Over the past couple years the simple, ubiquitous hormone testosterone has become a major front of the culture war, thus hopelessly miring information on the subject in endless distortions online. Now, with the average male clocking in at dramatically lower T levels than his father or grandfather at the same age — an ongoing disaster with all manner of biological and social consequence — it has never been more difficult to find information pertaining to the possible reason, or reasons, let alone any potential solutions to the problem.

Can humanity persist in a world without men? Or, at least, a world without the hormone that makes men masculine? Jordan Castro guests today with the canonical piece on this most divisive, essential hormone.

-Solana

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Koro — a name taken from the Malay kuru, meaning how it looks when a turtle’s head retracts into its shell — refers to a well-documented, cross-cultural mass hysteria phenomenon during which large groups of men believe their penises are shrinking, sometimes completely disappearing, which they think will lead to their death. Though relatively unknown, the phenomenon has occurred broadly: in China, men thought it was caused by female fox spirits; in Thailand and Singapore, in the 1960s, by poisoning; in Africa between 1998 and 2005, by black magic, during which time 56 people reported instances of genital “shrinking, disappearance, and snatching.” In one instance in Nigeria, in 2001, men who believed their penises were shrinking accused five men of “penis theft” and killed them. Koro, previously thought to be a culture-dependent psychological problem, is now viewed by some as a universal sociocultural phenomenon that tends to arise in moments of social or political strife.

Men in the West today don’t believe in magic or witches, but they do believe in science, and some science says their manhood is vanishing. For example, one 2007 study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism on over 1,500 men concluded that men’s testosterone had been declining roughly one percent per year, for the previous 50 years. To put that in perspective, if this trend has continued into 2023, the average 22-year-old man today has an average testosterone level roughly equal to that of a 67-year-old man in 2000. More, if T levels — a key ingredient in sperm production — continue to drop at this rate, by 2045 the median man will be unable to have children.

But articles and analysis on testosterone in mainstream media and some academic publications are not as certain about the decline. A 2019 piece in The Guardian says there’s “little solid evidence of a testosterone decline in men,” and that “the best population-based data from the US doesn’t show any decline in men.” In the New York Times, a 2019 piece called “Is Low Testosterone Hurting Your Libido? Or Are You Just Aging?” argues that unscrupulous wellness brands are “zeroing in on” men’s insecurities by selling T supplements to counteract normal, age-related T-level decline. A 2013 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that half the men taking prescription testosterone aren’t even T-deficient.

Which is it? Are men mysteriously losing their testosterone, and thus their biological essence as men, or are they just insecure? Is this simply the West’s rendition of koro, or is it the beginning of our civilization collapsing?

What is Testosterone?

“When you think of testosterone,” a 2019 Harvard Medical Journal article begins, “what comes to mind? Macho men? Aggressive, impatient, type A behavior? Road rage? Violence?” This is the common association with testosterone, which has made many mainstream liberals brutally, and somewhat cruelly, incurious about it. Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, called testosterone “a rare poison.” In 2012, WIRED blamed testosterone for financial market crashes, because it makes men “become overly aggressive, causing bubbles.” A 2016 VICE article titled “How Much Can We Blame Testosterone for Men’s Many, Many, Many Faults?” says that T “is linked to a host of negative social behaviors” such as being “less likely to talk after sex” and “decrease[d] empathy.” A recent Politico article titled “The testosterone primary of 2024 is getting out of hand,” quotes historian Kristin Kobe Du Mez, who suggests the Republican presidential candidates have lost “all sense of reality” by engaging in an “alpha male competition.”

Testosterone has a bad reputation among some, but it’s more than dicks and muscles — it’s an integral part of men’s overall health. T plays a key role in regulating sex drive, reproductive function, sperm count, muscle and bone mass, strength, fat distribution, the immune system, inflammatory response, and more. Dr. Cameron Sepah (known colloquially as Dr. Cam), a professor at UCSF Medical School and the CEO of men’s health company Maximus, spoke with me about the importance of testosterone. For Dr. Cam, testosterone “functions as a comprehensive biomarker of health, with decreasing levels potentially indicative of an array of health complications ranging from undiagnosed pathologies to exposure to environmental contaminants, sub-optimal lifestyle habits, or the aging process itself.” A 2022 study out of Baylor and University of Texas San Antonio found that lower T is related to higher mortality in all cases, at any age, except for unexpected death, such as in accidents and injuries.

