the rodent physiognomy dichotomy of left-handed males

please don't take this seriously

DISCLAIMER: This is pseudoscience. This is silly. This is bullshit.

At some point in my freshman year I realized that I’d gone on dates with a statistically significant number of lefthanded men. I’m going to preserve some personal privacy by not dropping an exact ratio, but if there was nothing otherwise significant about lefthandedness, the chances of me going out with that proportion of lefthanded men by pure coincidence would be one in one hundred thousand.

This led me to do some Googling to see what behavioural correlations might’ve caused such an overrepresentation of lefties. And it turns out that male lefthandedness is correlated with:

• Larger corpus callosum

• Higher testosterone in utero

• Lower bioavailable testosterone

• Both low and high IQ (ie bimodal distribution of IQ)

• Altruism

• Shizophernia

• Criminamily

• Homicidality

Sometimes people try to explain these away as brought on by our cruel society which sets lefties up to be outcasts from the start. But surely lefthanded prejudice is not so strong that it changes the brain and testosterone levels.

Notice also how some of these changes are at odds with each other: altruism and criminality? Clearly there exist at least two distinct modes of being a lefthanded male.

Enter the rodent physiogeny dichotomy of left-handed men.

The theory is as follows:

• Left-handed men tend to have a stronger feminine essence than their right-handed counterparts

• Men who try to suppress this essence end up as “rats”. Rats are more neurotic, extraverted¹, and more likely to go insane or resort to criminality.

• Men who incorporate this essence end up as “mice”. Mice are less neurotic, kinder, and more introverted. They look more like mice.

Don’t have an intuitive sense of the rat/mouse dichotomy? Let’s classify a few important historical persons.

Paul McCartney? MOUSE!

We’re starting off really easy here, because I can’t think of any human that looks more like a mouse. It’s also obvious on the level of creative output; a rat would be incapable of writing “And I Love Her”². It’s too sincere.

Nikola Tesla? RAT!

This one’s hard at first. The ears say “mouse” but the lower face says “rat”. However, a quick scan of anecdotes from the “Personal Life” section of his Wikipedia page betrays him as a rat:

• Badgered a professional subordinate into changing her dress

• Friends with Nazi-adjdacent mystics

• Committed himself to chastity to focus on science

This is someone whose mode of adding value to the world relies on chaos and restriction, indicative of the deeper chaoses and repressions involved with having an unincorporated feminine essence.

Barack Obama? MOUSE!

This one reveals that “mouse” does not mean “timid” or “womanly”. Nor does it indicate a value judgement. Obama is a wife guy. Obama campaigned on warm and fuzzy feelings. Obama was personable and respectable.

His being an imperialist power has very little bearing on his classification here, as the rat/mouse dichotomy is more about internal order and how one reaches conclusions rather than the real-world outcomes of decisions.

The college-years anecdote in Obama’s memoir where he reads the works of Virgina Woolf to get with an "ethereal bisexual” almost gets him into rat territory (and maybe suggests the boundary between rat and mouse can be crossed throughout one’s life) but given that he only reads Woolf and does not engage in any active deception, it’s fair to assume that Obama’s actions here came from a place of genuinely wanting to connect rather than outright deception.

Eminem? RAT!

Eminem is clearly a rat. The impetus of most Eminem songs is his anger at women close to him. You don’t get that kind of output from a man at peace with his own femininity.

1. I mean “extravert” and “introvert” in the original Jungian sense, ie an “introvert” is someone who cares more about subjectivity and an extravert is someone who cares more about objectivity.

2. Songs of McCartney that could’ve been written by a rat include “Temporary Secretary” and “Band on the Run”.