testosterone / women.

Andrew Sullivan has been and remains one of my favorites. 

His recently article is a must read. Not for the Mueller stuff... but for the sexual assault, misogyny, and testosterone stuff from the perspective of a gay man. 

Men have ten times as much testosterone as women, and testosterone is deeply connected with aggression, power, ambition, drive, pride, stubbornness, strength, and violence. In every species, testosterone makes one gender the more risk-taking, the more physically powerful, and the more assertive, and this includes the small number of species in which testosterone is predominant among females.

“All this the world well knows.” Except today’s debate about men and women seems to have missed it.

I’m not praising or lamenting this. I’m just recognizing it. It excuses nothing with respect to abuse, assault, harassment, and so on. There’s a bright line here and I see little moral difference between Spacey’s foulness and Weinstein’s. But testosterone helps explain why male power primarily gravitates toward sex, why sexual abuse occurs much more often among men, and why separating sex and power from male sexuality is to miss something important. It is always about both. If we are to have a conversation about men and women, work and play, power and love, then ignoring nature — pretending that this is all about social power dynamics or even hatred — is a very misleading thing.