We Hate Testosterone

On pathologizing a force of nature

To celebrate becoming a Substack bestseller, I am running a 40% discount on year paid subscriptions until March 15th. Thank you for supporting my work!

Photo by Artur Matosyan on Unsplash

In 2020, my doctor looked me straight in the eye and told me that if I didn’t get my weight and cholesterol under control I would die of a heart attack at 40.

Got it, I thought. This is what I pay doctors for. I have now lost about 35 pounds, and I’ve put on quite a bit of muscle. I have transformed from a gigantic, jolly, toddler-shaped thing to a slightly-less toddler-shaped thing with bigger muscles. But I was completely unprepared for what would come with this physical transformation. I wish that, at the end of the appointment, my doctor would have said something like, “Oh, one other thing — in the process of becoming healthy, you are going to become a much less socially acceptable person. Good luck!”

It took several years, but I eventually reached a threshold of fitness that resulted in rapid, unexpected transformations. These transformations reminded me why I had allowed myself to get fat in the first place.

First, my sex drive horrified me. All I wanted to do was have sex all the time. Fortunately, I have a spouse of a decade who is more than happy to oblige. But my fantasies changed, too. The range of my sexual desires widened and deepened. I didn’t just want more of the socially acceptable stuff like monogamous, loving sex. I also wanted the less acceptable stuff, like no-strings-attached, no-holds-barred sex with strangers. I became more interested in pornography, kink, and loveless, casual sex. A lot more interested.

My base-level sex drive is now so powerful that I’m constantly having to strategize with it so that it doesn’t drive me off the tracks. If I don’t think deliberately about managing it, my sex drive kidnaps me and runs off with me tucked under its arm. This is extremely annoying and also not exactly socially acceptable. Paying this much attention to sex must surely be a sign of dysfunction. But no — the dysfunction runs in the opposite direction. I was fat; now I’m healthy.

More alarming than the increased sex drive are the psychological changes; changes that we all assume to be purely cultural, and yet they emerged from some deep, basal substrate in my mind.

I don’t think of myself as an angry person, and yet I now find myself experiencing white-hot flashes of anger, especially on the days I work out. I have a shorter fuse — I’m slightly more prone to outbursts, verbal aggression, and flights of violent fancy. In almost every case, showing my anger would be insane and disproportionate, so I wrestle it to the ground. I walk away, I breathe, I remind myself that anger is temporary madness. Someone will say something that feels like a slight against my status or my character, and I will have a brief, all-out brawl with myself to contain my rage. “Breathe” I tell myself, “just breathe.”

I wish it stopped there. It doesn’t. My day-dream life is now violent.

I find myself wanting to punch someone in the face really, really hard. I even fantasize about punching people I like. I will look at the face of a close male friend and wonder, to my astonishment, what it would be like to punch him without warning.

My relationship to my pets has changed. Previously, I was content to cuddle with my six cats. I still do that, but now I also fantasize about how I would go full John Wick on anyone who would look sideways at any of my cats. Some berserker, violent, guard-dog instinct has ignited in me for these adorable felines. I cuddle with them and fantasize about smashing the face of anyone who hurts them.

This aggression has become so persistent that I’ve started looking for local martial arts gyms just to get this aggression out of my system. In the meantime, I just work out more, but this creates a sort of violence feedback loop. The only way I know how to get out this aggressive energy is to work out more. While this helps to burn off steam, it also paradoxically builds up more aggression, which I then have to displace to somewhere else.

Other changes feel less physiological, but are no less noticeable. I desire male companionship and comradery more. It’s suddenly weirdly important to have a group of men I do things with, when I was previously content to just have face-to-face coffee dates with friends. I still have those, but I need to play games with men and be in groups of men, too.

Even my music tastes have changed. While I was previously solely content with instrumental, chill, ambient music, I now find myself craving brutal, pounding, testosterone-fueled music, as if there’s an inner berserker in me who needs a soundtrack to get pumped for battle to. Instead of writing to Lofi and ambient, I now write to heavy metal and heavy electronica.

---

An obvious culprit here is testosterone. Losing weight, building muscle, and improving cardiovascular health caused a massive bounce-back in my testosterone levels, especially once I hit a certain threshold of physical health in the spring of 2024. This means I now feel more like I did in high school and college: wild sex drive, aggressive tendencies, more energy, and greater physicality.