Without enough T, things start looking pretty grim for not just men, but everyone — it also has a major influence on behavior. Largely in contradiction to how the media reports on it, there’s evidence that testosterone is a prosocial hormone. One study found that it promoted “cuddling” in gerbils; another found that men with high T were more honest; yet another found that having high T made men “more sensitive to moral norms.” Men with high T may even be more likely to feel a “sense of well-being” and “enhanced cognition,” and to act in ways that are positive, helpful, and intended to create social harmony.

And testosterone is positively correlated to ambition, which, though an object of distrust today, is what drove men to build skyscrapers, cathedrals and highways; to defend the weak in battle, and so on. So it’s easy to imagine a world without T as one characterized by stagnation, even decay — cramped, risk-averse men, turned inward, afraid of confrontation, in a perpetual state of submission, lacking the will that’s always animated them to turn frontier into dominion. Imagine an infertile guy who suffers from hot flashes, has no motivation, is irritable, depressed, can’t concentrate, and keeps going to the hospital for Covid because he’s sickly and more susceptible to infections. Is this the man of the future?

“The global decline in testosterone levels is an empirical observation supported by an increasing body of research,” says Dr. Cam, and “its presence in the research landscape is difficult to refute.” A 2013 study out of Finland confirmed what the 2007 study, mentioned at the top of this piece, showed — a roughly one percent per year population-level decline of T — as did a 2020 study, which examined testosterone levels among Israeli men in the first two decades of the 21st century and found “a highly significant age-independent decline in total testosterone that is unlikely to be explained by increasing rates of obesity.” Another study from 2020, specifically looking at adolescents and young adult men, found that 20 percent of the 4,000+ subjects suffered from clinically low T.

The testosterone decline has implications that reach all the way down to the survival of the species: there’s evidence that points toward a similar decline in viable sperm, of which testosterone is crucial for proper development. Without enough of it, the sperm production process gets halted at a specific phase called meiosis, which can lead to infertility. In her book, Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, epidemiologist Shannah Swan delves into a study she co-authored in 2017, which reported that sperm counts in the West had fallen by an astonishing 59 percent between 1973 and 2011. "If you look at the curve on sperm count and project it forward [...] it reaches zero in 2045," says Swan. “The current state of reproductive affairs can’t continue much longer without threatening human survival.”

Why is T Declining?

Some scientists have attributed the precipitous testosterone decline to causes previously known to affect testosterone: more people are fat, old, diabetic, and other factors. But in multiple studies, the testosterone decline remained even after many of these things were controlled for. Men with healthy BMI and no comorbidities had significantly less testosterone in their blood than similar men in years prior. So, if it’s not a ubiquitous change in men’s lifestyles, what is it? A non-exhaustive list of possibilities: 

• Tight-fitting underwear: a 2018 study found that tight-fitting underwear adversely affects sperm count and teste-related hormones in men.

• Increased room temperatures in American homes and offices: the average room temperature in American homes and offices has increased in recent years, and this could lower T for the same reasons as above.

• Diet/phytoestrogens: phytoestrogens, structurally similar to estrogen, are naturally-occurring compounds found in various plants that humans eat, such as spinach, pears, soybeans, and a lot more. They may interfere with the body’s hormonal production when consumed in large enough amounts.

• Chronic stress: ongoing stressors, such as depression, anxiety, unemployment, or injury, lower testosterone, due to changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal that occur in response to stress, such as releasing more cortisol.

• Declined exercise and physical activity: “good stress,” like lifting weights or chopping wood, can cause the body to produce more testosterone. In one study, serum testosterone levels increased in obese men who were put through a twelve-week training and diet course.

• Marijuana use: giving THC edibles to non-human primates made their testicles shrink and their T levels plummet.

• Glyphosate: the active ingredient in the broad-spectrum herbicide Roundup — used widely in industrial farming — impairs testosterone synthesis in addition to causing cancer.

• Endocrine-disrupting chemicals: these can be found in the environment, and include things like phthalates and bisphenol-A (BPA), which are known as ‘everywhere chemicals’ because of their presence in things like plastics, pesticides, cosmetics and even receipts. They reduce testosterone biosynthesis and secretion.

• Masturbating: one study found that T goes up 45 percent in men who haven’t masturbated for a week. 

• Eating less fat: low fat diets are associated with a decline in testosterone.

