For a lot of my life I thought I was just broken, an imperfect being for whom the regular rules of being a guy just didn’t make sense. I tried hard to be the son my father wanted but I finally gave up on sports after I got hurt in football and somehow finished an entire baseball season with a zero batting average. I couldn’t catch or throw, no matter how many times I practiced there was no way to know where the ball would go after I released it. My teammates hated playing with me too, I can remember many times when they’d throw up their arms in disgust at my pathetic performance. I couldn’t have been worse at being a guy if I tried.
I was bullied mercilessly in grade-school but not nearly so much by the boys as the girls who treated me with aggressive contempt, hurling insults to my face whenever the teacher wasn’t paying attention. I never understood how they knew I was different so early but they did and they made sure I knew it too. And I did know it, but I didn’t really care. I was more interested in doing my own things, watching nature shows, drawing, seeing fantasy and sci-fi movies, reading. I would have been happy to have been left alone to be myself but that never happened. I remember once, just prior to a holiday chorus performance in sixth grade, I finally decided I’d had enough and punched one of my least favorite male tormentors directly in the cheek. He was fine. I broke my hand.
I can’t watch ASPCA commercials all the way through without tearing up. I am fantasy prone, love the arts (I draw and paint), and I’ve been known to sing even when other people can hear me. I’ve always preferred the company of women or children to men of my own age largely because I find the pissing contests men have where they constantly have to one up each others exploits to be incredibly tiresome. I’ve never been interested in other men not in the slightest but I’ve been accused of being gay many many times even by my own family.
I’ve always struggled with motivation, failing in virtually every possible area of my life for a long time before I’d finally had enough of being a wishy-washy wimp. I started taking martial arts and working out. I changed my diet and slowly things started to straighten out for me. It was at this point that I discovered the work of Professor Simon Baren-Cohen of Cambridge which changed everything.
The professor had been trying to find the cause of Autism by studying intrauterine development but instead he found out that not every child is exposed to the same levels of sex hormones in the womb, that there was a range of variation. Futher, he found that the children’s adherence to sex typical behavior could be predicted by their sex hormone levels in the womb. Little boys with high testosterone displayed typical male interests after birth but so did girls with high testosterone exposure. The reverse was also true, boys exposed to less testosterone in the womb were more likely to respond to faces quickly like girls and to develop language earlier and more fully also like girls.
Digit ratio which I’ve mentioned before on this blog is a relatively crude way measure these variations in sex hormones during development but since we can’t go back in time to get a sample of our own amniotic fluid, it’ll have to do. I have an even digit ratio, my index finger and my ring finger are almost exactly the same length on both of my hands and the life I’ve lived up to this point has most definitely been one one of ideas, words, and fantasy. I have never been, nor will I ever be a man of concrete action however I don’t believe that means I’m not a man. I’m just not a typical man.
However, just because I’m not like most guys, doesn’t mean I have to hate them. I’ve done that in the past for sure. I’ve envied their ability to get things done, their confidence, their interest in the mechanical and for a long time that envy manifested in hatred of all things male. But it’s funny how, once you realize who you are, once you embrace your talents and work to improve yourself as I have done, then you can develop your own confidence. I’ll never be a great shot or be able to hit anyone with a snowball at greater than arms length and my math skills are mediocre at best but that doesn’t mean manliness isn’t for me or men like me. We can develop ourselves, we can toughen up, we can get off the couch and put down the computer games and make something of ourselves just like any other guy can and we don’t need to belittle the whole concept of manliness to do it. Rather it’s been my experience that we should embrace it because we need it more than anyone.
i am interested to know your astrological profile (even if you are not interested in astrology). whats your date and time of birth ?
I don’t know the time, but I’ll find out for you. Leo.
i am not interested in your sun sign. I would like to see the whole natal chart. I am suspecting you have strong water influence to be that feminine in mind.at least you can give me your date of birth
Well it turns out there is no answer for you. In the interests of anonymity I’m not planning to give out my date of birth and, as I was born via Cesarean Section, there is no way to say what my natural birth time might have been. The procedure itself was performed in the early evening. Had I not been extracted surgically, it’s possible at least one of us would have died in the process, even both, I was in a really twisty situation.
The relationship between testosterone [yes, in-vitro too] and mathematical ability is not nearly so simple.
First, there is the problem of defining “mathematical ability”. For most people who are basically completely unaware of what real mathematics is, they think it’s [roughly] a proxy for numeracy. Of course, genuine mathematicians know how ludicrous this idea is, since the doing of mathematics is totally abstract, and involves making logical connections between mathematical objects that are well-defined. It’s much more like a detective scrapping together clues to crack a case. At least on the problem-solving end of mathematics, this is more what it is like.
Plenty of mathematicians themselves have been extremely poor at mental arithmetic & numeracy. You will often hear a joke from mathematicians about how they have difficulty working out the tip from a restaurant meal when a group of them go to eat there.
I find it even more irritating when people like Baron-Cohen [clearly not an expert in mathematics] go and obfuscate the whole situation by mixing “spatial ability” with mathematics. Mathematics is an abstract art-form. It is perhaps best described as the art of reasoning correctly about abstract mathematical objects. I cannot see how visual-spatial skills will help a person here. Have you ever tried picturing nth-dimensional space? I know I surely can’t. I’m pretty sure no-one else does, either.
While I can imagine basic visual-spatial abilities to be useful for an engineer [even this is not true in a modern age of CAD programs and advanced 3D animation], I don’t see the relevance to mathematicians. The focus in work-a-day mathematics would be in proofing, anyway.
What the studies actually show wrt to testosterone levels and “mathematical” [as well as spatial] abilities
Now looking at the actual results of the studies, even the basic notion that more testosterone = better math skills, doesn’t hold up.
Men with the highest levels of testosterone did worse than men with slightly less than normal levels. Women with higher levels of testosterone did better than women with lower/normal levels. What this suggests is that there is an optimal level of testosterone required in order to gain higher marks in the “mathematical” tests that were issued to the subjects. Above average levels of testosterone exposure in the womb result in something called fetal testosterone poisoning, which affects the normal development of the child in-utero and has a deleterious effect on brain health and mental functioning.
So it makes no sense for you to imply that lower levels of testosterone are the root cause of your “low math ability” [ignoring the technical issues of what “math ability” actually means that I highlighted above]. Since your low➖T should place you in the higher bracket of mathematical aptitude [low➖T men still did better than high➖T women i.e. the best men still out-compete the best women in this regard] as a member of the male sex.
There’s also a problem with measuring T levels in extremely gifted mathematical cohorts. Does higher➖T result in greater mathematical aptitude in this sub-group, or does it lower it? As far as I’m aware, they have not yet done comprehensive studies with adult male mathematicians in this regard.
So I’d hold off any conclusions you may have right now 😜.
Yes, I agree, it’s all very speculative. All I have is my own experience and a few very interesting early studies. And in my experience you’re absolutely right about arithmetic and abstract higher mathematics being very different. I still can’t remember all my times tables for instance but had (and still have) no problem with algebra or trigonometry, though I did hate calculus passionately.
I’d love to see more longitudinal studies grabbing the hormone levels of infants and then later as the children develop into adults. If you had a big enough cohort you could learn a ton (of admittedly correlational information.)