Maternal Dominance Hypothesis and Priviledged Daughter Hypothesis
Ladies, this is a massive undertaking and while I had sworn to myself I would never post another incomplete essay due to my habit of never actually coming back to finish them :worry: I feel like we need to get the conversation started on this.
The Maternal Dominance Hypothesis and the Privileged Daughter Hypothesis
(gasp!) Brace yourselves.
I have been postponing this essay since the earliest days of the site because I seem to have an inability to write about this topic without giving offense. But I think the time has come; I think some sways have failed at least in part because of a lack of understanding of the Maternal Dominance Hypothesis. So I’m going to try, with apologies in advance for any clumsiness on my part.
http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/con.../2371.full.pdf the Maternal Dominance Hypothesis is a theory of gender determination put forth by Valerie Grant, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland, NZ. In a nutshell, the MDH is an idea that women who are higher in testosterone (as evidenced by certain personality traits reported on a psychological survey and NOT blood tests), have more sons.
There are some other studies that seem to indicate testosterone sways blue Evidence that mammalian sex ratios at birth are partially controlled by parental hormone levels around the time of conception (a very handy compilation that brings together a lot of studies in one handy package, but be aware that the researcher, William James is promoting his own particular viewpoint of gender determination that also involves testosterone, and at times tries to stuff things that don’t fit, into tight spaces where I personally feel alternate explanations make more sense.)
?? Wait a minute, I thought we knew that maternal condition was what is swaying!! Is this the Trivers Willard Hypothesis?
The MDH differs from the Trivers Willard Hypothesis; it’s an alternate explanation for gender determination in mammals, based on the same data from the same studies. Grant’s original claim was that maternal condition had nothing to do with gender ratio, that condition was a byproduct of dominance. Meaning, mama animals who were dominant simply took control of the available resources and as a result were in better condition, while less dominant females got fewer resources and then were in worse condition accordingly (this is true, this does happen; when resources are scarce, dominant animals get first pick and subservient animals tend to get whatever’s left). Grant’s take was that the observations of condition = gender that have been made in several species of mammal, were simply a coincidence that had nothing to do with why mammals conceive boys vs. girls.
However, in a recent review, Grant acknowledged that http://www.reproduction-online.org/c...3/425.full.pdf it is likely that there is some interplay between maternal condition and maternal dominance. I’m glad of that because there is a plethora of info indicating it, and it was dismaying to me to see her ignore all those things when anyone could plainly see it only HELPS her overall case. Testosterone has been repeatedly shown to be affected by blood sugar, overall health, muscle mass, body fat, age, disease, exercise, etc. Condition, status, and behavior seem to be connected on a fundamental level.
Simply put, the Maternal Dominance Hypothesis is the second part of the equation, the reason why you and I know people who are thin to the point of frail, and yet still keep popping out boy after boy. Aside from sheer bad luck, it’s the number one reason why otherwise good sways fail. Something in their environments is sending them cues that boys are a better “bet” for them, even in the face of lower maternal condition. Gender ratio just CAN’T be totally diet and condition or it would be a lot more obvious than it is and those clever old wives would have figured it out a long time ago.
While I personally have a bit of a hard time accepting Grant’s claim that self-reported answers on a psychology worksheet can necessarily mean anything at all regarding testosterone levels, after talking to hundreds if not thousands of boy/girl moms over the course of the last 6 years I am convinced that the personality aspect really does have some fundamental role to play in gender ratio and that it is the primary reason why otherwise great sways produce opposites.
??What type of personality traits?
According to Grant, the definition of dominance is influential, ascendant, prevailing, authoritative, or high in control. It’s NOT what most people think of when they think of high testosterone – it’s NOT aggressiveness (hostile, angry, violent, quarrelsome, argumentative) or domineering (overbearing, bossy, dictatorial, and high-handed.) Those traits seem to appear independent of testosterone. Grant uses a definition of “acting overtly to change the views or actions of another”.
My observations are a little bit different. While I do agree with the general thrust of what Grant says and I do believe there is a tendency amongst boy moms to try to influence others, I have observed that additionally, the moms who have boys tend to be a lot more of control freaks and struggle with anxiety and OCD-tendencies than the girl moms do. It goes well beyond trying to influence others, into a strong, almost overwhelming desire to control as much of their surrounding environment as is possible coupled with a high level of anxiety over doing so.
I would even go so far as to say, the desire to influence may come out of that anxiety to some extent – if an anxious person can get others to control their behavior, it may alleviate some anxiety for them. Example, if you have convinced everyone you have come into contact with to wash their hands with sanitizer, then you have less anxiety over germs, so that may be a strong motivating factor to influence others to live and believe as you do.
Interestingly, research in animals shows that testosterone LOWERS anxiety and OCD tendencies, so again, I’m not totally sure we’re dealing with testosterone per se (keep in mind, this whole theory is based on self-reported results on psychology surveys and not blood tests) But since we don’t know what this Factor X (or Y LOL) really is, let’s just keep calling it testosterone until we find out differently.
