The Jane Doe Gang Rape Cornell Case: Where is John Adams When We Need Him?

 Rape is, of course, a nasty crime, next only to murder and dismemberment in the psyche. Gang rape, even worse, which we associate with Russian soldiers wrecking revenge on Germans, or African paramilitaries in Rwanda and elsewhere, an instrument of "worse than death" torture.

In some cultures, a woman raped is put to death by her own relatives, on the basis that she should never have been in a position to be raped, or that she has been so defiled she disgraces the family by merely continuing to exist.

Rape stories evoke among the strongest emotional responses in the listeners. 

So the accusation of rape is among the most extreme of any accusation. The classic movie, "Rashomon" tells the story of the murder of a Samurai and the rape of his wife from four different perspectives and addresses the subjective nature of truth, testimony, and fluidity of memory.

Amidst the accusations of gang rape by Jane Doe of Cornell is the whole nature of memory and "repressed memories" which had a run in the popular press some years ago when women came forth with stories of molestation by fathers, uncles, grandfathers, which at times echoed the famous Arthur Miller play, "The Crucible" which was seen as an allegory related to false accusation and public hysteria of the Joseph McCarthy era. 

Regarding the Jane Doe accusations, the New York Times has run scores of stories on this case, along with a podcast. Most of the stories are focused on the reaction of women, and defenders and protectors of women, who see this case as not just a case but a cause: The victimization of women who are not listened to when they allege rape, the devaluation of women, the evil of a paternalistic society policed by men who think every woman claiming rape "Had it coming" or "Asked for it."

The trouble with the journalism of this case, and with the panicky reaction by the Cornell administration is that nobody much has held up a hand and said, "Let's await the court. Let us proceed deliberately and use the rules of evidence demanded by Due Process in the setting of presumption of innocence, and have faith in our court system to get at the truth."

I am trying to do that now.

Listening to the hour long NYT podcast, where a journalist walked through some of the facts of the case as it emerges from the hundreds of pages of Jane Doe's interview with first Cornell police and then Thompkins County police, some facts emerge which convinced me to withhold judgment until all the facts are laid out at trial. 

The "facts" as the NYT podcast lays them out are this:

1. The day of the frat party, Jane Doe had been robbed and was in an agitated state before going to the bar "Moonies."

2. From the bar, she phoned a boy who she had already had or intended to have a sexual relationship, intending to meet him at a fraternity party later. She drank alcohol at the bar, willingly and on her own volition, and by the time she left she was "high" but she walked to the frat house without getting lost or falling.

3. When she arrived at the frat party that boy asked her if she wanted to do a threesome. The second male said to her, "I can understand if you don't want to do this, so just say no and no problem." But she said, "We are all consenting adults here."  Sometime before or during this group sexual activity Jane Doe imbibed ketamine along with more alcohol.  Whether the frat boys used ketamine or how drunk the males were is nowhere mentioned

4. At some point, likely just before having sex with one of these two males she performed fellatio on one of the boys. She did not ask his permission. That male, who was among those Jane Doe named in her suit later said, "If we are talking about people subjected to sex without permission, then she is guilty of performing sex on me without my permission."

5. At some point, some frat brother discovered the group sex event and sent some sort of online message about this girl, who he suggested was taking on all comers and inviting others to join.  Other frat boys arrived and had sex with Jane Doe. What her state of consciousness was as the sexual encounters progressed is in dispute. A total of seven frat boys are named in her suit.

6. Whether she went home that night or spent the night with her boyfriend is unclear but the next day the original boyfriend texted her and said, "I'm sorry things went down that way last night," and she replied, "Not a problem. I still like you and want to see you again."

7. The fraternity house threw a Halloween party about two weeks later and Jane Doe wanted to go and planned to attend, but the president of the fraternity called her and told her she should not attend because word of her night with multiple partners had got out, and she was now persona non grata, at least for now. She expressed indignation to the frat president and complained to her boyfriend about not being allowed to go to the party.