I cannot emphasize enough how startling this all is. I am a nerdy writer. I have built a personal vision of masculinity that includes none of these “traditional” energies of masculinity. The vision of masculinity I embraced after the wild travails of my youth is that of a fat, gentle friar: a man committed to kindness, scholarly introspection, and monastic tranquility. Gone were the wild, testosterone-fueled days of my teens and early twenties, when I would party, drive at high speeds on mountain roads, get into fist fights with friends for the fun of it, and go on month-long sex benders. I thought those days were behind me. I was wrong. It’s as if a butch testosterone fairy has injected me with T as I slept, and the friar has woken up to a wild frat boy inhabiting his monastic cell — an angry, promiscuous, lustful, aggressive, competitive, and risky young man.

Testosterone is not the only cause, or even the most direct instigator, for each of the transformations I’ve experienced. A soup of other hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline, could account for my heightened aggression, especially on the days I do strength training. Culture, placebo, greater confidence, and shifting identity also all play a role in everything I’ve described here, particularly the ways my music tastes and relationship to other men have changed. But a lifetime of testosterone production, from utero to this very moment, is directly or indirectly implicated in every experience I’ve described here. I have been forged in the furnace of testosterone, and becoming physically healthy has only made its effects on my mind and body more pronounced.

I take for granted that hormones dramatically shape not just our bodies, but also our minds, personalities, and desires. I find it mildly offensive and deranged to suggest otherwise: I have been an athlete, a brother to two sisters, a friend to women on birth control, and a companion to trans people as they go through transition. The earth is round, and hormones shape human experience in concert with culture. I won’t spend any time discussing whether this is the case — this is a blog post, not a dissertation, and I consider it a forgone conclusion. I do, however, strongly recommend Carole Hooven’s book T: The story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us as an excellent primer to the hormone.

Instead, I think there is a far more interesting question to ask: are we ok with this? More to the point, are we ok with the natural effects of testosterone and the inevitable, average results of being a healthy male? Because I don’t think we are.

I hear a lot of talk about men. I read it on social media, I read articles on the internet, and I listen to friends chitchat about their male coworkers, family members, boyfriends, brothers, husbands, and sons. They always clarify that they really like men and don’t hate them. But beneath those words, I hear a subliminal rumble that sends a completely different message — that they are ok with only a small sphere of masculine drives and desires, and that they very much despise the rest.

Men’s sexuality in particular is brought up for scrutiny. Men are objectifying, horny, animalistic. Everyone suspects that men masturbate more than women (which we do), and find it mildly gross.¹

The way we talk about visual pornography in particular reveals some unpleasant facts about how we view male sexuality. Richard V Reeves, an expert on men and boys, commented on this when I interviewed him a few years ago:

Here’s why I really think there’s this moral panic about porn, and why it’s called a “public health emergency” in several US states. I’ve thought about this whenever someone has been caught, like the Jeffrey Toobin thing, the New Yorker writer who was famously caught masturbating during a break from a Zoom call. The reason I think you get that reaction to him but also to porn is that it reveals in really stark and vivid ways what men are like when it comes to sex. I think for a lot of women especially the idea that you could just take five minutes out of your day, log onto Pornhub, maybe masturbate and then go back to the spreadsheets you were working on – they find that just incomprehensible and a bit disgusting, because that’s very different to female sexuality on average. What I think porn does in some ways is shine a light on an aspect of male sexuality that a lot of people just don’t like. I think a lot of women don’t like it, but I also think that conservatives don’t like it generally. It is a fact about male sexuality that is uncomfortable, and porn makes it quite visceral and visible.

We all love male sexual desire when it is directed towards loving, monogamous pair bonding, and we fear and punish it when it falls outside of those bounds. But it inevitably does and will — biology makes it so. The world over, men report having greater interest in casual, loveless sex than women on average, and fantasize more about body parts than persons. Pornography, which has existed since men first started scrawling on cave walls, is a mere reflection of men’s psyches, and it is so successful on the internet today because it harnesses the market force of men’s fantasies. Pornography is not merely shaping men’s desires, it exists in the first place because of men’s desires. No matter how much civilization, religion, or family may leash, train, and house-break a man, these instincts will never go away.