??Where’s the controversy with that?
First of all, I think Valerie Grant sounds like a bit of a bitch quite frankly, and so I can totally understand why people, girl moms particularly, take offense (here’s a particularly odious interview) Women with high testosterone may be more likely to have sons -- Health & Wellness -- Sott.net . Plus at first blush, the whole idea comes off sounding similar to some prejudices that a lot of girl moms face in their day to day lives – the idea that having girls is somehow less good than having boys and people who have all girls are inferior in some way. (I do NOT believe that is what the MDH is really saying whatsoever, but I think it can sound like that until one really understands it, and it can push people’s buttons.) But if we want swaying to work as effectively as is possible (and I DO) we may need to put our personal feelings aside to some extent and really examine these ideas without prejudice.
Pink swayers dislike the Maternal Dominance Hypothesis because they feel like there is a subtle implication that women who have a lot of sons are bitchy, mannish, pushy, angry, unfeminine, and so on and that they’re not feminine enough to have a daughter.
Blue swayers dislike the Maternal Dominance Hypothesis because they feel like there is a subtle implication that women who have a lot of daughters are inferior or weak and that women have boys because they’re somehow “better” or “healthier”, and that they’re not good enough to have a son. Also, because losing and failing can lower T levels, some people have interpreted this as meaning girl moms are “losers” or “failures”.
Let me just put that oneto bed right here and now – just because losing or failing at something ~may~ lower testosterone levels, there are many other reasons why a person might have lower than average testosterone – diet, overall health, diet and illnesses during childhood, conditions in your mother’s or even grandmother’s uterus (the egg that is you, formed in your mother’s body when she was a fetus in your grandmother!!) even genetic factors could come into play – a petite person will generally have lower T levels than someone who is born with the genetic predisposition towards muscle mass. Lower testosterone is just a hormone level, it doesn’t carry any value judgements with it, having lower testosterone and daughters doesn’t mean that anyone is a loser or a failure in any way.
Additionally, I believe that while suffering losses and having things not go your way can certainly lower testosterone, there are also many people for whom things have always come pretty easily, due to the fact that they’re totally awesome. These people also tend to have lower testosterone; if there’s no competition to be had because you’re just the best at everything naturally, your body won’t waste time and precious scarce resources making a lot of testosterone. You don’t NEED it. The war is over; you already won – why make testosterone at that point?
As a result, these inherently fantastic ladies tend to have more daughters, and evolutionarily speaking, it makes complete sense that they have daughters because a woman who has a charmed life, may be able to provide the same for her daughters (and her daughters will likely be equally awesome and more likely to be successful at handing down genes for future generations.)
There are some primates where the dominant females have more daughters (LINK). Even in some other primates where this was not the case, when researchers took the females from the communal environment where they had to compete all the time for resources, into individual living quarters, they were shocked when they started having way more daughters (LINK). It’s believed that their testosterone levels dropped when they no longer had to compete. And in a study done by Elissa Cameron (the blood sugar researcher) to refute Grant, in humans, the vast majority of the wealthiest women in the world who inherited their wealth, had more daughters (LINK) – think Paris and Nicky Hilton, the Kardashians, and so on.
Very beautiful women also tend to have more daughters than the population as a whole http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/JTB2007.pdf
I have a couple of books in my personal library, that describe an alternate theory of gender determination called “the Privileged Daughter” hypothesis. (For some reason I could not find anything about this online?? It’s a real theory.) Just as the name suggests, for very privileged individuals in an environment where a daughter would be safe and well cared for and may have a reproductive advantage (beauty, charm, inherited social position), it makes evolutionary sense for those individuals to have more daughters.
In an imaginary world where females were protected, highly valued, and given lots of advantages, and males not as much, t would be “smart” for one’s genes to have a daughter in that scenario. Universally since the dawn of time, the average male is less successful at reproduction than the average female – remember a boy is a gamble that can pay off big time, whereas a daughter is a sure thing. Why would you even CHANCE having a boy if you had an excellent shot for daughters to have offspring that would survive to adulthood??
EVERYONE dislikes the Maternal Dominance Hypothesis because they feel like there is an implication – actually Grant comes right out and SAYS this! - that some of us plain SHOULDN’T have children of a particular gender because we’re not “suited” to raising them. I’m going to address this specifically further on in this essay, but on a personal level, I feel like the human animal is nothing if not flexible, and now that heaven has plopped a baby girl in my lap my parenting has changed to suit her (and OMG you should see my husband!!! W.O.W. he’s like a different man when it comes to her.) Could some of us be more “boy-mom” or “girl mom”, why certainly, and I will discuss this in more detail shortly.
??Wait what? I thought people who were high in testosterone were always running around getting into fights and acting like the Incredible Hulk.