• Medication (opiates and major tranquilizers such as haloperidol): long-term opiate use suppresses the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis, responsible for regulating testosterone production. As a result, some opiate users experience low testosterone levels, which is why, when they get clean, they experience what some describe as a “pink cloud”: as their HPG axis recovers, so too does their testosterone production.

• Estrogenic compounds in the mother’s diet: humans ingest small amounts of estrogenic and antiestrogenic compounds all the time, but in utero these can have especially damaging effects. Mothers who are exposed to these contaminants and pesticides while pregnant can alter their child's epigenetic expression, and make their penises deformed. Cryptorchidism — in which one or both testes never “drop” — and hypospadias — in which the opening of the urethra is not at the tip of the penis, but down on the shaft, or sometimes even on the scrotum itself — are both on the rise, as is testicular cancer.

Behavioral changes can also influence testosterone. One Forbes essay, titled “You’re Not the Man Your Father Was,” asks, “Has testosterone declined in response to a changed world, or has the world changed to accommodate less virile men? Or is it both?” Having more testosterone makes you stronger in the gym, for example, but lifting weights can also increase testosterone. Similarly, having low T can make you more likely to retain fat, but having more fat can lower T. There are also studies that show that things like getting married, having a supportive social group, or even just being around tears cried by a woman out of sadness, lowers T. Perhaps men are just finally becoming more sensitive, socially supported, and less “toxic,” and the loss of T is simply an adaptation to a kinder, gentler world?

T in the Media

Whatever’s happening, our media seems more concerned about the threat of men than any threat to men. The media, as a class, has completely dismissed the testosterone crisis. In one bizarre video about the “science of attraction,” four male Buzzfeed employees get their T levels checked, and all find they have clinically low T (with the exception of one who, as opposed to the sub 300 ng/dL required to have hypogonadism, had a still-troubling 365). In response to the results, one of the guys soy-faces and gasps. When the guy with the most T is announced, another moans “Dadddyyyy.”

In 2018, Vice published an article titled “I Did Every Clichéd Manly Activity to See if it Boosted my Testosterone” that begins, “As someone who regularly espouses progressive ideologies online…” and goes on to call grunting while weightlifting a “reactionary display of aggression.” It concludes with an exhortation — 

“Go ahead, fellas. Cry at the movies, take up knitting, and wash your tofu down with a soy latte. It'll have little to no effect on any measurable level of your manliness. But even if it does, who gives a shit about that stuff anyway? [...] Better to be a good person with low T than the deepest-voiced guy holding a tiki torch.”

The author’s day of “manly activities” — which included things like drinking beer — actually lowered his T, albeit a statistically insignificant amount.

Perhaps the hostile ambivalence is due to the fact that unlike other advice thrown at men in recent years — go to therapy, get in touch with your feelings, and so on — improving one’s testosterone is ultimately not aimed at helping non-men. When Jordan Peterson rose to prominence, for example, his interlocutors accused him of talking to a mainly male audience, as if this was self-evidently problematic. Indeed, there’s practically nothing coming from our mainstream institutions that is aimed at helping men as men, and when men get together with an eye toward improving themselves in a way that is distinctly masculine, people get suspicious.

And so in the absence of a mainstream media apparatus that cares about men’s issues, the only people sounding the alarm about the testosterone crisis are on the fringe. Figures like Liver King, Alex Jones, and anonymous ‘right wing bodybuilders’ on Twitter are among the only people taking the issue seriously. In 2022, Tucker Carlson released a mini documentary called The End of Men, which featured Democratic presidential candidate RFK Jr. alongside Twitter anons like Benjamin Braddock and Raw Egg Nationalist to discuss the issue. For many of these guys, testosterone is where the personal meets the political. REN, for example, says the T decline is an intentional program designed and deployed by globalist institutions like the World Economic Forum to keep men weak and passive, so they can create a one world government and force everyone to live in pods and replace meat with bugs and endocrine-disrupting soy burgers. The “soy globalists,” REN says, want to “control you and to milk you for as much economic value as they can before they kill you.” This cabal of dysgenic goblins wants to drain men of their T, destroy humanity, and profit1.

Further, the egregious silence — or downright contempt — from the mainstream media has given the fight to regain T an underdog edge. If the problem is that endocrine disruptors are making men weak and infertile, and it’s true that multinational corporations like Monsanto are, in RFK Jr.’s words, “waging chemical warfare on our country” for profit, then it makes sense to think that globalist organizations have a vested interest in suppressing information about the testosterone decline while pushing products that exacerbate the problem.