It’s obvious to me that large swaths of our culture hate this about men, particularly conservatives and feminists. They protest and howl in answer to this observation, but I do not believe their protestations until they demonstrate that they can use neutral language to describe men’s innate desires.

Conservatives and feminists aren’t the only ones who revile maleness and the effects of testosterone. Liberals in particular despise and fear the aggression innate to average male drives.

Consider, for example, this headline from 2017, proclaiming that Trump’s is a “testosterone fueled presidency.” This is not meant as a compliment. The wording is clear: “testosterone” is a synonym for “bad”. In this view, it isn’t a neutral part of nature, neither good nor bad, but inextricably wedded to the worst excesses of toxic maleness. A hormone coursing through the veins of every man is the problem.

This isn’t an isolated concern. I know many liberal parents who anguish over the aggression of their male children and struggle with curtailing it. The underlying assumption is that the aggression itself, in addition to its expression, is the problem.

A lot of men — especially men who feel the overwhelming power of testosterone — pick up on all this double speak and rightfully become suspicious. They often retreat to shelters where they don’t feel reviled for energies they did not choose. They congregate away from the Sauron’s eye of civilization in shadow places on the internet, where their involuntary instincts are valorized and celebrated, often in ways that bring out the worst in them.

I understand the distrust of men. Men commit the lion’s share of violent crime. Men are responsible for the majority of rape. Male strength and sexuality are frightening. The world is a gentler, kinder place because strong men are made more tame.

But having the capacity for danger and violence is not the same thing as being dangerous and violent. Being a cad in one’s mind is not the same as being a cad in real life. These instincts, which are the direct result of a lifetime T exposure, are neutral forces; it is how we channel them that matters. We mistake the energy for the action; we confuse the yearning for doing. A failure to accept the nature of testosterone is, as the night follows the day, a failure to take responsibility for it. Until we embrace the natural consequences of T and maleness, we will just keep creating broken, unintegrated, unhealthy, violent men.

Here is the ugly truth: I allowed myself to get fat and unhealthy because it made being a man easier, and I was always aware of this. As I put on the pounds, I watched the wild drives of my youth fall away, and I thought, “thank god.” I breathed a sigh of relief. I could finally be a little more civilized, a little less sex-crazed, a little less angry, reckless, and insane.

It is a confounding experience to become, by many measures, a worse person by becoming physically healthy. None of what I have described — the intense sex drive, raised aggression, a greater propensity for violence — are signs of dysfunction. To the contrary, they are the results of good health. What a confounding circumstance, to be guilty of so much wrong-think because I have a stronger, healthier body.

So, here’s the choice that confronts me: be physically unhealthy, or commit wrong think. Be fat, or be a toxic male. And this is entirely unnecessary.

We have made enormous strides in accommodating different types of men. Masculinity is a spectrum, and we live in a kinder, more just world when we accept this. Everything that I have described in this article are averages, but they do not reflect individuals. As a gay man, I break the oldest gender taboo imaginable by having sex with other men. I have directly benefitted from this widening of social acceptance, and I am no longer less of a man for being gay. This is a triumph of civilization.

Boys can be theater kids and football players; wrestlers and artists; they can dream of being heroes, but a minority will also yearn to be princesses. Men will be poets and ballet dancers; firemen and boxers; caretakers and drag queens. Men can dominate sexually, but they can also be pursued. Men can penetrate, but they can also know the secret pain and ecstasy of being penetrated. None of this is a negation of one’s manhood: it only means that masculinity is wide and many walk through it. Patterns and averages at a population level do not negate the lives of individual men.

Let’s continue to expand, widen, and deepen that acceptance. Let’s come full circle and accept testosterone itself. We don’t need to be afraid of it and the ways it impacts the average male. We only need to embrace it as an extraordinary force of nature: beautiful, neutral, and deserving of respect.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

Half my work is behind a paywall, and this Substack is a crucial part of my income. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. To celebrate becoming a Substack bestseller, I am running a 40% discount on year paid subscriptions until March 15.

If you can’t afford a paid subscription, DM me or reply to this email and I will grant you six months free, no questions asked.

Don’t want to become a paid subscriber? Buy me a coffee instead.

1. Frequency of masturbation is a significant sexed difference. Men masturbate, on average, at much higher rates than women.