Razor Blades and Testosterone

On being a man who cuts.

Feb 06, 2025

Image graciously provided by our benevolent AI overlords at ChatGPT. The article, however, is human-made.

Note: this article is about self-harm. If that is a sore spot for you, or you find descriptions of injury particularly nauseating, please consider skipping this one. I expect everyone in my audience to read responsibly. If you are struggling with self-injury, please seek help or talk to someone you trust about your struggle.

For ten years, I was a regular cutter. I started cutting consistently when I was sixteen, and I didn’t stop until I was 26.

The majority of self-reported cutters are women. I always felt weird as one of the lone men who cut, not as a phase or a teenage dalliance, but as a committed careerist. I’ve often struggled with knowing how to communicate this strange compulsion to others, so I tend not to communicate about it at all. Why couldn’t I have a stereotypically masculine addiction like drugs, alcohol, or gambling? Why does it have to be this oddly androgynous and taboo thing? Whenever my cutting comes up, the fact that I am a 6’1” bearded man is never out of sight.

Men aren’t supposed to hurt themselves this way. Men are supposed to kill themselves with drugs or alcohol; they are supposed to hurt others and get hurt by others. I have only ever known one other man who cut as persistently and severely as I have. Every other committed cutter I have ever met has been a woman.

Over the years, I’ve periodically searched for material specifically for men who cut, and I can’t find it. Growing up, the only male figures who cut were hardly ideal — Marilyn Manson, Iggy Pop, Richey Edwards. This only compounds the isolation further.

"How common is it for men to cut?" asks one Redditor, "I’ve done it a few times now and got some pretty bad scars on my leg but always feel like a bitch doing it as a man." I relate. Being a man who self-injures with blades feels odd at best and emasculating at worst.

I don’t know how to square the feminine mystique of cutting with the statistics on male self-destruction. Nearly 80% of all suicides are men. Suicide is the #1 killer of men under the age of 50 in the UK, and the #2 killer of men under 45 in the United States. Men are destroying themselves on an industrial scale. It seems curious to me that, at least in my pocket of the world, self-injury is an exclusively feminine discussion when men are taking the trophy for Most Likely To Kill Themselves. Even if male cutters are still a minority, I know that they’re out there and that they are probably carrying the same gendered bullshit that I carry.

So, here is a small attempt to change that isolation. Here are a few out-of-focus reflections on the life of a man who, despite being clean from the knife for a decade, still desperately wants to cut.

My arms and legs are a latticework of scars. The scars are fading away now, but know what to look for and you can read them like blood splatter on a wall.

Some are deep, jagged, solitary, and shine like glass in the light. Those were moments so horrific that I no longer remember them. I can’t recall the anguish or the event. I only have this bodily mark to remind me that, in another forgotten life, a stranger was so tormented that he savagely opened his flesh.

Others are precise, practiced, and delicate: the marks of a trained hand that knows exactly how much pressure to apply to receive the exact amount of needed relief. I remember these moments more clearly: they were before I went to class, before I had a music recital, and when I was alone in the dark in bed.

I don’t notice my scars anymore, but on occasion other people notice them, and then I notice them, too. It’s strange to recall all over again that I carry this storybook in my flesh, a constant reminder to myself and others that I have hurt this much. I’ll wear shorts and a tank top to a coffee shop, oblivious, and then I remember that others see what has become invisible to me.

And what do they see? I’ve wondered this for years. They must see someone who is fucked up; someone who’s had to be in the mental hospital; someone who might have a personality disorder. Maybe they see someone who was abused or had a terrible childhood, and who spends the rest of his life trying to exorcise those demons. I don’t know. What I do know is that they see a rare man with this affliction.

In high school, I was athletic but also shy and excruciatingly insecure. Girls crushed on me, though I was too oblivious and secretly gay to notice. I was also exquisitely, painfully sensitive. I was desperate for the approval of others, and I felt the slightest hint of rejection as a red hot knife. I was agonizingly lonely. I was failing all my classes. I was in love with another male classmate but didn’t know that’s what I was experiencing.

All of this was normal teenage fare. It wasn’t until I was 16 that a demon crept into my skull and started messing with the default settings of my brain, and that’s when it went from normal teenage travails to something entirely strange and deadly.

The abyss opened without warning in my mind, and I was plagued with thoughts and feelings so dark that they terrified me. The darkness, meaninglessness, and second-by-second anguish dragged on and on. This wasn’t the dullness of depression; this was something white-hot and otherworldly. It made me feel worthless, gave me driving creativity, plagued me with monstrous dreams, and dragged me down, and down, and down. I remember being astonished at the continuous agony and that I could just keep going. This was the space within which I finally cut.

I remember the first time. I don’t remember the exact timbre of the agony, but I know that it was intense. I remember that the cutting made me feel good. It opened up a white void inside of me where there was a blissful nothing; a lovely television static that countered the dark emptiness. It made me feel euphoric, and it stopped the negative emotions in their tracks. But I also remember the crushing, numb shame the next morning — a shame as towering as the bliss. The pain was right there again, only this time I’d given it more fuel.

