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In this exclusive extract from his new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, Charles Cornish-Dale (a.k.a. the Raw Egg Nationalist) outlines the scale of the threat posed to civilization by testosterone decline. The book is a potent mix of science and philosophy and warns of the very real possibility of a world without testosterone—and without men. The Last Men is available for preorder right now from Amazon and Skyhorse, ahead of its release on Monday, 16 December.
The Massachusetts Male Aging Study (MMAS), which began in the late 1980s, was a random-sample, population-based, cross-sectional observational study of 1,709 healthy men aged 40–70 years and living in the Boston area. In simple terms, that means a random sample of men was taken from the local male population aged 40–70, and their health was monitored in a variety of different ways over a period of years. The male subjects were visited at home, where they filled in questionnaires, were measured physically (for example, their body-mass index was determined), and had blood samples taken, so that a number of different health markers could be measured. Initially, the study ran from 1987 to 1989, but then there were clinic-based follow-ups from 1995 to 1997 and 2002 to 2004.
The MMAS is generally considered to be a gold standard for observational studies. It uses a truly random sample of people from the community rather than a sample of people associated with a clinic or institution, which couldn’t be considered random in the fullest sense. The sample size is large enough to allow estimation of the prevalence of rare phenomena, and to allow sub-group analysis—the breaking down of the subject population into smaller groups by particular traits—and adjustment for confounding variables (influences that might affect the validity of results). The study was multidisciplinary, incorporating hormonal, anthropometric, lifestyle, psychosocial, nutritional, and biomedical data. It’s one of the only long-term studies of erectile dysfunction, and has provided important observational data on prostate cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. In short, this was an extremely well-designed, genuinely reliable observational study of male health. Gold standard, like I said.
The study also allowed long-term measurement and comparison of trends in hormonal function, particularly testosterone levels. Testosterone levels were measured as part of the blood sampling that took place throughout the study.
One of the important goals of the study was to document hormonal changes within individuals over time to see how testosterone levels change. It had been observed that testosterone levels generally decrease by 1–2 percent per year for a man once he reaches the age of about 30. The study would also allow comparison of trends in testosterone on a population level. Were levels increasing? Were they decreasing? Staying the same, perhaps?
In 2007, a detailed study of the testosterone data over the entire span of the MMAS was published. The results were not good. “Alarming” would be the word.
“We observe a substantial age-independent decline in T that does not appear to be attributable to observed changes in explanatory factors, including health and lifestyle characteristics such as smoking and obesity. The estimated population-level declines are greater in magnitude than the cross-sectional declines in T typically associated with age.”
Both total and bioavailable levels of testosterone—that’s testosterone the body can actually use—declined spectacularly, year on year, with total decreases of over 20 percent in both types of testosterone in less than twenty years. One-fifth of total and bioavailable testosterone gone in less than a generation.
As the quotation indicates, the analysis showed that the drops could not simply be explained by factors like obesity or smoking—because the authors could isolate and control for these confounding variables. Something else was going on. The researchers couldn’t say what, though:
“These results indicate that recent years have seen a substantial, and as yet unrecognized, age-independent population-level decrease in T in American men, potentially attributable to birth cohort differences or to health or environmental effects not captured in observed data.”
A Civilization at Risk
Researchers in Finland wanted to investigate whether a similar population-level decrease was taking place among Finnish men. They believed it was unlikely since Finnish men score higher on various indexes of reproductive health—for example, semen quality, incidence of cryptorchidism (undescended testicles), and prostate cancer—than American men generally do. They looked at three large population samples of men aged 25–74, totaling twice the number of men in the MMAS, from surveys taken in 1972, 1977, and 2002. What they found was a testosterone decline every bit as vicious as among the men from the Boston area.
Serum testosterone levels in men aged 60 to 69 decreased from 21.9 nmol/l, in men born between 1913 and 1922, to 13.8 nmol/l in men born 1942–51, a 37 percent decrease in roughly 30 years. The decreases remained significant even when adjustments were made for body-mass index and other factors. The study offered no explanation for the decrease in testosterone levels. Similar results were found in a study of 5,000 men from Denmark, which showed that men born in the 1960s had, on average, 14 percent less testosterone than men of the same age born in the 1920s.
