Reply #19: No necessarily disagreeing with you on culture

[Alcibiades]

It's obviously important. I just know that my work situation is similar to that of many women with small children who stay at home with small children, and so I'm a bit of a natural experiment: I work as a homemaker at least 14 hours a day, and have not had any decrease in libido from before, other than what I might assume would be a normal part of aging, going from having sex five times a week when I was in my early twenties, to three times a week nowadays, which is pretty much how my wife and I like it (thankfully, we're on the same page on that one, though I do take care to remember that she's a crockpot and I'm a microwave).

I apologize if you found my post to be thoughtless with regard to the changes in society, and thoughtless in that regard--rest assured, I have given thought to these, it's just that I was reporting personal experience, and so culture was held relatively constant, having already been defined by my early socialization. I was raised by a feminist mom, so I didn't get much in the way of exhortation to embrace traditional masculinity.

Of course I know that individuals can vary, that it's not all down to hormones--I have a boy and a girl, and girls are supposed to develop early, and I've done the same things with both of them. Nonetheless, my boy is extraordinarily precocious, hitting all his developmental milestones very, very early, whereas my girl is right on schedule, though I have no doubt that she's a very bright child who is just not as freakishly early in her development as the boy is--she's like me in that respect, because I didn't really speak until I was three. You can do the same things as parents, but people still turn out different, with an individualitiy that defies statistics.

As for testosterone, I stand by what I said: it is a powerful, powerful chemical, one that men are under the influence of from the time we hit puberty. I think that the women who can understand this best transgendered people who have transitioned from female to male using, in part, testosterone.

http://www.ftmtransition.com/transition/testosterone/tphotoshead.html

As striking as the outward changes are, many men who used to be women also report that the most profound changes occur on the inside, in things like emotions, cognition and, yes, sex. I don't think that reporting that sex hormones can influence sex drive makes me guilty of "ignoring" anything, or simple reductionism.

I am, BTW, conducting my own experiments in gender conditioning, with mixed results. Of course, our whole household defied traditional gender roles. My little girl loves to play with her older brother's train set, and my little boy will happily play kitchen with any group of girls who are so inclined. But I still cannot get him to play with dolls and, even though we have no toy guns in the house, he will avidly engage in mock warfare with little boys who want to do that sort of thing on the playground. My little girl has taken an interest in dressing and undressing herself, something I still cannot get the boy to do on his own. I know my sample size is small, but I have come to the conclusion that gender roles are neither wholly cultural nor biological, but have a complexity that cannot be reduced to either.