Debunking Erica Komisar’s Bad Science, Part 2

“Men can’t get it up because it’s not instinctually normal for them to nurture their children”

Welcome to Part 2 of what I believe will be a 4-part series dedicated to debunking Erica Komisar’s claims made during her interview on Diary of a CEO (now at 1.6 million views on YouTube). If you missed Part 1, you can catch up here.

Phew! I have to say that I am having a hard time keeping the rage bottled while writing this series, but Erica’s not wrong about everything, and I do have a certain level of appreciation for her willingness to say controversial things out loud and take the heat. On the other hand, if you are going to say harmful things–things that deliberately induce guilt and panic and shame–then you had better have really solid scientific backing for your claims.

My issue with Erica is that she uses science in a way that’s manipulative. She brings in just enough sciency-sounding talk to pull the wool over your eyes and make herself sound serious, and then she extrapolates and jumps to unfounded conclusions, with absolute certainty, even when we have strong evidence to the contrary.

Today’s debunking focuses on the role of fathers. Erica makes no secret of the fact that she thinks fathers should go off to work and mothers should stay home with their children. Her platform could be summarized as “the scientific justification of trad-wifery,” which I guess I would be fine with if her research were serious.

But it’s not. Or at least, not all of it is. So let’s talk about what she got right and wrong about the role of fathers, and why it matters.

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Claim: “If you are raised without a father or mother, then you are missing a piece.”

Erica:

“From an evolutionary perspective, as mammals, mothers and fathers are not interchangeable. They serve different functions. Mothers are important for sensitive, empathic nurturing (comforting children in distress, regulating their emotions). Babies need help regulating their emotions in the first three years and if mothers are not present in the first three years to do this soothing, then babies do not learn how to regulate their emotions.”

“Women’s bodies connect them to their babies. There is a physical and hormonal component…Fathers become important when children start to toddle and explore.”

“Fathers and mothers are both critical to the development of healthy children. If you are raised without one, you are missing a piece. But they are not the same, because our hormones dictate that they are not the same.”

“Oxytocin makes mothers sensitive to a baby’s distress, but when fathers produce oxytocin it comes from a different part of their brain, and it makes them what we call playful, tactile stimulators of babies. Mothers help to regulate sadness, fear, distress, but fathers help to regulate excitement and aggression, so often when single mothers are raising children without fathers, often little boys will develop behavioral problems (impulsive, aggressive).”

My thoughts:

Let’s start, once again, with the things we agree on. I have to admit that on some level, it’s almost a relief to hear someone say that mothers and fathers are different. We are mammals and that does matter. While I disagree with her aggressive stance on “breast is best” I think society would do well to acknowledge that breastfeeding, should a mother choose to do it, is an enormous task that cannot be outsourced. Even if you pump (and many mothers hate pumping) you still need the time and space to make the milk. So in that sense, women’s bodies do connect them to their babies.

She’s also right that (cis) men and women have different hormones and that this affects our parenting styles. There does seem to be some solid research indicating that oxytocin levels in mothers are generally associated with more affectionate parenting behaviors, whereas for fathers, it tends to be associated with more tactile stimulation and object presentation. Many of the progressive parents I hang out with balk at this fact, but research is research, and this research is good.

The problem is that she uses this science to quickly leap to the conclusion that only children raised within intact heterosexual marriages can grow up psychologically healthy and that instead of changing society in order to accommodate breastfeeding mothers in the workforce, we should all just quit and stay home.

What does the research say?

Once again, there is no evidence to suggest that children cannot learn to regulate their emotions while being cared for by non-maternal caregivers. As I mentioned in my last post, children who are cared for exclusively by their mothers do not develop any differently from those who are cared for by others.

In fact, according to this meta-analysis, children raised from birth by two gay fathers actually had better outcomes than children raised in heterosexual marriages. A meta-analysis is a study that analyzes the results of multiple other high-quality studies, meaning the results are robust. The authors conclude that “these results may be attributable to potential higher socioeconomic status for gay fathers, better preparedness for fatherhood in the face of strong antigay stigma, and more egalitarian parenting roles.” Whatever the reason, the results are solid. Children raised in loving homes by two same-sex parents are not, as Erica suggests, “missing a piece.” She does admit that a father can “learn to become a sensitive empathic nurturer” but only if we acknowledge that he is less capable to begin with so he can work to overcome his handicap.

What about single moms and dads?