8. Members of her sorority, hearing the story, either from her or from others told her she had been violated, likely raped and urged her to report the frat boys she had had sex with as a rape. She heard from other students who called her a "slut."  The males named in the suit say that Jane Doe was fine with the group sex until she had been "slut shamed" and felt her reputation had been impugned.

(This is one of the most mystifying aspects of the story as the NYT tells it, at least to me. In a culture where sex, group sex and sexual freedom is thought to be complete, how can anyone be accused of being a "slut" unless she demands payment for the sex? If she is enjoying the sex, is she a slut based on the numbers of sexual partners she has on one occasion? When "hook up" nights are the custom at colleges, where girls and boys are having sex with people they do not know, but simply for the pleasure and release of having sex, how does one girl get selected as being too promiscuous? If the idea of promiscuity has been dismissed as prudishness, where does the line get drawn for one girl who has too many encounters over a defined period of time?  Are all women who participate in an orgy "sluts"? And what of the men?)

There is an entire culture invested in group sex. The artist, Terry Rodgers, has made a good living portraying group sex orgies, depicting the participants as lost souls, unhappy and vainly searching for something which will forever elude them.

Terry Rodgers painting

9. The complaint emanates in no small part from Jane Doe's assertion that she was so drunk and impaired that she could not give actual consent to sex. Nowhere in her complaint does Jane Doe mention whether any of the males she accuses of rape was drunk. Some of the accused have said they were drunk, and every bit as impaired as Jane Doe.

So those, are the "facts" as far as the media can provide.

What to make of all this?

When British soldiers shot down Boston civilians on the snowy night of the Boston Massacre, the whole city was enraged and, amazingly, the Crown allowed the soldiers to be put on trial for their actions. (George III, apparently did not tolerate ICE agents in 1770.) At their trial, John Adams, acting as the defense attorney for the soldiers, elicited the facts that the soldiers were first brought under attack by a mob which outnumbered them--over 200 citizens against 9 soldiers. The order to "Fire" likely came from the crowd, taunting the soldiers, not from their officer. 

"Facts are stubborn things," John Adams famously said.

The soldiers were acquitted of murder although two were, for some reason, convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

That was Due Process and that got written into the Constitution, by, among others, Adams.

None of us can know, short of sworn testimony what really happened that night at the fraternity house at Cornell, and what "really" happened may be a Rashomon like fluid truth. 

From the perspective of the males involved, they had a willing partner who did not fight back but welcomed their embraces, and trying to decide who was more impaired than whom is an impossible task.

From the point of view of Jane Doe, she had initially not been very much disturbed, but only after she told her story to her roommates decided she had been abused and raped. This is now explained as a psychological phenomenon known as "processing" the event, that she was in such a state of shock she was unable to bring charges.

But if that phone call, two weeks later to the frat president, demanding she be invited to the Halloween party is substantively true, then, to me at least, this begins to sound more like a woman scorned than a woman in shock. Why would a woman who had undergone a traumatic, horrific event be eager to revisit the scene, the very fraternity where it happened, where she would likely see and "party with" the boys who she says had raped her.

That would be  a very peculiar reaction to rape, I would think, "still processing" nothwithstanding.

What is appalling, at this stage, is the rush to judgment. However the trial turns out, that the accusation is being treated as a conviction is the current shame.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, Carl Sagan (a Cornell professor) once said about the claim of extraterrestrial visitations to planet earth. 

The crime of gang rape is so horrific we really ought to take a deep breath and say, "If this is true, then seven young men (if they were old enough at the time) deserve to spend years in prison. But we need to know if the facts support the accusation."

After the Deluge: Accountability vs. Revenge

 

President Obama was, so far, the best President of my lifetime, but he was far from perfect. Chief among his failures was the failure to bring to account those who were responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. Nobody ever went to jail for that nearly catastrophic event, which brought the U.S. to the brink of another Great Depression and was the product of depraved, heedless greed and malfeasance.

