Donald Trump’s recent contribution to the “women don’t make good leaders because they have periods” genre is easy to dismiss given Trump’s cartoonish persona. Still, some of the most progressive among us have wondered, perhaps to our politically correct chagrin, whether there might be some grain of truth here, and even committed feminists have joked about not wan
ting to make decisions of international consequence at certain points in their cycle. Perhaps Trump’s outburst offers us the opportunity to examine our biases and beliefs when it comes to women’s biologies and their capacity to govern, and to debunk the old trope about women and that time of the month with a sturdier scaffolding than that of doctrinaire political correctness.
All human behavior is influenced by our biological substrate, and our hormonal endowment is a significant part of this substrate. When we buy a car, when we choose a partner, when we vote for or against health care reform, where we stand on the nuclear regulation agreement with Iran; in all of these instances we are being nudged, steered, prodded, and inhibited by the 50 or so hormones in the human body. Many of these (adrenaline, serotonin) are common to both men and women. Some (androgens such as testosterone) are more prominent in men, while others (estrogen and progesterone, the hormones involved in the menstrual cycle) are relatively present in women. For both men and women many of these hormones affect thought, mood and mind.
The key phrase here is “for both men and women”. Androgens were in play when Lyndon Johnson made hawkish decisions about Vietnam because, as David Halberstam tells it, he feared being seen as less of a man then Kennedy. Testosterone was a devil on Bill Clinton’s shoulder during some of the less constructive moments of his presidency. And when Donald Trump said “you could see there was blood coming out of her . . .whatever”, he was presumably in an adrenaline and testosterone juiced state insufficiently modulated by his frontal lobe.
Men, no less than women, have all kinds of stuff coming out of their whatevers.
This frontal lobe piece is important, literally and metaphorically. When men make errors that can seemingly be blamed on an overabundance of testosterone the problem is not solely the hormone. When Johnson said of Ho Chi Min “I didn’t just screw him, I cut his pecker off”, his lack of political decorum wasn’t merely the result of hormonal inebriation, it was also the consequence of a character too brittle and insecure to optimally modulate. When Bill Clinton put government at risk for sex it wasn’t that he had too much testosterone, it was that he lacked the capacity to separate urge from action. (Contrast Clinton with Jimmy Carter, whose admission that he had committed adultery “in his heart” still serves as an iconic example of how one can honor the ubiquity of hormonal impulses without being ruled by them). And Donald Trump’s comments are a pitch perfect example of the very flaw he means to critique in women; his anger spills out as reactive and retaliatory not because he has too much fight or flight adrenaline, but because he lacks the characterological solidity and security to speak from a more regulated and thoughtful place.
For both men and women the impulses that flow from hormones may contribute to failures in clear headedness, but hormones themselves are not the prime culprit. Being civilized is not achieved by siphoning off our estrogen, testosterone and adrenaline, in fact without these oomph and vigor infusing ingredients we would be a pretty pallid and ineffective lot. We are able to be at once civilized and yet still alive when we construct and maintain a dynamic tension between our biological driven-ness and the character-based consciousness that allows us to govern and modulate these urges.
Some of us are indeed more inclined to hormonal insanity than others, but the division is not defined by not gender. It is defined by the way in which we are able to steer our innate biological urgings, as opposed to being steered by them. This is the basis of character.
If men and women are equally vulnerable to the loss of clear-headedness that comes from failing to regulate the at times seismic reverberation of hormonally driven impulses, where does that old “a women can’t be president because of her period actually come from? Why do we imagine that a woman will be too flustered to make a clear and smart decision at certain points in her cycle while we don’t suspect that a man will decide to impulsively bomb Iran the morning after his wife has snubbed him in bed?
This bias survives because truth is shaped by power, and men still have the power. As a result, the conventionally masculine is seen as good, and the conventionally feminine is seen as less good. We confabulate Trump’s insecure bombast with strength and confidence, for example, while we assume that compassion and empathy are associated with weakness. This bias can be found in how we view men and how we view women, and it also can be found in how we view conventionally masculine and feminine qualities, whether possessed by men or women. The game is fixed. As Gloria Steinem noted, if men had periods men would brag about how long they lasted and how much flow they put out.
When we get over our power-based biases about men and women’s qualities, we can see that the notion that women are less capable of governing than men is deeply wrongheaded; BOTH men and women, if they are to be clear, strong minded and persuasive, have to channel the vitality and aliveness that comes with being sexual, aggressive and bodily beings. But BOTH men and women must also have the character to govern these urges, to steer them and not be steered by them. This balancing act, between the primitive and the civilized, is the basis of character and leadership, and it is equally challenging for all human beings.