Children raised by single parents do tend to have more externalizing issues, according to some research, but this is probably due to socioeconomic struggles and parenting stress more than to the absence of a mother or father figure. Indeed, research shows that when controlling for physical and social resources, outcomes are the same for children raised in single-parent households as for children raised in “intact” two-parent heterosexual families. The study concludes, “children of single mothers who occupy similar family environments as children in two-parent families in terms of resources perform slightly better in terms of externalizing behavior problems than their two-parent counterparts.” In other words, if you can reconstruct the alloparental social context of our evolutionary past (with lots of people helping to raise your kids), your children will actually do better than parents who stick it out in single family homes with two heterosexual parents.

Basically, there is no research to suggest that the nuclear heterosexual family is best for children. This is conservative nonsense with no scientific backing. And if you follow my work you know that the isolated nuclear family is a recent, post-industrial invention that has done no one any good.

Claim: “It’s not instinctually normal for men to stay home and nurture their children.”

Erica:

“When men stay home and nurture children, there’s an inverse relationship between testosterone and oxytocin. Women’s testosterone goes up when they are in the workforce and men’s goes down when they stay home and what that’s doing for sex lives is bad: men can’t get it up because it’s not instinctually normal for men to stay home and nurture their children. We have reversed things, culturally, so fast, and then we just expect that our evolutionary biological responses can catch up but they can’t. Evolution does not work like that.”

“Also, when men’s testosterone goes down they get depressed…If we let men be the nurturers we are going to have to supplement their testosterone.”

My thoughts:

Nothing irks me more than when people use evolutionary biology to justify stay-at-home mothering, when in fact they know nothing at all about evolutionary biology. As I have spoken about extensively, women have always worked throughout our evolutionary history (you can watch my reel on that here if you’re interested).

But I am also willing to admit, once again, that not everything Erica says here is wrong. Men who nurture their children more do tend to have lower testosterone levels. Married men have lower levels of testosterone than single men, and fathers have the lowest levels, on average (source). Direct interaction with children also tends to lower testosterone levels (source).

But…is this a PROBLEM??!

Erica is suggesting that this is pathological, when in fact it’s an ancient evolved mechanism. Males in any species face a trade-off between investing more effort in mating and investing more effort in raising their existing children. Higher testosterone levels are generally associated with higher sex drive, whereas lower testosterone levels are generally associated with more nurturing behavior. In monogamous, pair-bonded species like humans, where the males play a critical role in helping their existing children survive, it’s totally normal and expected that testosterone levels should go down during fatherhood in order to encourage more nurturing behavior and less sexual drive.

If anything, we are not doing enough these days to encourage this wonderful, natural, biological process (as I have written about here). When men fail to take paternity leave and miss the critical window for bonding with their baby, it’s harder for them to take on a nurturing role later on. Sarah Hrdy has written extensively about the neurological rewiring and hormonal changes that occur in fathers, in her book Father Time, and I recommend it to anyone seriously interested in this topic (and who wants the well-informed and well-researched opinion of someone who actually holds a PHD in evolutionary anthropology, and not a BA in English Lit and a Masters in Social Work).

My point is: find me a mother out there–one mother–who thinks her husband is doing too much nurturing of their children and not soliciting her often enough for sex. I have never, in all of my research and talks with mothers, heard a single woman complain about this. If Erica thinks this is the reason for divorce and marital problems in the modern era, as she suggests on DOAC, then she lives in a willful bubble of her own design.

But does low testosterone, due to too much nurturing, cause men to become depressed?

Borderline testosterone levels are associated with higher rates of depression in men, but these men also tend to be obese and physically inactive, which is a major confound (since those variables alone are often associated with depression). Moreover, many of the men in these studies are already on antidepressants, which begs the question of whether the medication could be the cause of lower testosterone, and not vice versa.

The American Urological Association (AUA) considers a normal range to be 450–600 ng/dL, and low testosterone is below 300 ng/dL. New fathers experience a median testosterone decrease of about 30%, meaning a new father who drops from 500 to 375 is still well within the healthy range.

It’s probably also worth noting that in hunter-gatherer societies, men are often very involved and affectionate fathers (as I wrote about here), and hunter-gatherers are known to be quite psychologically healthy by most measures. Somehow, they manage it without taking testosterone supplements.

Next up: what do we know about the relationship between maternal care, or lack thereof, and mental illness? Is ADHD a stress response primarily caused by lack of good mothering? What about depression? What role do genetics play?