Many argued that the malefactors were simply too obscure, and their crimes too hard to understand--it took a movie, "The Big Short" to explain it and that movie had to include scenes in bubble baths to illustrate what had happened when financial bubbles burst--and it would be hard to define who actually did illegal things, beyond the ordinary self serving Wall Street types, but driving around Iceland, you can see prisons where the white collar criminals who damaged Iceland are housed. They served their time. Americans were not nearly as scrupulous in seeking justice as the Icelanders.

Obama said, "It's done and past now. Let's move on." But isn't all crime in the past? We try people and bring them to account for what they did in the past.

                          Mussolini and Mistress

Hermann Goering, at his Nuremberg trial huffed and dismissed the proceedings as "victor's justice," as if bombing civilian populations  in London, the Netherlands, France and Poland was not a crime, nor even immoral, not to mention what was uncovered in the concentration camps across the Third Reich. 

The U.S. Supreme Court, a packed Court of Trump's creation with the connivance of Mitch McConnell and his willing accomplices in the Republican party (like Susan Collins) says that whatever Mr. Trump does in office, he is protected against judgment--he can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. In fact, Mr. Trump can fire away on 5th Avenue, and then pardon himself.  

But the Court can be unpacked if there is enough outrage and enough Democrats in Congress.

Hitler was reportedly profoundly shaken when he saw the photographs of Mussolini and his mistress hanging in a square in Milan, and he wanted to be sure his body was burned to ashes so nobody could do that to him and Eva Braun. He saw vengeance coming.

That kind of retribution is rare, however--The Romanov czarist family was shot, but the emperors of Germany, Austria/Hungary and the Ottoman empire simply retired.

Trump, will, of course, issue blanket pardons for everyone in his circle, but one thing we have learned from Trump is the law doesn't matter. All that matters is the judge.

The New York Times ran a front page article on the death threats to Congressmen and Congresswomen, and even the gun toting Marjorie Taylor Greene complained about that.

In his Sunday Boston Globe piece, Stephen Kinzer, a professor at Brown, reminds us there are plenty of guilty folks in both Democratic and Republican parties and if the Democrats go after Republicans, they'd better clean their own house first, and in this he echoes Secretary of Commerce Scott Bessent who has sounded that refrain, as only he can in his creepy way. "Get your own house in order,"  Bessent smugly tells his Democratic interlocuter, Senator Elizabeth Warren, after she asks the SEC to investigate Donald Trump's stock trades as he manipulated the market with his off again/on again forays into war in the Middle East and opening and closing the Strait of Hormuz. 

There are surprisingly few treatments of  what comes next. Not just immediately after the election but after, after. 

"Embracing Escape," by John Dower tells the story of what happened in Japan after the surrender. Unlike Mussolini and Hitler, the Japanese emperor was allowed to live, as the Americans saw it would be far easier to manage the Japanese with the emperor alive. 

There were war crime trials in Japan but they were limited and got far less attention than Nuremberg.

"The Defeated," a TV series set in immediate post war Berlin portrays the dissolution of society in the days before the Marshall plan for restitution of Germany came into effect.

Oddly, "Gone with the Wind," Margaret Mitchell's pot boiler, addresses the after, after at length. Mitchell believed the Ku Klux Klan was a noble and necessary organization to keep the freed slaves from raping white women and she believes the slaves were better off in slavery and she says large numbers starved after emancipation, as they were pathetically sitting on road sides unable to feed themselves--much like the urban homeless of today.  For Mitchell, the after, after was a disgraceful abrogation of white supremacy in managing the post war realities.

The fact is, the rich, like Jared Kushner do not believe they have done anything wrong--that he embarked on trips to rich Arab countries as an official American government envoy, while making deals to enrich himself by billions as a condition for American government support--but none of this strikes him as anything to apologize about. He's entitled to do a little business the way the Saudi ruling family is accustomed to doing business: the government is the family and the family is the government. That's just the way the world works for Jared.