While higher testosterone levels may bring out those traits in a person (a hostile and angry person, under influence of testosterone, might then try to influence others or control their universe in a hostile and angry manner) the testosterone is likely causing the attempt to influence and control, NOT the hostility and anger. Those things are separate. An authoritative person who tried to influence others calmly and rationally thru the use of carefully written pamphlets LOL may be just as high in testosterone or higher even, than the person running around getting into scraps with strangers. I have known some very delicate older ladies who can influence others with a raised eyebrow and I suspect they were packing some serious T. I explore that in more detail in this essay What does it really MEAN to have high (or low) testosterone?? Scientifically??
There are A LOT of very negative studies and articles regarding testosterone online that are put out by people with anti-male political agendas, and many other studies that aren’t negative at all but are manipulated by people with anti-male agendas. Overall, by anyone who isn’t trying to spin data to support a particular worldview, testosterone is not believed to be a negative influence on personality and in fact has been shown to increase honesty, fairness, and leadership tendencies in many studies. The “negative” (read: stereotypically male) effects of testosterone were shown to be rooted more in cultural expectations (honor-obsessed cultures, the ones where people are highly concerned about their self-image and getting respect = more violence than cultures who don’t value “honor”, even when those cultures coexist in the same country LINK) than in anything inherent in testosterone in and of itself. And some of the “negative” personality factors linked to higher than normal testosterone were retested on women and testosterone was found to have absolutely no effect on female personality (women have way way way less testosterone than men do).
BTW – let me just pause a moment and point out that this is a major weakness of the MDH because we are dealing with self-reported personality traits on a psychology survey and NOT testosterone levels in blood – if female personality does not seem to be affected by T levels the way men’s is, then HOW can these answers on a survey mean that dominance = high testosterone = more boys in women?? Maybe it can, but then again maybe there is some other factor at play here. After all, Clomid raises T levels in the blood but still sways strongly pink!
??I still don’t get it.
Grant’s definition of the MDH is a murky one and difficult to understand and once you throw PDH (Privileged Daughter Hypothesis) in the mix it gets even muddier. So let me offer a different one based on my own observations (here is where we may get into trouble so please bear with me, I’m not trying to offend anyone so please everyone cut me some slack, I’m trying to help!!).
We have talked a lot about boy moms being “control freaks”. I personally believe that the fundamental difference between boy moms and girl moms, is that not only do boy moms try to be in control, on some level they feel like they HAVE to or dire consequences will result. Boy moms on balance are a lot more anxious and wound up than girl moms are and have the idea that they must control, control, control, every possible variable in any given situation. They spend a lot of mental energy thinking up every horrible thing that could ever go wrong and making plans on how to prevent these things from happening, or else making contingency plans in case they do.
To a boy mom, if something goes wrong, it’s because they themselves failed to control for every circumstance but that’s ok, because they will simply regroup and try harder and fix all the little things that went wrong the first time.
Girl moms on the other hand, don’t seem to have this same drive to the same extent; in my opinion they may have a bit more tendency to attribute things to being out of their control or as being the responsibility of someone else and that they are either powerless to change them or that it isn’t really worth it to bother because someone else will take care of that and probably things are going to turn out ok in the end anyway, they always do. (and this isn’t a bad thing at all as I will go into greater detail about, further on).
Now whether that is down to testosterone or what, I’m not sure we can say. Women have SO little testosterone when compared with men, that I find it hard to believe a microscopic fluctuation in T levels is altering people’s personalities so strongly that, as the stereotypes would have us believe, they are turning from normal, balanced, adult human females into raging she-beasts or passionless milksops. And the data doesn’t support it either, because as I mentioned, testosterone did not seem to affect women’s behavior the way that it did men’s and cultural factors are much more important to behavior than anything having to do with testosterone.
Estrogen and progesterone fluctuations really do mess with one’s behavior (it’s these fluctuations that cause PMS/PMT) and since testosterone, progesterone, and estrogen are all made from the same stuff, I think it’s absolutely likely that a person who is higher in T levels might have a different hormonal makeup all together. There are other hormones such as oxytocin, cortisol and many others, that have been proven to affect personality as well and testosterone has been shown in a recent study to counteract the effects of oxytocin – so if you are higher in T levels, it may not be testosterone affecting your behavior per se, it may be a lack of oxytocin (the cuddle hormone) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/he...mone.html?_r=0 or some whole other thing(s)entirely.
So PLEASE PRETTY PLEASE I just really want you guys to be CALM about T levels. Keep em in perspective. We don’t know how it works and so PLEASE no one panic pink swayers if you get stressed out or upset while swaying, or blue swayers if you feel laid back about the whole thing, that’s FINE!!! It very likely has nothing whatsoever to do with testosterone (if testosterone is even swaying!!) because testosterone can’t be influencing your behavior ANYWAY. I don’t want anyone to read this essay and then start spending hours online looking up all the various herbs ever said to raise/lower testosterone and planning to incorporate them into their sways.
Fugidaboutit – we don’t even KNOW that testosterone is doing anything at all.