Carole Hooven, Ph.D.

You're aggressing and fighting for status and singing or flexing your muscles or ignoring your kids or being an asshole to your wife.

You're also not reinforcing adaptive behaviors with a bit of a testosterone spike.

Like if you're around an attractive woman and you're trying to seduce her, there's very possibly going to be a testosterone increase, which stimulates a dopamine surge and reinforces a behavior if you're successful.

I'm just saying when you shut all that off...

It's like when women go on birth control and they don't respond to men necessarily in the same way that they would have because they have just screwed up that entire hormonal birth control.

That system, there's a system in women and in men where those sex hormones are giving you signals about what's happening in the environment and what your role is and your potential.

But that's a whole other thing.

But I don't want to get away from the fatherhood because this is very well established, this drop.

It happens not just in humans, but in other males where paternal investment increases survival of the offspring, which it does in humans.

Oh, no, he'll keep working 80.

No, men work harder and make more money, tend to do that.

No, because the kid's too old.

Then he'll start looking...

for other females.

There's serial monogamy where the man is more likely to stay around during the early years.

And that's when maybe a critical period, I'm not sure for this effect, it's really when the offspring is dependent and young and the mother needs to be supplemented.

Again, in a hunter-gatherer situation, the woman is not just going to have one kid, she's going to have several, and she's going to be nursing or weaning and or

about to get pregnant and she's in a situation where she can really benefit from investment from a male and he benefits reproductively.

So I just want to pause.

And protection.