As Kinzer notes, "Failing to hold high officials accountable for their actions increases the likelihood that their errors--or crimes--will be repeated. It also fuels public outrage that destabilizes our political system. Washington forgives and forgets too easily."

And that has been Trump's great insight: Americans are profoundly cynical--they think America is, in reality, much more like "The Godfather" than it is like "Erin Brockovich."

Senators Eric Smith and John Neely Kennedy Attack Jack Smith for Not Attending Hawks Game: MAGA Enters a Reality Free Zone

 

At a United States Senate hearing which should go down in history as the Immaculate Revelation, Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Ohio) pounced on his prey, Jack Smith, the prosecutor who sought to indict Trump for trying to fix the 2020 election and for hiding secret documents, which to this day remain secret (although credible conjecture is they contain MacDonald's recipes for French Fries and Big Macs).

Senator John Neely Kennedy had just got through saying Mr. Smith's testimony gave him vomit in his mouth, and to tag team that remark, Schmitt had his staff flash up a poster with photos of Jack Smith and two Atlantic Democratic prosecutors and bubble comments, which were later found to contain email messages from Mr. Smith's staff about the seat numbers in a basketball arena. "You didn't know we had those emails DID you Mr. Smith?" Schmitt announced gleefully. But now we got you, caught, right there in a crowd of 3,000 along with your dirt bag co-conspirators! Obviously plotting to collude in a groundless prosecution of our dear leader, Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Smith looked genuinely perplexed and asked to see the poster, which had been raised by Senator Kennedy but dropped so quickly it looked like the flash cards of a child's multiplication table practice set.

While Mr. Smith groped for an answer, Senator Schmitt bore in, "You WERE in Atlantic that night, at that Hawks game, weren't you?"

"Well, I'm not sure."
"Well, maybe I can remind you to keep you from perjuring yourself any further!"

Meanwhile, Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked to see that poster again and to have it shown to Mr. Smith, but just as she did, Smith brightened and said, "Oh! Yes! I WAS at a basketball game. Caitlin Clark was playing for the Iowa Hawkeyes, at the University of Maryland. I was in College Park that night."

Senator Klobuchar said, "Oh, so Senator Schmitt mixed up the Hawks with the Hawkeyes. Maybe you better get your facts straight before you call somebody a 'dirt bag.'"

"You are trying to rehabilitate the witness!" Schmitt sniffed. 

Senator Klobuchar did not say, "Yes, Senator. I was trying to rehabilitate a witness after you falsely accused him of perjury, after you presented a falsehood as fact and even now you refuse to admit you were wrong or that the fact that Mr. Smith was 700 miles away from Atlanta that night. You are dancing the Roy Cohn rag, which is a dance the  MAGA mob has perfected: Get it wrong. Don't admit it. Just say you got it right. There is no such thing as truth, only 'alternative facts.'"

But the world isn't that wonderful. 

Instead the moment passed and the next day Senator Schmitt laughed off the whole thing by saying, "Apparently Mr. Smith is a Caitlin Clark fan," as if that were an answer to how he lied and then refused to apologize for getting it wrong, but simply maintained the facts might be wrong, but the accusation of Mr. Smith's perfidy is right, in principle, you know, like he really is a dirt bag, just not a Hawks fan.

Go Hawkeyes!

What Happened At Cornell?

Allow me to state, categorically, that I do not know what happened to Jane Doe in October 2024 at Cornell.

I certainly am no closer to knowing by reading the now dozens of New York Times articles about the case. The NYT has, however, allowed me to read about the reaction of people who have taken up the cause they see represented by this case--victimization, ravaging a woman, rape, cruelty to women, misogyny most foul.

The New York Times does run a podcast, and from that I got some information, which is incomplete, but may have taken me some steps closer to understanding, although none of this reporting, which includes the reporters reading the 120 page transcript of Jane Doe's statement to police, is actually testimony under oath cross examined in court.

1. Jane Doe had a very bad day even before her visit to the fraternity: She had been robbed and lost her ID that morning.

