The Neuromantics – S2, Ep 9

This month, on the Neuromantics, we’re looking at stories about hormones, brains and sexual behaviour that run counter to expectations. Testosterone has a masculinising effect on the body in utero and in development, but it also has an effect on the brain, and in mammal brains it turns out that it’s only having that effect after it has interacted with an enzyme called aromatase – and become an oestrogen (estradiol). That’s the shifting ground explored in Brain Aromatisation: Classical Roles and New Perspectives by Charles E. Roselli et al. We might then ask: which hormone is actually responsible for masculinisation – the testosterone or the estradiol? And the answer is a complex one, suggesting that complementary processes are at work, and that to masculinise a body part need not imply that it is defeminised. This has implications for our view of the hormonal control of mammalian sexual behaviour. An interpretative gap seems to open up between sex differences in the brain and sexual behaviour; and (in humans) between partner preferences and the broad spectrum of behaviour, all of it socially modulated, that is exhibited in order to attract those partners. Some of this complexity turns on gender identity – the social construction of sex – and some of it on the category “sexual behaviour”, the kinds of interactions that we consider “sexual” in the first place. What would 007 think about all this? And more to the point, what would he do? In Ian Fleming’s 1956 novel, Diamonds Are Forever, much of what the hero does has its roots in aggressive male behavioural traits. It’s a surprise, then, to see our hero packing a suitcase, and taking such loving care of his branded luggage, silk pyjama onesie, and sentimental knick-knacks. The closer one looks, the more interesting this fetishisation of things becomes. Everything in Bond has a sexual connotation, but not all of it feels typically masculine, perhaps because, like all heroes, 007 is an outsider who belongs nowhere, a dandy with a professional interest in concealing himself. The homosexual protagonist of James Baldwin’s famous 1957 novel, Giovanni’s Room, practises more naked self-deception, but his creator – a political activist as well as a great artist – ruthlessly exposes him.