So, early on, in this crucial moment of my cognitive development, fiber optic cables were laid down in the ocean of my brain at the age of 16, creating a connection, as fast as light, that hurting = cutting. This began a cycle that lasted for a decade. I still live with those cables, and I still regularly fight with them.

I was then caught in the snare of the online self-harm world. 16-year-old me was a foreshadowing of the kind of online radicalization that seems to be happening en masse to children now. A friend of mine who was also a cutter introduced me to this underworld of anguish. She showed me online forums full of deranged cutters sharing their stories of self-injury. I still remember some of these stories: women describing their scars and their particular methods for shredding their flesh. Websites dedicated to self-harm featured hauntingly aesthetic images of blood, scars, and open wounds, and worshipful pages devoted to patron saints of self-harm, like Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers.

It's chilling to realize how vulnerable I was as a kid and how I had no self-protective filter — no internal Chesterton's fence that warned me to not go there. It’s scary to think how kids like me are taken advantage of now in the vast online worlds of Discord, Snapchat, TikTok, and Telegram.

This content propelled me deeper and encouraged me to fetishize, ritualize, and worship self-mutilation. The slicing of flesh became a sort of devotion. I glorified self-destruction, perhaps because that was a more heroic framing for the terrified child at the bottom of that well.

Why was I so vulnerable to this? I don’t know. All I know is that I hurt an enormous amount for seemingly no reason. I hurt more than was ordinary or necessary. Nature is godless and unfair, and some people are just born without skin — with more exposed nerves than others.

In the years that followed, I mastered cutting as if it was an art — I eventually learned how to hurt myself with sharp objects without leaving a scar; I learned to appreciate the strange loveliness of beads of blood rising from the skin, and I learned exactly how much pressure to apply — not too hard, not too light — to yield the maximum amount of euphoria.

Why? Because I was angry; because I hated myself; because I was a vessel filled with radioactive poison and no place for it to go; because I was testosterone-fueled but too gentle to release that aggression onto anything other than myself. As a young man, I was all gas and all breaks with no way to vent my rage except by exploding inward. At the scariest moments, I was so lost and angry that I wanted to do real violence to other people. Instead, I did violence to myself.

It was the eyes of my now husband that stopped my cutting. I couldn’t stop for myself, but I could stop for this other man.

At first, my self-injury scared and confused him. But then he told me words that changed the trajectory of my self-injury forever: “It’s ok if you do it again. No judgment. Only love.”

Young men are inclined to fuck a lot, and Jon and I were no different. I loved Jon more than anything in the world — that wild, slavish, puppy-dog love — and I didn’t want to see that look in his eyes ever again when he saw fresh cuts, which he inevitably would whenever we had sex. This gave me — and still gives me — a newfound will to counter the drive to hurt myself. Cutting is a carnal act, and I needed an equally carnal antidote. Love of the flesh is the answer to hatred of the flesh.

That was 10 years ago. It wasn’t easy to sacrifice my cutting on the altar of loving my husband, and I needed to relearn my relationship to suffering to make it work. I’ve had only one slip-up in those intervening years.

I now have a clearer understanding of what’s wrong with me. I was diagnosed with Bipolar II with Psychotic Features as an adult, and that’s given me a much better understanding of my mental states. I have explosive creative bouts in which I frequently feel driven to hurt myself. I experience horrific lows during which I get paranoid and delusional, and I similarly want to hurt myself there, too.

I can also look back on the young man and see what went wrong. Entirely apart from my fucked up brain, I didn’t have an easy youth. I had learning disabilities, failed most of my classes, and felt stupid; I was gay in an extremely conservative setting; I watched my friends get murdered when I was 19. I was a fucked up young man, and I entered my 20s ready to explode. I couldn’t imagine living to 30; I assumed that I would kill myself by then. I am now 36, and I love that fucked up kid who thought I would never exist.

It’s wild to me how, a decade after consistently cutting, I still experience the urge. It’s quieter now, but only because I’ve locked it in a box.

When I feel particularly tired, manic, lonely, depressed, or scared, my arms start to tingle, to cry out. My body aches to be cut open. I’ve tried describing this to other people, and I’m always met with incomprehension.

Hypomania is particularly confounding. “It’s like I feel incredible and want to kill myself at the same time,” I explain. I might as well be describing what it’s like to have a fifth limb or to smell a number. It can’t be described, so I’m shut away in a phenomenological locker where only other cutters can know what it means to be a cutter. This is not an ideal state of affairs since cutters have a tendency to bring out the worst in each other.

Not cutting is my line in the sand — the boundary I do not let myself cross. I’ve allowed myself to do any number of other things when I’m in pain: too much porn, industrial levels of nicotine, hours of video games, an over-reliance on exercise, too much food. Who cares? None of them hold a candle to my oldest and scariest nemesis.