2. She visited a bar and drank alcohol, although she was underaged, before going to the fraternity, 

3. She visited the fraternity to have sex with a boyfriend who then proposed a threesome involving another frat brother. 

4. This frat brother asked her if she was okay with having a sexual experience with two men and he told her it was okay if she did not want to do this, but she said she was fine with it. She said, "We are all consenting adults here."

5. She performed fellatio on one frat boy who was drunk, who later filed a complaint, after she filed her complaint, saying that if she was rendered unable to give consent because of drunkenness, then he was likewise unable to give his consent to her, and she should be charged with sexual assault.

6. At some point, other frat boys visited the room where all this sex was happening and the woman may have been given more alcohol and she may have taken ketamine.

7. At some point someone texted or placed on Snapchat a message that a girl was having sex with everyone and come on by.

8. She left the fraternity the next morning and got a text from the original boyfriend apologizing for "how things went down," but she responded it was all good, and she still liked him and wanted to see him again.

9. At some point news of this bacchanalia got out and Jane Doe was accused by other Cornell women of being a "slut."

10. The president of the fraternity called her to say she could not come to the fraternity's Halloween party, given all the negative publicity. She told police she had very much wanted to go to this party, back at the fraternity. This was after the event she later described as a gang rape. She expressed indignation at this rejection.  She told the frat President she was angry about being banned from this party she was looking forward to attending.

At this point, does it sound like a woman who has had a dreadful experience? Why, if the scene of the crime was so horrendous, would she be looking forward to returning for a party at that scene. Does this sound like a woman with repressed memory or the wrath of a woman scorned?

11. Now, two years later, she has had time to "process" what happened to her. Her friends in her sorority told her what had happened was very bad, and this seemed to pivotal in her filing her complaint, two years later.

All this sounds familiar: In 2014 an engineering student at Brown University found a drunk, naked co-ed in his bed after a fraternity party, had sex with her and they exchanged phone numbers the next morning, and he thought they had had a pleasant experience. When she got back to her dorm, her roommates heard what had happened, and told her she had been raped and she filed a complaint. But her initial reaction to her experience had been positive; it was only after consultation with other women, she decided she had been raped. The boy was expelled. 

The current vocabulary for this phenomenon of delayed revulsion, after initial delight is now called "Processing trauma."

Whether or not any or all of the frat boys were drunk seems to be immaterial in the view of those damning their actions; drunkenness apparently only renders women suspectable, not men.

In both cases, "delayed processing" occurred only after the women involved discovered their women friends considered their sexual experiences wrong, or even slutty. 

In the case of the Cornell Jane Doe, at least some of the frat boys suggest that it was only after Jane Doe's reputation was assailed she cried foul.

In 2026, "hook ups" for sex with partners who are not looking for "relationships" or romance are considered just fine on many campuses. Sex is now recreational and no shame attaches to one night stands, spontaneous encounters or sex for simple pleasure. Why Jane Doe got called a "slut" is unclear, given this ethos, although perhaps having sex with multiple boys on the same night crosses a line among 18 year olds in 2026. 

Who can say?

The fact that weeks after the incident, Jane Doe still wanted to go to a party at that same fraternity suggests she had not felt traumatized by that experience--she was looking forward to partying in the same place, presumably with some of the same boys.

But now, all of this is akin to "recovered memories" where what happened at the time was too traumatic to be "processed," but later comes back to haunt the victim.

Am I simply too old to understand this line of reasoning?

Or is there something wrong with this?

She Who Must Be Obeyed: -Cornell Rape Case

Jennifer Weiner got herself published in the New York Times today. 

And why not? She is a summa cum laude graduate (English lit) from Princeton and her Wiki page tells us she is the author of multiple New York Times best selling novels, including "Good in Bed," and she is a T.V. producer to boot.

Jennifer Weiner

So, she ought to be an expert.