More recently, a study of testosterone levels among American adolescents (age fifteen to nineteen) and young adult men (twenty to thirty-nine) showed a large decline in testosterone levels between 1999 and 2016. Again, after controlling for confounding factors such as BMI, physical activity, smoking and alcohol consumption, these decreases remained significant. As in the other studies, the decrease was around 1 percent a year across the study’s timespan. The researchers note that 20 percent of all men aged 15 to 39 in the U.S. now have clinically low testosterone.
A study of Israeli men from 2020 showed a “highly significant independent decline in total testosterone in the first and second decades of the twenty-first century.” For men aged 21, for example, there was a decrease of about 10 percent in 10 years, from an average of 19.68 nmol/l in 2006–2009 to 17.76 nmol/l in 2016–2019.
This is bad—surely? Even if you don’t know much about testosterone beyond the fact that men need it, you’d expect a decline in the hormone on this scale and across the developed world to have serious consequences, especially since the decline appears to be ongoing. A year-on-year decline of 1 percent in testosterone levels for the next 50 or 100 years would surely be a disaster.
You’d be right. But to understand what such an enormous decline might mean, first you need to understand what testosterone is and does, and that means, among other things, breaking a certain amount of conditioning about testosterone and aggression. Testosterone as the aggression hormone. Testosterone as the cause of fighting and wars. Testosterone as something we might be better off without. You see and hear it all the time today, whether you’re reading a magazine or newspaper, or watching CNN’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention. (We’ll come back to that later.)
Some archaeologists have suggested, based on ancient skull evidence, that a drop in testosterone was necessary for the emergence of civilization itself. They found changes about 50,000 years ago to the skulls of modern humans—especially reduced prominence of the brow ridge—that coincide with some of the earliest finds of tools. Increased “craniofacial feminization,” the researchers say, “reflects the evolution of enhanced social tolerance.” If that was the case then, why not now, too? As society advances, do we even need testosterone?
Testosterone is involved in aggression and competition, absolutely, but the hormone does far, far more than that.
The Trouble with Testosterone: What We Know and How
Testosterone is a hormone. Hormones are biological signaling molecules. They carry messages in physical form around the body. Hormones come in a wide variety of types, from eicosanoids and steroids to amino acids and proteins, and even gases, such as ethylene oxide (which makes plants ripen) and nitrous oxide (which causes blood vessels to dilate). All of these molecules encode messages that tell tissues within the body what to do. They do this by binding to receptor proteins in tissues, essentially flicking a switch that turns particular processes on or off.
Hormones largely exist within feedback loops, meaning the body constantly responds to changing levels of hormones and the processes they regulate to prevent dangerous fluctuations and disturbances, rather like a thermostat controls a heating system. Consider insulin, for example, the hormone responsible for reducing blood-sugar levels. High blood-glucose levels cause the pancreas to secrete insulin, which then reduces glucose in the blood by promoting its absorption into the cells of the liver, fat, and skeletal muscle.
Testosterone, like estrogen and progesterone, is a specific sex hormone that governs sex-related aspects of the organism. Like estrogen, testosterone is a steroid hormone derived from cholesterol, which is produced by the body in the liver and consumed in the diet from animal foods. Most testosterone is produced in the Leydig cells of the male testes, and it works by binding to what are known as “androgen receptors” in the tissues, which turn on effects specific to androgenic hormones.
I’ve previously mentioned “total” and “free” testosterone. The total amount of testosterone is not necessarily the amount the body can use. Because testosterone is a lipophilic (i.e. fat- but not water-soluble) hormone, it must be transported through the blood by special carrier molecules. One of these carriers is called sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG), and it binds to testosterone and makes it inactive. The portion of testosterone that is not bound to SHBG is the free testosterone, and it’s this portion that can still bind to androgen receptors and have androgenic effects in the body. Bound testosterone cannot do this.
On average, men have about seven or eight times as much testosterone as women—although testosterone is important to female health and development, and estrogen is important to male health and development. A lot of men (especially on Twitter, when they’re constantly reading health posts) get it into their heads that the best thing a man can do is totally rid his body of estrogen, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. In men, estrogen is essential for bone development, erectile function, libido and reproductive health, the modulation of social behavior, body-fat storage and function, insulin sensitivity, and a number of other bodily processes. Men need estrogen—just far less of it than women do. And women need testosterone too—just far less of it than men do.
Let’s look at some of the specific things we know testosterone does. Testosterone governs the masculinization process that first occurs in boys in the womb and then resumes during adolescence. Processes directed and shaped by testosterone include the development of the penis and testes, deepening of the voice, the growth of facial and pubic hair, muscular and bone development, and libido and sperm production. The production of testosterone in men is regulated via the brain’s pituitary gland, which sends signals to the testes to produce the hormone. Levels of the hormone, and of all hormones, are closely regulated within feedback loops. If testosterone levels are too high, the brain sends signals to the pituitary gland to reduce production, or the opposite if levels are low.
In addition to governing physical processes that are essential to the full expression of male sex, testosterone is involved in the regulation of mood and the expression of male behavior. Now you can be forgiven for believing that, in this regard, testosterone is simply the “aggressive” hormone, the hormone that makes men fight and kill and rape and do all the nasty retrograde things that need to be eliminated from society once and for all. We don’t live in the Stone Age anymore, right? That’s certainly how testosterone and its effects are portrayed in the media and pop science. The truth, unsurprisingly, is far more complicated and nuanced. Testosterone is not simply an “aggressive” or “anti-social” hormone. Increased levels of testosterone do not make a man reliably more dangerous. They might make him more formidable, a far worthier opponent for his fellow man and for life itself, but that’s not the same thing, and we ought to know the difference.
The Feminized Monkey
Estrogen, the “female” hormone that supposedly makes women the angelic nurturing creatures we all need and love, actually has a very important role to play in the modulation of aggression. This is demonstrated in a wonderful study I like to talk about as much as I can: “Increased aggressive behavior and decreased affiliative behavior in adult male monkeys after long-term consumption of diets rich in soy protein and isoflavones,” in the journal Hormones and Behavior, from 2004. By feeding male macaques a diet rich in soy compounds that mimic the hormone estrogen, scientists were able to make them simultaneously more aggressive and also more introverted and submissive:
In the monkeys fed the higher amount of isoflavones, frequencies of intense aggressive (67 percent higher) and submissive (203 percent higher) behavior were elevated relative to monkeys fed the control diet . . . In addition, the proportion of time spent by these monkeys in physical contact with other monkeys was reduced by 68 percent, time spent in proximity to other monkeys was reduced 50 percent, and time spent alone was increased 30 percent . . . The results indicate that long-term consumption of a diet rich in soy isoflavones can have marked influences on patterns of aggressive and social behavior.
I like to say that these feminized male monkeys became passive-aggressive “incel monkeys,” an analogy that bears up surprisingly well in the human case when it comes to the effects of testosterone decline and feminization.
We’ll get back to the specifics of what testosterone does, but let’s consider for a moment the history of the hormone. It’s been less than a hundred years since we’ve known what testosterone is, let alone its effects. That doesn’t mean, though, that man had no idea of the masculinizing effects of testosterone. The connection between the testicles and manhood is one that was made a very, very long time ago. It’s not hard to imagine primitive man making that connection simply on the basis of men having a penis and testicles and women not. Ergo, the penis and testicles make a man a man and not a woman. And given their appearance and structure—sacks—it wouldn’t be too unreasonable to imagine the testes were carrying something valuable, too . . . Perhaps this brainwave reached man in some dimly lit cave at night or out on the savannah while hunting game. Who knows? But it seems plausible. My lizard brain told me so.
The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity is available for preorder now via Amazon or the Skyhorse website. It will be released this Monday, 16 December.
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