What the Crisis of Masculinity Literature Misses about Testosterone

Everything. Literally.

The irrepressible Camille Paglia

My new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, is out now in hardcover, audiobook and Kindle formats, from Amazon and all good bookshops.

One of the most gaping holes in pretty much the entire “crisis of masculinity” literature—with books like Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men—is biology, and in particular hormones. And by “hormones,” I mean one hormone in particular: testosterone, the master male hormone, the one that’s responsible for men being men and not women, that governs sexual maturation, gives men extra muscle mass, provides motivation, gives them libido, makes them strive to compete and also accept their place in a hierarchy. Testosterone just doesn’t feature at all. Yet maybe all of men’s problems today, and especially young men’s problems, map to some extent onto the civilisational decline in testosterone levels that’s taking place. The best studies, like the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, suggest testosterone is declining 1% year on year, and has been for decades.

Jordan Peterson, for example, famously discussed what happens to lobsters if you give them the neurotransmitter serotonin. It became something of a meme, funny for a while, then deadly tiresome. But there isn’t a single mention of testosterone in 12 Rules for Life that I could find. Nor, indeed, is there a mention of it in the follow-up, Beyond Order. Young men, it seems, lacking the order and discipline to clean up their rooms and pet a cat in the street when they see one, don’t have to worry about the biological basis of their failure to summon the will to do even the most basic things—because there isn’t one. Or at least that’s what you’d be led to believe, anyway.

Richard Reeves does mention testosterone in his book, Of Boys and Men, but only in the most perfunctory manner. His concern, basically, is to dispel the notion that men are governed by testosterone, and that that means they’re forever destined to be aggressive, unruly, hard to tame and, ultimately, ill-suited to any kind of role in a modern democratic society.

Testosterone, according to some feminists—and Hollywood director James Cameron—needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history if Progress is to continue. Cameron actually called it a “toxin” in an interview a few years back.

It’s understandable, in a sense, what Reeves wants to do. There’s a powerful reductive tendency at work in Western thought and the broader culture, and it’s apt to deceive us if we aren’t on our guard. Perhaps it’s 2,000 years of monotheism, or thereabouts, that makes us look for a single cause for everything. Once, God was the cause of causes. Now, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins tell us everything can be explained by the “desire” of lines of code in our cells to reproduce themselves. For Freudians, it’s sex. For feminists, the patriarchy and male domination of women. None of these explanations are satisfactory, and people who end up following them religiously make disasters of their own lives—and the lives of others.

“We are not slaves to our cells,” Reeves writes. No, we aren’t. We are our cells. Big difference.

Nor is testosterone simply the “aggression” hormone. That’s one of the most malignant pieces of pop-science I can think of, maybe even the worst; and that’s saying something. Testosterone isn’t just about aggression. It drives a wide variety of behaviours that could and should be classed as pro-social, from faithfulness to one’s partner to ambition, generosity and even the willingness to stand up and defend a minority position in public. And yes, aggression can also be pro-social.

You don’t need to dispense with the idea that hormones powerfully constrain our development, behaviours and attitudes to avoid falling into the “aggression hormone” trap laid for us by misandrists and self-loathing men. You can just look at actual science, at a wealth of experimental data, and you can pay attention to what happens to men when they don’t have enough testosterone. The forum website Reddit is chock full of testimonials of young men suffering great agonies as a result of an inadequate hormonal endowment.

The real task is to recognise that biology and the social are not mutually exclusive domains. A full explanation would take in both and understand the constant dynamic exchange that takes place between them. Biology influences society, and in turn society influences biology—and so on.

One of the great ironies, for me, is that we must turn to a woman for a real understanding of what such an explanation could look like. The great literary firebrand Camille Paglia—herself a “high-testosterone woman,” plucky, adversarial, driven, sensual and libidinous—wrote one of the most profound statements about the respective roles of testosterone and estrogen in shaping the whole of human culture. It’s worth reproducing in full. The quotation is taken from her 1993 book Sexual Personae.

“Man’s genital concentration is a reduction but also an intensification. He is a victim of unruly ups and downs. Male sexuality is inherently manic-depressive. Estrogen tranquilizes, but androgen agitates. Men are in a constant state of sexual anxiety, living on the pins and needles of their hormones. In sex as in life, they are driven beyond—beyond the self, beyond the body. Even in the womb, this rule applies. Every fetus becomes female unless it is steeped in male hormone, produced by a signal from the testes. Before birth, therefore, a male is already beyond the female. But to be beyond is to be exiled from the center of life. Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.”

But even the great Paglia has her blind spots. She treats the hormonal environment as fixed and unchanging—this is testosterone, and this is estrogen: this is man, and this is woman—when in fact, it’s anything but. It’s my contention that every society is a unique hormonal environment, because of various factors ranging from diet to whether, like among the ancient Scythians, the men wore tight trousers and rode horses all day—a nightmare for the testes and male reproductive health, as observers recognised even then.

The modern world is a unique hormonal environment, and its defining feature is a growing surfeit of estrogen and rapidly diminishing testosterone. Until we recognise this fact, and accord it the importance it deserves, we’ll never really understand why a book like 12 Rules for Life could sell 10 million copies off the back of a commandment to CLEAN THOU THY ROOM, delivered and received with the earthshaking force of God speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai.