If there is one thing that just about every social media influencer in the manosphere agrees on it’s that your testosterone levels are too low. According to their chorus of voices, the hormone will improve your sex life, increase your confidence and just plain make you feel like a badass. While that is no-doubt that testosterone replacement therapy can work miracles in true cases of clinical deficiency, commercial compounding pharmacies, influencers and even Big Pharma itself are responsible for an over-prescription epidemic that is leading to severe health consequences across the country. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 6 out of 7 online commercial pharmacies are willing to prescribe testosterone supplementation to men with normal levels of the hormone. Today the testosterone industry raked in more than $400 million a year.
The consequences can be dire. The side effects of too much testosterone can lead to fertility problems, hypogonadism (shrunken balls), blood clots, heart disease and, important for the purposes of this report, mania and depression.
While endocrinologists an medical experts like Karl Nadolsky and
are warning the world about the medical consequences over-prescription of hormonal treatments, there’s an equally pressing sociological problem that comes hand-in-hand with the mass distribution of mood-affecting pharmaceuticals.Research suggests that high testosterone levels are linked to aggression in men. In particular, several teams have found that high testosterone that the outcome isn’t physical violence, rather the expression of dominance in social hierarchies. The neuroscientist in the latter article Charles Eisenegger wrote “testosterone promotes status-seeking and social dominance motives, and thus plays an important role in social status hierarchies.”
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Eisenegger showed that high testosterone men act more ruthlessly in economic games, show lower empathy in social environments, and attempt to “win” during social interactions. Conversely men with lower testosterone were more generous.
It’s reasonable to assume from this that men seeking ever-higher levels of testosterone through supplementation end up seeing the word through the hormonal filter they’ve injected into their bodies. The sad reality is that these very anti-social traits are the same values most encouraged in the TRT-obsessed manosphere.
A cursory search of podcast transcripts suggests that almost all of the top manosphere influencers — Joe Rogan, Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, Lex Friedman, Aubrey Marcus, Lewis Howes Steven Bartlett, Bryan Johnson Andy Frisella, Peter Attia, Tim Ferris—have episodes about testosterone. Most actively talk about how their supplementation protocols in detail. Both Rogan and Huberman started TRT in their 40s, which begs the question: What sort of biomedical coincidence led all of these top-influencers to somehow experience clinically low testosterone?
Is it possible that their need for testosterone wasn’t medically necessary, but instead was a form of gender-affirming care to achieve a particular vision of masculinity?
The consequence here is that every message they transmit to their social media platforms, podcasts and videos first has to pass through a the filter of hormone supplementation.
It’s not a stretch to say that these influencers collectively give a literal voice to a hormone. The hormone acts to supercharge a self-reinforcing cycle between the audience and the influencer that encourages testosterone-enhanced personality traits.
But wait! It gets so much worse.
While clinical doses are generally safe and beneficial for men who are medically deficient in testosterone, over-prescription comes with serious and often-permanent downsides. Since the body is conservative with where it expends energy, once a person starts getting testosterone exogenously (from an external source), its ability to produce the hormone naturally declines, and eventually stops altogether.
Once this happens men’s testicles will literally shrink, they’ll become infertile, and if they every stop taking supplemental testosterone they will inevitably suffer from the clinical side effects low T. In other words, while a normal man might turn to testosterone supplementation because they wanted to emulate the vision of masculinity promoted by alpha male podcasters, they will become medically dependent on the hormone in time.
This is, of course, a perfect business plan for the testosterone companies that are making millions through over-prescription. If they can hook a man on a super-clinical dosage, that man will turn into a customer for life just to feel normal. It’s the same business plan that got Purdue pharma in trouble selling opioids.
Altogether the testosterone-influencer nexus is a toxic brew of hyper-masculinity, affiliate marketing wellness scams and cynical big-pharma business plans. It’s worth keeping this in mind the next time you see the near-ubiquitous online advertisements for TRT.
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