Science or Spin? Testosterone, Masculinity, or the Last Gasp of Woke

There is an old saying from Australia:

“Tall poppies get cut down.”

The expression refers to the tallest flower in the field. Rather than celebrating its beauty, someone cuts it off so that it is no taller than the rest.

Psychologists have spent decades studying this phenomenon. They have given it several names: Tall Poppy Syndrome, the Black Sheep Effect, female intrasexual competition, and indirect or relational aggression.

Although each focuses on a different aspect of human behavior, they all point toward a similar observation.

Groups do not always reward excellence.

Sometimes they punish it.

Researchers such as Anne Campbell have argued that women historically competed quite differently than men. Physical aggression carried enormous risks for ancestral women, especially during pregnancy and child-rearing. Instead of fists and open confrontation, competition more often took the form of gossip, exclusion, reputation damage, coalition-building, and social isolation.

Tracy Vaillancourt and others have likewise shown that women are especially skilled at what psychologists call indirect​ or relational aggression—forms of competition that damage a rival without requiring physical conflict.

Interestingly, these patterns have been documented across a remarkable range of social settings. Researchers have observed them among schoolchildren, university students, summer camps, workplaces, parent groups, politics, entertainment, and increasingly on social media. The specific behaviors vary, but the underlying dynamic remains strikingly consistent. Wherever social relationships help determine status, competition often takes relational rather than physical forms.

Classic studies by psychologist Ritch Savin-Williams are especially revealing. His summer camp research showed that even groups of adolescents who had just met quickly formed stable dominance hierarchies. Among girls, those hierarchies were maintained largely through verbal and relational tactics rather than physical confrontation. The lesson was clear: human groups naturally establish social rankings, but the methods used to compete for status often differ between the sexes.

Another body of research examines what is known as the Black Sheep Effect. Groups often react more harshly toward members of their own group who violate expectations than toward outsiders. The person who rises too far above the group, receives too much attention, or appears to disrupt the existing social order can become the target of surprisingly intense hostility.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of relational aggression is not the aggression itself but its invisibility.

Unlike physical violence, relational aggression is often designed to leave little evidence. Gossip is whispered rather than shouted. Social exclusion leaves no bruises. Reputation attacks are disguised as concern. Coalitions form quietly. Each individual act may appear trivial—even accidental—but together they can profoundly alter a person’s standing within a group.

This invisibility may help explain why relational aggression is so often overlooked. Victims know something is happening, yet observers struggle to identify any single event worth condemning. Even authority figures can miss the larger pattern because they evaluate each incident in isolation rather than seeing the cumulative effect.

That brings us to Caitlin Clark.

By any objective measure, Clark has transformed the WNBA.

She fills arenas.

Television ratings have exploded.

Merchandise sales have soared.

Many fans who never watched women’s basketball now tune in specifically to watch her play.

One might expect such a player to be celebrated almost universally.

Instead, she has often been met with unusually hard fouls, dismissive comments, resentment, and a remarkable reluctance among some players ​to acknowledge what she has accomplished.

The fouls themselves are obvious enough, although even the obvious ones often seem to be missed by the referees.

That pattern is typical of relational aggression, which is frequently overlooked by school officials, HR departments, and even informal social groups. Researchers have long noted that women’s relational aggression often goes unrecognized by those in positions of authority.

The fouls against Caitlin Clark are physical, but they also share important characteristics with relational aggression. They are easily hidden within behavior that appears normal: “I play hard basketball. Sometimes it gets rough.” They also come with built-in plausible deniability: “I didn’t mean to do that.” “It’s just a foul.”

The deeper question, then, is not whether these are simply hard basketball plays. It is whether they are better understood as the physical expression of a broader social dynamic.

A hard foul is easy to dismiss. Two hard fouls are still just basketball. But when the same player repeatedly becomes the target of ​v​iolent play, persistent criticism, social distancing, and efforts to minimize her accomplishments, the research suggests we should at least consider the possibility that we are witnessing something larger than ordinary athletic competition.

