The Anti-Androgenic Society

No other society has suppressed masculinising hormones like ours does

We live in an anti-androgenic society: That’s the fundamental contention of my forthcoming book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.

By “anti-androgenic,” I mean that our society tends to suppress the masculinising hormones and especially testosterone. It does this through various means, ranging from the biological to the social and political. Most of these means, I believe, are largely “built in” to the type of society we live in—an industrial capitalist society sustained by advanced chemistry—and can’t really be thought of as deliberate. But some are deliberate, at least in the sense that they reach the level of consciousness and are actively promoted by certain segments of society like the mainstream media and even the medical community.

No other society that I know anything about has ever been like this, as a whole; although there have been societies where particular groups have chosen to reduce the actions of testosterone for some desired end. In Asia, historically, Buddhist monks were the only ones who regularly consumed unfermented soy, because it helped them extinguish the fires of libido, which might otherwise prove impossible to control. Although they didn’t know it, these men were consuming huge regular doses of phytoestrogens, which simulate the action of the feminising hormone estrogen in the human body—and indeed in the animal body, as a wealth of scientific studies show. Male rats or monkeys that are fed unfermented soy are feminised too, sometimes with amusing results (search my Twitter profile for “incel monkeys,” for example).

A large focus of my work, as you’ll probably know, is on the toxic chemical burden of modern life, and how substances known as “endocrine-disruptors”—everything from plastic chemicals and pesticides to deodorants and food additives—are altering the natural hormone ratios that determine our biological sex. In brief, those ratios are more testosterone, less estrogen for men, and the reverse for women. By a rather strange kink of modern chemistry, the vast majority of endocrine-disrupting chemicals mimic the feminising hormone estrogen, rather than testosterone. This is bad for the health of both sexes, and can be disastrous if exposure occurs at vital moments of hormonal development, like during gestation in the womb or during puberty.

But it’s not just that we’ve created a world suffused with toxic feminising chemicals. It’s the social and political system as well.

In my new book, I ask some pretty uncomfortable questions about liberal democratic society and whether it is, by its very nature, hostile to testosterone. Is there something about the liberal democracy, about the kind of behaviours that it requires and affirms, that reduces the need for testosterone?

Francis Fukuyama, following Friedrich Nietzsche, certainly thought so. It’s often forgotten that Fukuyama was not just an apologist for the triumph of capitalism over communism: He also warned that the “unipolar moment” risked leaving man a shadow of his former self, a creature fit only for working a 9-to-5 and buying stuff and sitting in front of the TV—or now a computer or a smartphone. Nietzsche called this crepuscular half-man “the Last Man,” and if you actually know Fukuyama’s book The End of History, and aren’t just one of those people who claims to have read it but hasn’t, you’ll know the full title is actually The End of History and the Last Man. The warning is every bit as important as the apology.

Fukuyama couches his warning about liberal democracy in terms of thymos, a word the Greeks used to mean something like “spiritedness” and Fukuyama glosses as “desire for recognition.” Thymos is what drives men to act, it’s what motivates them to do meaningful things, including to fight but also to engage in other forms of activity. There are different kinds of thymos, Fukuyama explains. We have isothymic desires, which lead us to seek recognition as being one among equals. Democracy can satisfy these, by according us equal rights, protections and opportunities (supposedly). But there’s another kind, megalothymia, which drives men to seek distinction and to be recognised as better than their peers. Here liberal democracy offers us little opportunity for satisfaction, and that’s a problem.

Although Fukuyama doesn’t make this connection himself, thymos, and in particular megalothymia, maps very closely with testosterone and the kind of behaviours it encourages in men: striving, libido, competition and, yes, aggression (although the hormonal basis of aggressive behaviour is actually much more complicated and interesting than the pop-science view suggests). So when Fukuyama says that liberal democracy makes us the Last Men because it drastically reduces the scope of action for satisfying thymos, he really means testosterone.

Anyway, this is all in the book.

If we do live in an anti-androgenic society, we’d expect to receive explicit—and by that I mean conscious—messaging to that effect in the broader culture, since systems generally encourage their own preservation and always have their agents and defenders to fight for them. If our society needs to be defended against testosterone, we’d expect explicit defenses along that line. And of course we get them.