Testosterone Doesn’T Deserve All The Blame

Love makes the world go ‘round. The stars guide our destinies. Money is the root of all evil.

So why is testosterone getting the blame for everything?

Have you noticed this? If some baseball player charges the mound, it’s “too much testosterone.” If we send cruise missiles in against Iraq, it’s “a display of testosterone.” If someone makes a movie containing nothing but car crashes and explosions, it’s “testosterone-fueled.” If I want to use my remote control, perfectly reasonably, to skip through all 60 television channels in under 30 seconds, my brain is “addled by testosterone.”

I, for one, am getting a bit testy about this.

Ten or 20 or 60 years ago, nobody talked about testosterone except in biology class, and even then everybody just giggled about it. Nobody blamed stupidity on any particular hormone. Maybe I am looking back on this with too much nostalgia (not a hormone, as far as I know) but in those days people blamed stupidity on stupidity. I don’t recall Churchill denouncing Hitler’s invasion of Poland as just another example of “testosterone run amok.”

Come to think of it, Hitler would have been a poor choice for any testosterone-related accusation. According to one autopsy report, Hitler had only one testicle. If true, this would mean, if I understand my biology correctly, that he had half as much testosterone coursing through his body as almost any other man on the planet, and that includes Don Knotts, Richard Simmons and Mr. Peepers.

You might think that this would cause people to re-think their testosterone stereotypes, but no. Back in the 1600s, people blamed everything on the “the humors,” and they spent a lot of time trying to balance the humors by sucking the black bile out of the bloodstream with leeches. Today, testosterone has replaced the humors as the villain du jour, and I, for one, am enormously relieved nobody has suggested the idea of leeches. I’m sorry I even brought it up. People might get ideas.

Anyway, there are dozens of hormones raging through human bodies all the time. Why are we picking on this particular one?

Why don’t we say:

“Look at Miss Prissy over there. Too much progesterone.”

“Wow, check out that guy. He’s operating under some big-time thyroxine, baby.”

“Get a load of that chick. She’s like a prolactin poster child.”

“You know what’s wrong with Tom Clancy novels? Way too many glutocorticoids.”

“As the ‘80s progressed, it became increasingly clear: Reagan’s foreign policy was fueled by calcitonin.”

Yes, I suppose it is conceivable that our foreign policy was profoundly affected by a hormone that raises the levels of calcium in the urine. It’s only slightly sillier than claiming that testosterone causes one nation to send out warships, especially when one of those nations is led by Margaret Thatcher.

So what exactly does testosterone do? According to my research, it causes men to grow beards, develop deeper voices, and become, basically, men. It can, admittedly, cause boorish and aggressive behavior, but this occurs mostly with elk during rutting season. The effect on human behavior is not completely clear. Scientific studies have not conclusively proven that testosterone causes people to burp in public, smoke cigars, play poker, listen to sports-talk radio or produce the eighth installment in the “Die Hard” series (“Die Hard Goes to the Dentist”) although plenty of anecdotal evidence exists to support all of these assertions.

By the way, women produce testosterone, too, just not as much of it. So maybe when women use the phrase “too much testosterone,” they mean: Any amount exceeding their own. Could this kind of thinking be caused by “too much estrogen”?

No. It’s time to get beyond that. We now know that we are not guided by the stars. Our behavior is not controlled by our levels of “black bile.” And I, personally, am convinced that not all of my failings can be attributed to testosterone.

Which only leaves sheer stupidity to blame, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.