If so, the referees face a​ tough task. They are trained to officiate individual fouls, not invisible social hierarchies. A referee can call a shove. He cannot call status competition. He can penalize an elbow. He cannot penalize a coalition.

Perhaps Clark is not merely a great player.

She is a tall poppy.

Her extraordinary success has disrupted an existing hierarchy.

The research suggests that when someone suddenly rises far above her peers, she may trigger forms of indirect aggression designed—not consciously in most cases, but socially—to pull her back toward the group.

Again, this is not an excuse.

It is an explanation.

The interesting part comes when we compare this with men’s sports.

Consider Michael Jordan.

Jordan entered the NBA as an extraordinary talent. Opposing teams hit him hard. They challenged him physically. They tried to stop him.

But something else happened.

As his greatness became undeniable, players increasingly admired him. Young athletes wanted to imitate him. Rivals measured themselves against him. He became the standard by which excellence itself was judged.

The competition remained fierce.

The respect grew alongside it.

That difference is fascinating.

Male hierarchies often appear to resolve competition through rank. Once someone proves himself to be the best, others continue trying to defeat him, but they also acknowledge his position.

Female hierarchies often seem to operate somewhat differently. Because relationships and coalition membership play a larger role, someone who rises dramatically above the group may be experienced not simply as the best performer, but as someone disrupting the balance of the group itself.

Human behavior is almost always influenced by multiple factors—personality, cliques, incentives, race, culture, coaching, individual history, and circumstance. It would be a mistake to attribute what we are seeing to any single cause. My suggestion is simply that relational aggression deserves consideration as one contributing factor among many.

What is remarkable is that psychology has spent decades documenting phenomena such as Tall Poppy Syndrome, relational aggression, stable dominance hierarchies, and the Black Sheep Effect, yet almost no one seems willing to ask whether these well-established patterns might help us understand what we are witnessing today.

Sometimes the best way to understand a controversy is not to ask who is good and who is bad.

It is to ask what kind of human behavior we are looking at.

If Caitlin Clark were a man playing in a men’s league, would we be seeing the same social dynamics?

That may be the most interesting question of all.

​Men Are Good.

Tall Poppy Syndrome
N. T. Feather’s classic work: Attitudes towards the high achiever: The fall of the tall poppy.
Also useful: BPS overview on tall poppies, deservingness, and schadenfreude. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229782141_Attitudes_towards_the_high_achiever_The_fall_of_the_Tall_Poppy

Relational Aggression
Crick & Grotpeter’s foundational 1995 paper: Relational Aggression, Gender, and Social-Psychological Adjustment. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7789197/

Black Sheep Effect
Marques, Yzerbyt & Leyens’ original 1988 paper: The “Black Sheep Effect”: Extremity of judgments towards ingroup members as a function of group identification. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7789197/

Dominance / Status Hierarchies
Good overview: Dominance in humans — useful for distinguishing dominance from prestige/status.
Also relevant: Cheng et al. on dominance and prestige as routes to social status.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8743883/

Hierarchy Stability
Knight & Mehta: Hierarchy stability moderates the effect of status on stress and performance.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1609811114

Savin-Williams, R. C., & Vrangalova, Z. (2013).
Mostly heterosexual as a distinct sexual orientation group: A systematic review of the empirical evidence.
Developmental Review, 33(1), 58–88.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2013.01.001

A recent Australian study examined masculinity attitudes among 650 boys attending an all-boys school. The researchers also surveyed parents and staff in an effort to understand how boys develop their views about masculinity.

The findings were fascinating.

The researchers concluded that many boys continue to embrace traditional masculine ideals. They found that boys valued strength, responsibility, resilience, achievement, protection, provision, and earning respect. They also found that many boys felt pressure to live up to these expectations and were influenced by peers and online voices.