Her topic, of course, is the Cornell rape case. What else? the NYT has run, by my last count, twelve articles over the past three days about the case of a young woman who is suing people and institutions over an incident which occurred at a fraternity house, where she apparently not only had sex or was forced to have sex,  with multiple frat brothers, and one or more of them sent messages about the whole thing on Snap chart or something, and maybe even images.

There have been so many version of what happened, in the NYT alone, the facts of the case are so far, in the public domain at least, incomprehensible,  but one version has her showing up drunk or maybe drinking some alcohol, performing public fellatio on some frat brother, and either asking for or being asked about having group sex, and then things went downhill from there, if that's possible, with her being held against her will and raped by seven frat bros. 

Having just dropped off her own daughter at college, Ms. Weiner tells us news of this nasty crime left her "incandescent with rage."  Her daughter is a big hearted girl ready to spread her wings, and this Cornell outrage was not at all what she dreamed of for her daughter.

So far, I was with Ms. Weiner, but then she says:

A/ "How is this still happening? Shouldn't things be better now? How could all of our activism have brought about so little change?"

B/ She walked at "A Take Back the Night march, where students walked through campus stopping so that women could tell agonizing personal stories."

c/ "People accused of sexual assault can in some circumstances cross-examine their accusers, a terrifying prospect for survivors of trauma."

(As if being accused of rape is not a terrifying experience for the accused.)

Well, let's not skip by "C" too quickly. 

It is here that Ms. Weiner revealed herself most  completely. What she is saying is the crime is so unspeakably cruel and horrible that we ought to abandon all our principles of how crime is evaluated and judged. What she is attacking, at its heart, is Due Process. The authors of the U.S. Constitution's Sixth Amendment say the accused is guaranteed the right to confront his accuser. Fairness, justice, human decency demands that much.

Even the guys who wrote the Bible did not, at least in translation, make the ninth Commandment about simply lying, but it says, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." False witness, from antiquity has been known to be a truly vile act. Accusation is a significant act, an attack, often with the most significant consequences for the accused.

So, for both religious folk and legal folk an accusation is a ponderously serious thing, and if false, is a great injustice, and the presumption of innocence is there for a reason.

None of this is to say the woman at Cornell was not harmed or should remain silent. Her accusations should get a full hearing, but the crime is so important, it should be examined thoroughly, no matter how terrifying that may be for her or for those she accused. 

What Ms. Weiner would advocate, and, for that matter what the activists of the #METOO movement advocated was that the accusation substitute for the whole process--no examination, no challenge, no defense. The indictment is the only thing. All the rest is rejected as beside the point, because, you know, women have suffered. 

I would, modestly, suggest that accusation without a chance for examination, rebuttal is a crime unto itself. It is the "Oxbow Incident," in essence.

Then there is the A & B above. Does Ms. Weiner really think that marching through campuses, telling horror stories, holding up signs which say, "Take Back the Night," or "activism" like hers would really de-toxify testosterone saturated college boys?

She must not have raised any sons.

Reading further into her Wiki page, it turns out her novels are "chick lit" and although one was turned into a movie with Cameron Diaz and Shirley MacLean ("In Her Shoes"), I have to confess, I've never heard of it.

But, then again, I'm told this is because she has been dismissed as a genre writer by the male dominated star making culture of American publishing and media:

"I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance or a beach book--in short it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention," Ms. Weiner tells us.

Well, Ms. Weiner should know, having been a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton in English literature, but I imagine this would come as something of a surprise to Katherine Anne Porter, author of "Old Mortality," and Harper Lee ("To Kill A Mockingbird") or Willa Cather ("My Antonia") or, for that matter, to Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath or Joan Didion or Anne Tyler.

None of those women authors were ever taken seriously by the male dominated publishing and media.

But then again, maybe it was the "TV producer" that got in the way of Ms. Weiner's Pulitzer prize--after all she live tweeted "The Bachelorette," and she wrote the "State of Georgia" which was cancelled after 12 episodes.

