, you can be only so aggressive. Aggressiveness leads to an "arms war." If aggressiveness is rewarded--and it is in a passive world--then everybody tends to become more aggressive until nobody has an advantage; in fact the passive now have the advantage because they live longer, etc., leading to the selection of more passive creatures, creating an environment effectively exploited by the more aggressive, leading to...the arms race cycle.

Some interesting quotes from the text:

"Wife abuse" tends to increase "in the Washington, D.C., area after the Redskins win their football games." (p. 92)

"To some men, a good relationship allows them to strut while their wives admire them." (p. 111)

"...[W]omen know in their secret hearts that men who won't kill for them are useless." (p. 61. Dabbs is paraphrasing from Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Crossing.)

"...[C]avewomen had to have resources and protection for their young, and so in courtship and mating, they favored dominant and powerful suitors...<Cavewoman> values persist today...Money is associated with power...women want men with <good financial prospects>." (p. 113)

"Senator William Proxmire once denounced two of my colleagues for looking at love scientifically, saying that love was a mystery, not a science, and he wanted it to stay that way. My colleagues agreed that love was a mystery, but they thought the senator should welcome all the help he could get in solving the mystery, given his own problems with divorce." (p. 96)

"Sociobiologists like E. O. Wilson believe that understanding the relationship between our animal qualities and our behavior frees us to improve our behavior, similar to the way that understanding the relationship between tubercule bacilli and disease freed us to find effective treatment for tuberculosis." (p. 210)

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars science by anecdote, January 27, 2002

By 

John (Frankfurt, Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (Hardcover)

An interesting topic but the book is ultimately very disappointing. There are far too many anecdotes and not enough hard science -- in particular the interaction of testosterone with other factors such as intelligence or the levels of other hormones is only touched on. The description of the ancestral environment and the role of testosterone in human evolution is comic book at best. The book serves a useful purpose in surfacing the role of hormones in human behavior and demolishing the naive pc supposition that the only differences between men and women are due to education and culture; but leaves the reader wanting more. There is a much better book waiting to be written on this theme.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could have been much shorter, October 30, 2004

By 

Craig Scott (Cary, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (Hardcover)

The author strings together a well researched cache of interesting anecdotes which do a great job a grabbing your attention and illustrating the point. However, he never goes into any of the bio-chemistry of how it all works. So, I guess its more of a sociology oriented book. But it never realy goes anywhere.

Factoids like "men with high testoterone are more aggressive, and more likely to beat their wives etc. etc." didn't give me much to chew on. I did enjoy the statistic that shows that high level corporate types who have successfully clawed their way to the top are not necessarily high in testosterone, though they might think they are... (they actually "relationship" their way up -- which should be good news for women execs). I thought about the execs I know and laughed.

Ah well.