#maleness

Abstract

Both biosociological and psychological models, as well as animal research, suggest that testosterone has a key role in social interactions. Evidence from animal studies in rodents shows that testosterone causes aggressive behaviour towards conspecifics. Folk wisdom generalizes and adapts these findings to humans, suggesting that testosterone induces antisocial, egoistic, or even aggressive human behaviours. However, many researchers have questioned this folk hypothesis, arguing that testosterone is primarily involved in status-related behaviours in challenging social interactions, but causal evidence that discriminates between these views is sparse. Here we show that the sublingual administration of a single dose of testosterone in women causes a substantial increase in fair bargaining behaviour, thereby reducing bargaining conflicts and increasing the efficiency of social interactions. However, subjects who believed that they received testosterone—regardless of whether they actually received it or not—behaved much more unfairly than those who believed that they were treated with placebo. Thus, the folk hypothesis seems to generate a strong negative association between subjects’ beliefs and the fairness of their offers, even though testosterone administration actually causes a substantial increase in the frequency of fair bargaining offers in our experiment.

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Demivir was coined by Tumblr user the-gender-collector-emself on October 20, 2020.

Demivir is described as “any and all identities that are partially related to or partially aligned with maleness. Some examples would be demiboy, nanoboy, Neptunian, novarian, dawnian, demifluid/flux boys, etc.Please do not use this to encompass masculinity or masc-aligned identities.”

The above flag was posted on Tumblr

“The American ideal, then, of sexuality, appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden – as an unpatriotic act – that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.”

This quote by James Baldwin is the first thing you see when you enter the Masculinities exhibit at The Barbican, which I just got back from. (This cultural excursion pretty much represented my first time properly venturing out and taking public transport to get somewhere non-local in over four months! It felt like a surprisingly anxiety-inducing big deal!). The exhibit is a provocative wide-ranging, multimedia exploration into conceptions of “maleness” from the sixties to the present day, featuring works by the likes of Catherine Opie, Laurie Anderson, Peter Hujar, Isaac Julien, Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz. My favourite room featured luscious 1960s portraits by Swiss outsider photographer Karlheinz Weinberger (1921 - 2006) of sullen leather-clad bikers posed like defiant peacocks, while in the corner, Kenneth Anger’s fetishistic and homoerotic 1965 short film Kustom Kar Kommandos (with its soundtrack of The Paris Sisters cooing “Dream Lover”) played on a continuous loop. Had I died and gone to heaven? Meanwhile, Adrian Street’s 31-minute documentary So Many Ways to Hurt You (2010) about the life and times of campy bleached-blond “glam rock” Welsh wrestler Adrian Street was so fascinating and absorbing I wanted to pull up a chair and watch it in its entirety. (I found it online once I got home!).