Testokoro

But like the female fox spirits Chinese men have blamed for koro, adding impossible-to-prove intentionality on the part of a specific group like the WEF — or a force like globalism — to a potentially emergent phenomenon, gives the right-coded theory of testosterone decline a queasy undertone. And like declining T levels in the West, koro has been associated with diet: in Singapore, in 1967, as many as 97 men reported genital shrinking after a newspaper published an article blaming the consumption of pork on several cases of male genital shrinkage. In one account of the Chinese koro-causing fox spirits, author Pu Song-ling blames the spirits’ overabundance of Yin, or feminine life force, for their penis-shrinking effects.

Similarly, culture warriors on the right, when they talk about testosterone, tell a story about the loss of masculinity whose culprit is women. Men are being poisoned by the food supply, stripped of the social roles they’ve played for millenia, lambasted with anti-male rhetoric — and their testosterone is disappearing, all because of a globalist, malevolent, feminizing force. When Andrew Tate recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and said, “When you want to conquer a society, you kill the military aged males,” and then, while ‘they’ can’t actually kill men, “they can certainly cut their balls off,” it was hard not to ‘hear’ koro. Tate wasn’t speaking literally, of course, but shortly thereafter, when he made mention of turning Western men into “eunuchs” while “importing high testosterone” men from the third world, you get a sense that his hyperbole wasn’t necessarily coming from a place of strict concern for men, but masking a primal, warlike fear that a certain type of lifestyle is on the way to being erased out of existence.

The mainstream media, for their part, would almost certainly agree. The SPLC, for example, calls The End of Men “pseudoscience,” and frames the discussion around testosterone as just another attempt to bend the narrative back toward “male supremacy.” A Daily Beast article about Tucker’s documentary says that it “of course, isn’t about science, it’s about the insecurities of men in the vein of Donald Trump.” Men have dominated and subjugated women for thousands of years, they say, and now they sense they’re losing power — the “crisis of masculinity” talk is really just a dog whistle for the desire to return to a more patriarchal past. 

Though these types of articles are aggressively ideological, their steelman is obvious. The amount of cringe that proliferates in the “manosphere” about testosterone is enough to make anyone wish that sperm counts would plummet even faster. There’s a whole subculture of “masculinity gurus” on Twitter and YouTube — such as MenMoneyMindset (~365,000 followers), MasculinePeak (~300,000 followers), and TheManMakerX (~245,000 followers) — who post simplistic slogans, crude infographics, and hucksterish threads, lamenting the loss of testosterone as well as a world that seems more like the gender caricatures portrayed in 1950s advertisements than anything authentically traditional. There is a degree of irony and mirth in some of the more interesting accounts — but in many cases it is gruesomely earnest.

Like many issues of the day, competing ideologies mostly prevent productive discourse around the testosterone issue by producing mirror-image decoys that lock the public into a conversation that only goes in one direction: around in a circle. To mainstream liberal media, the decline in T is not happening, but it’s good that it is happening. To right wing culture warriors, the testosterone decline is happening, but it’s due to vaguely inescapable conspiracies related to culture's shift to the left, and globalization.

Meanwhile, men continue to suffer from increased rates of depression, anxiety, infertility, erectile dysfunction, and more. While ideologues deny the crisis or co-opt it to bolster their political agenda, regular men suffer. As far as I can tell, “the best population-based data from the US” that “doesn’t show any decline in men” referenced in the Guardian piece that I mentioned at the top of this article doesn’t exist (I emailed the source and the article’s author, who never responded, and spoke with multiple experts who hadn’t heard of such data). And T’s connection to sperm production is unequivocal. Some alarm about what’s happening to men is warranted, and you don’t need to rearrange your entire worldview to get your hormone health in order. The ubiquity of pesticides in our food supply, our sedentary lifestyles, and other factors don’t need a conspiracy to explain them. It’s obvious why men today would see the growing, culturally-sanctioned trend of disdain for males — which, like the koro-causing fox spirit, is feminized — as a hostile threat to their survival. But the disappearance of testosterone isn’t only about the disappearance of “manliness”: it’s about the disappearance of vitality, competence, and human flourishing. And maybe the human race.

-Jordan Castro