Testosterone duo: Real message from the aggressive Rohtak sisters

The Rohtak sisters, Aarti and Pooja, hit the headlines this week in two avatars, once as heroines and subsequently as possible male-bashing agent provocateurs. They became heroines when a video showing them resisting and striking back at alleged harassers surfaced out of nowhere (author unknown).

Their reputation plummeted when an eyewitness said the boys had not provoked anything and another video - showing the sisters roughing up another guy, with one kick headed for the crotch - being particularly noteworthy. An Indian Express report today (4 December) says the girls had also filed a complaint against three boys in a third incident some time ago.

It will take some time for the real truth to emerge. Meanwhile, our heroines have been removed from their pedestals and rebranded as possible female trouble-makers. Exactly the archtypical view some men would like to have of women who don’t fit the submissive stereotype.

That the media can one day hoist people to such rarefied levels of courage and then, equally quickly, throw them on the dungheap of ignominy shows how quick it is to rush to judgment on minimal evidence.

But that’s another story. My purpose here is to show that there could be a third reality (and possibly a different message to take from the incidents) behind the Rohtak sisters’ apparent aggro. They may be neither victims nor villains - they may just be themselves, which is that they may be (note the maybe) just more aggressive than “normal” females.

In our binary world, there are aggressive men and there are not-so-aggressive or submissive women. We think of aggressive women as oddballs and freaks - though in nature’s scheme of things the male-female separation is always one of degree.

It is now well-established in science that men become masculine and women feminine partly through the impact of a hormone called testosterone. While the Y chromosome (or its absence) determines our physical gender traits and the plumbing, adding to the male-female differentiation is testosterone (the T-hormone). Generally men have much more of it and women less. But there can be women with more of the T-hormone and men with less of it than the male and female averages in a population.

The Y chromosome decides whether the fertilised female egg becomes a boy or girl, but the degree or maleness or femaleness of a child (or adolescent or adult, as the case may be), depends on the levels of testosterone impacting the brain. Girls with more testosterone in them will be more aggressive than those with less of it. Testosterone is also a key determinant of sex drive in both males and females.

This is not (repeat not) to claim that the Rohtak sisters had more testosterone in them than normal, but it is to suggest the third apparent reality: they could be girls with more than the normal aggro in them than the female average. This is why we have athlete  Dutee Chand facing a crisis in her career, as she is barred from competing in women’s events as she has a condition called hyperandrogenism , where a female body produces a larger amount of testosterone than the average woman.

A second point worth making is that the demise of patriarchy needs (possibly) a corresponding rise in more aggressive females. A key reason why male domination persists is because they are, on average, bigger and physically stronger. While technology has reduced the importance of size (we have pepper sprays and guns to level the field), in most normal situations, these levellers are worthless.

A takeout for me is that till women are able to deal with men even on the physical aggression plane, which means learning self-defence and the ability to give it back, patriarchy will be difficult to beat back. Power is usually neutralised by counter-power. In their own way, the Testosterone Sisters of Rohtak have sent a clear message.

(Note: I am using the term Testosterone above not only in the hormonal sense, but largely to mean physical aggressiveness, whether it is caused by high T-levels or otherwise).