So, she has not been given her due, I'm sure, likely because she is a woman, and suffers from that cross carried by women like Nina Kostroff Noble and Karen Thorson who were producers instrumental in that Mt. Everest of TV's greatest five seasons: "The Wire."

But you have to give Ms. Weiner some credit for asking the question: "How could all of our feminist activism have brought about so little change?"

If you don't ask the question, you will never find the answer.

 

Testosterone and Its Discontents

That angry, raging warrior, Pete Hegseth is concerned about the testosterone levels of his armed forces.

The implication is that he does not want any low testosterone soldiers around, and, further, that we would be better served by high testosterone level soldiers, sailors and airmen.

The questions here are:

1/ Do higher testosterone levels result in better performance?

2/ What should the goal levels be?

3/ What would you do if you found a soldier who has testosterone levels lower than you think ideal?

4/ Females have testosterone levels which are typically only 1/3 to 1/2 that of males. Are they less lethal in today's battlefield? 

5/ And what is today's battlefield, anyway? If we put an incredible hulk on the field against a woman, will he defeat her or is he like the Abrams tank, huge and menacing looking, which is brought down by a small drone?

Part of the problem here goes beyond science, endocrinology and performance to an issue of language. "He's a low testosterone sort of guy," has become a trope of sorts for a man who lacks aggression, assertiveness, focus, sexual drive--a pale man, who is quiet, docile, who may respond but not initiate.

Those features may, in fact, accrue to men with low testosterone and, in fact, may ameliorate with testosterone therapy, but leaping to the conclusion that those characteristics are simply hallmarks of low levels is wrong.  There are men with lowish testosterone levels who are quite aggressive and bulky. There are men with testosterone levels at the upper range of normal who do not look intimidating. But, of course, those are not the men we focus on. The guys who stay fixed in our minds are the guys who got even bigger and more powerful by raising their testosterone levels sky high.

Ben John, Testosterone Works!

I would be the last to deny testosterone cannot improve athletic (and by extension, military) performance. The studies which exist, and there are precious few, suggest high levels of testosterone achieved with injections, which raise levels from a  normal of a total testosterone of 250-900 ng/dl (depending on the lab and the assay) to over 1200, will reliably increase muscle mass, strength and recovery. Free testosterone levels by mass spec/liquid chromatography are better assays, and they will increase from 50-200 to 200-800 with injections.

Looking at Sammy Sosa, Mark McGuire and Ben Johnson, I thought, "Uh-oh" seeing Sosa's facial acne, Johnson's huge biceps and McGuire's big trapezius muscles.

One of the most common referrals I got in practice was a man who looked like the Incredible Hulk sitting in my exam room who told me he was seeing me for his "low T."

What he had done, of course, was to stop his injections for  month and then he got his blood drawn, and his T levels were vanishingly low, because his testicles had shut down while he took injected testosterone. Then he gets his blood test and it's low. Why would he do this? Because he wanted me to prescribe a legal source of testosterone rather than his having to depend on a gym rat compounded version which was expensive and made in somebody's dusty basement.

What Hegseth Sees in the Mirror

The other side of the coin are elite female athletes. For the most part, in the few surveys which are available, elite female athletes have normal total and free testosterone levels for females--15-50 ng/dl. And they seem to perform remarkably well.

I don't know Caitlin Clark's levels, but whatever they are, she has enough to perform.

The fact is, there are at least 1,500 male track stars across the US who run faster 800 meter races than the world's record for any female runner who has ever run, and there are thousands more male runners across Europe, Africa and Asia who beat the world record for women.  Elite male athletes simply are stronger, quicker and faster than elite female athletes. 

Chris Evert, a sensational woman female tennis player, laughed when she was asked how she would fare playing against Jimmy Connors or any of the great men of her time. "I would not win a game, much less a set." When pressed, she said the power of the serves and volleys among the men was simply overwhelming.