Much of the discussion focused on concerns about “traditional masculinity” and the influence of the manosphere.

Yet as I read the boys’ actual responses, I found myself thinking something unexpected: the boys sounded remarkably familiar.

Many decades ago, when I was growing up, boys worried about many of the same things. They wanted to become strong. They wanted their fathers to be proud of them. They wanted to earn respect, succeed, protect the people they loved, and become dependable.

None of this sounded particularly new.

In fact, many of the boys sounded remarkably similar to the men I have worked with over the past thirty-five years as a therapist. They were wrestling with questions that generations of boys have wrestled with:

• What does it mean to become a good man?

• How do I earn respect?

• What responsibilities do I have toward others?

• How strong do I need to become?

These are ancient questions.

What struck me was not the boys’ answers. It was the researchers’ inability to hear what the boys were actually saying.

Again and again, boys spoke about responsibility, strength, sacrifice, protection, duty, and earning respect. They described wanting to become the sort of men their fathers and grandfathers would admire. They spoke about carrying burdens, protecting loved ones, and becoming dependable. Many readers will recognize these aspirations immediately. They have echoed through generations of boys and men.

Yet throughout the paper, these aspirations are repeatedly translated into the language of pathology:

• Protection becomes paternalism.

• Responsibility becomes hierarchy.

• Strength becomes dominance.

• Traditional masculine aspirations become evidence of manosphere influence.

Certainly, some boys expressed troubling ideas. Some comments reflected hostility, bullying, and immaturity, and those deserve criticism. What is remarkable, however, is how often the researchers appear unable to distinguish those attitudes from the far more common aspirations toward duty, courage, sacrifice, and responsibility.

The boys say, “I want to be strong.”

The researchers hear, “I want power.”

The boys say, “I want to protect my family.”

The researchers hear, “I endorse gender hierarchy.”

The boys say, “I want my father to be proud of me.”

The researchers hear, “I have internalized restrictive masculine norms.”

The tragedy is not that the researchers disagree with the boys. The tragedy is that they seem unable to see the beauty in what many of the boys are expressing.

The boys are describing a willingness to carry burdens. They are describing obligations, service to others, and sacrifice. Yet these qualities are so thoroughly filtered through the lens of “toxic masculinity” and “manosphere influence” that the researchers largely fail to recognize them as virtues at all.

This blind spot is revealing.

If members of almost any other group spoke about sacrifice, responsibility, service, and devotion, many academics would immediately recognize these qualities as admirable. When boys express these same aspirations, however, they are often viewed primarily as evidence of social conditioning, patriarchy, sexism, or dominance.

The burden disappears. The sacrifice becomes invisible. The obligation is transformed into power.

Perhaps this is one reason so many boys increasingly feel misunderstood.

One of the most revealing findings in the study was the growing gap between boys and the adults around them. Many boys felt that schools, teachers, and even parents did not understand their views. The researchers interpreted this primarily as evidence of peer influence and online influences.

There may be some truth in that. But there is another possibility worth considering.

Perhaps boys are searching for alternative voices because many institutions no longer speak convincingly to the questions they are asking.

The researchers repeatedly point toward the manosphere as an explanation for boys’ beliefs. Yet many of the beliefs they describe long predate Andrew Tate, social media, and the internet itself:

• The desire to be strong.

• The desire to protect.

• The desire to provide.

• The desire to earn respect.

• The desire to become a man worthy of admiration.

These are not inventions of the manosphere. They are aspirations that have appeared in boys and men for generations.

The study may have been intended as an examination of modern masculinity, but what I saw was something far older. I saw boys wrestling with the same questions that many of us wrestled with decades ago.

The language surrounding masculinity may have changed. The questions have not.

And until our institutions learn to recognize both the burdens and the beauty that many boys associate with manhood, they will continue to misunderstand the very people they are trying to help.

Boys and Men are Good.