Cutting is like an opportunistic ex. He is the first to call whenever anything starts to go wrong: “Hey, I saw that you’re going through a rough time. Can I help you get through it?” His suitcase is always packed, ready to move in and resume our decades-long relationship at a moment’s notice.

Sometimes the desire to hurt myself is so powerful that I resort to lying down, closing my eyes, and breathing through it. I’m simultaneously overwhelmed by the knowledge that I could make it all go mute if I were to just make a cut in my arm or leg. A tiny one would do — just a little bloodletting. These two apparitions appear hand it hand — the pain and the opportunity for relief — like the twins in The Shining.

I don’t act. I just lie there, paralyzed, waiting for the overwhelming craving to pass, knowing all the while that I could feel better. Sometimes the craving becomes impulsive and hysterical, an adrenaline junky shouting “Do it do it do it do it” over and over again in my head.

That’s the scariest thing about persistent craving — the ego depletion. It's like sliding down a slope toward the edge of a cliff. A bad patch for me could last months, and it gets harder and harder to continually resist that little voice that says everything will be better if I just slash my arms and legs. It wears me down. It makes less sense, over time, why I’m fighting so hard to not indulge. Willpower itself is an intoxicant: the longer I apply it, the more drunk and impulsive I become; my act of strength makes me weaker.

I know I can’t rely on willpower alone, so I’ve developed an arsenal of tools. Meditation might be the single most powerful skill I’ve ever learned. Exercise saves my life. Lifting heavy things and moving long distances is an excellent replacement for self-harm, though not always available in the moment. Most of all, learning to use my voice and tell other people when I’m hurting is what keeps me off the ledge, but it’s also the single hardest task of my life. I’ve used my voice an untold number of times, and I still feel like I don’t know how to do it.

Through all of these struggles, the real man is lurking in the background. What would a real man do? The real man wants to shut down, clamp down on the voice that asks for help. The real man wants to punch walls and himself. The real man feels, at best, alone and weird for being a cutter, and at worst like a faggot bitch. The real man isn’t even a thought — he’s a physiological response. The real man hurts and hates himself for hurting.

In response to the real man, there’s a progressive man who rises up to argue with him. But this guy just adds more noise to the fight over what a “real” man is. A real man, he argues, shows his emotions — never mind that I often don’t know how to. A real man, he argues, doesn’t care about sexed stereotypes — never mind that I always have and can’t help it. A real man lets himself cry — never mind that I feel physiologically incapable of crying no matter how much I want to. A real man is gentle, not aggressive — never mind that testosterone makes me aggressive, if not towards others, then at least towards myself.

The Progressive Man and the Real Man are both impossible standards. I don’t measure up to either of them. I can’t be the Progressive Man who shows his feelings with nonviolent awareness; I also can’t be the Real Man who doesn’t have feelings.

To sidestep this whole catastrophe, I imagine that I’ve woken up one morning to find a puppy deposited on my doorstep. It’s one of those big, clumsy, manic, dangerous-but-cute puppies. It’s now my bewildering job to take care of this beast. It would be easy to punish the puppy, ignore the puppy, or abuse the puppy. This tends to be the solution when I see myself as an American male instead of a puppy.

Like any responsible pet owner, I just do what’s required to take care of it. I know that the puppy needs lots and lots of exercise, so I take it on long runs and hikes in the wilderness. I know it needs to play with other puppies, so I take it to the dog park (tabletop games, coffee with friends, a weekly men’s group) where it can hang out with other puppies. This puppy needs an insane amount of sleep, so I make sure it gets enough of that, too. Sometimes the puppy needs affection; it needs to be held, caressed, and nurtured, so I make sure it has its physical needs met. I know that the puppy needs life skills, so I teach him tricks to make him more resilient (meditation, reading, cognitive behavioral skills.) And, sometimes, the puppy gets sick. He starts feeling bad or manic and wants to hurt himself. That’s when I take him to the puppy doctor (a therapist) to see what can be done to help.

Seeing myself as a puppy instead of a man helps cut through the bullshit intrinsic to being a man in our culture. In a strange Zen Koan, dehumanizing myself is an act of humanization. Being a puppy is more human than being a man.

Somehow, this cobbled-together arsenal of tools works. I haven’t cut myself in years. I also know that my abstinence is no guarantee that I will never cut in the future. I might slip on some dark night and make a cut or two.

I’ve felt very close to that possibility recently, and this article is what I’ve done instead. The craving to cut has been near-overwhelming the past few weeks, and I’ve decided to pour that anger, that need to be heard, that desperate cry for relief into written words instead of my flesh. I hope these words have been of some comfort.

If you’re lost, you can do what I’ve done and synthesize the suffering into something else. Most of all, you can use your voice and tell someone about your struggle. If you feel out of control — like the rage and despair are pushing you closer and closer to a self-destructive edge — you are not alone. It’s ok that you don’t live up to the Real Man or the Progressive Man. I don’t either. It’s ok that you hurt, that you feel lost, that you’re imperfect. After all, you’re just a puppy.

Now go love that puppy and take him for a walk.

Sacred Tension

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