So, I'll take it from her testimony, and from what little data we have, that testosterone makes a big difference in athletic performance. But there are other factors: male puberty, with it's effects on muscle, bone, brain, tendon is a potent factor. 

How Trump Sees Himself

But here we are talking about huge differences in testosterone levels when we talk about male v female. How much difference differences of 100 ng/dl among a male cohort would make is totally unknown. Putting more gas in an already full tank does not improve the performance of the engine.

Male wrestlers lose weight, train relentlessly and often sleep poorly all of which likely lower their testosterone levels, and yet they are beasts on the mat. Once you get above a certain threshold of testosterone, it's not clear smaller differences matter much, Once you reach a certain level of many things, additional increments result in only diminishing returns: Does a seven foot basketball player really have much advantage over a player who is two inches shorter?

The issue of whether female soldiers are in the same position as Chris Evert is lurking behind Mr. Hegseth's focus on testosterone levels. I would bet on a male warrior in a knife fight, all else being equal (training, size, nutrition), but as we have seen in Ukraine, most war is not fought with knives in the 21st century. Most women soldiers have guns and famously the best snipers of World War II were women.

Male Puberty

There has been an online gossip about "steroid rage" among men who have raised their testosterone levels into the stratosphere, and then beaten up their wives, friends, policemen, whoever. Maybe that's a real thing. Likely not, but maybe. If it is real, however, the question comes back to General Patton's famous remark to his soldiers: "I do not want you dying for your country. I want you to make that other poor bastard die for his country and we can kill him and win."

Testosterone level below 100. Still lethal.

Mr. Hegseth seems to have forgotten that rage and a rebel yell do not win wars.

Hegseth and Testosterone

 

Secretary of Defense/War/Superheroes, Pete Hegseth, is going to test his soldiers, sailors and airman for their testosterone levels.

He has not said if these tests were limited to males, or individuals with an XY chromosome complement or whether individuals with XX chromosomes, or women in common parlance will be tested.

The Secretary, answering questions about why he might want to know the testosterone levels of his warriors, said he did not intend to treat soldiers who fall below the median levels with testosterone injections. But he wouldn't be opposed to soldiers increasing their levels with testosterone injections.

Or something to that effect.

He did not make his own testosterone levels available to the press.

He has not released his SAT scores, either.

Nor has he released his biceps measurements in inches.

It is not clear if he has grown hair on his back or what his testicular size is. 

The thing about testosterone levels  of which Mr. Hegseth seems unaware, is that testosterone levels are not stable, like for example, cholesterol levels or red blood cell counts. Most men have a diurnal variation--highest around seven A.M. and lowest around 4 P.M. Levels vary across days of the week. When endocrinologists are trying to figure out which men have low testosterone levels, they ordinarily draw at least three levels over the course of two to three weeks. In fact, insurance companies require at least two levels before they will pay for testosterone replacement.

Other levels are germane: pituitary levels of the hormones which rise when the testicles fail to keep levels where the pituitary wants them to be, but Mr. Hegseth does not know about these, and he does not want to test them.

Mr. Hegseth has apparently heard about testosterone, but just as obvious, he has not read much about it. Nor has he actually bothered asking people in the field much about testosterone. He may have found some endocrinologist who thought it might be a good idea to screen for testosterone among military servicemen, but you can always find some doctor somewhere who will say crazy things--in Trump World they seem to have set out baited bottles and collected wacko doctors like mosquitoes in blood augar jars. That guy in Florida, Dr. Joseph Lapado, who does not believe in vaccines or COVID 19 and who thinks that vaccines boosters diminish immunity, that mRNA vaccines alter a person's own DNA among other bizarre beliefs. RFKJR, who is not a doctor but plays one on TV believes polio vaccines killed more people than they saved. 

So, expertise is, apparently, in the eye of the beholder and to Mr. Hegseth's eyes, jacking up testosterone levels will win the war in Iran, and make America safer and strike fear into our adversaries. 

Secretary Hegseth is no endocrinologist. But that does not mean he doesn't have an opinion.