i didn't know anything COULD wash away testosterone. via markpayne @ flickr
If you’re tired of the countless ads for Viagra and Cialis and the like, Newsweek has some bad news for you. The newest condition that pharmaceutical companies are poised to pounce on is “Low-T” — the “T” standing for testosterone. Solvay Pharmaceuticals are about to unleash an ad campaign for its legal steroid AndroGel, “a testosterone foam that hormone-challenged men have been rubbing on their bodies for almost a decade.” Brace yourself, because:
In a series of new commercials released this month, and slated to blanket more than a dozen cable channels and guy-friendly print media over the next six weeks, the company goes after male anxiety about the four horsemen of aging: less energy, a fatter gut, a fouler mood and sexual incompetence. Ads show a paunchy everyman haunted by the shadow of his former self-a golf-ball-driving, all-night-dancing lothario.
And really, who wouldn’t be attracted to a promiscuous golfer?
But some people think that testosterone loss can be more effectively combatted with porn instead of pills. Rutgers University sex researcher Helen Fisher concludes that adult entertainment is the best way to deal with testosterone issues for those in what she calls “captivity situation” i.e. married with children. “Captivity situation.” Nice. I guess it’s time to let those poor zoo animals that we call “husbands” out of their cage and let them run wild in their natural habitat, by which I mean let them go wild with porn to fix a testosterone imbalance. Fisher explicitly advises that men should “go on the Internet and look at porn” to deal with lower testosterone levels.
“[Porn] drives up dopamine levels, which drives up your testosterone,” she tells NEWSWEEK, while kissing your wife or hugging your kids drives it down.
In other words, kissing your wife is emasculating but jacking off to Debbie Does Dallas or E.T.: The Extra Testicle will prove that you are a red-blooded man’s man. Right. Wake me when Big Pharma and society as a whole is actually giving a shit about women’s sexual pleasure. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to deconstruct the theory that I will never stimulate a man’s testosterone more than a skin flick can.
The kissing the wife quote has gotta be a misquote of some sort or something taken out of context since they didn’t put the whole thing in quotations, right? right?
I did think the last part of the article about regulating the porn industry was interesting… in sort of a mind numbing, how would you even do that, sort of way.
@Tersa: I don’t know if it’s referring to Fisher or it’s the author’s own opinion. But either way, they chose to include it and it’s beyond weird.
If “man’s men” are high-T, does that make gay men the manliest of all?
I’m so…speechless. “Captivity situations”? Whatthefuck?
*headdesk*
I actually don’t see what’s wrong with Fisher’s quote (the part that’s actually in quotes and not the part that comes after). She’s just stating a fact drawn from studies on dopamine levels.
The author’s take is much more ridiculous.
I read this article a couple days ago and I was aghast. *headdesk* was the only possible reaction.
@misscalculate: My issue is with the author in that particular instance, although I take great exception to a man who’s married being called “in a captivity situation” as Fisher does.
I think it’s a ‘this is your brain, this is your brain on evolutionary-psychology’ situation. Sigh.
Good lord, how much more fucked can our construction of masculinity get? Whatever, I’m just going to take this as yet another thing that guys do that amounts to them wearing a sign that says “Don’t have sex with me, or even treat me like a reasonable and sane human being”. Early warning systems are necessary in the modern world.
I’m not really sure how popular this will be mass marketed to men though, with so many negative masculine athletic connotations associated with the term ‘steroids’ nowadays. Not to belittle anyones hormonal imbalance situations though, a human sense of wellbeing does depend on them. I picture this in the back of magazines with those ‘enlargers’ more than on prime time TV, but who knows, I hear the drug companys are getting desperate, with no new ‘little purple pills’ on the horizon.
@margaret: To be honest, there are enough people who take substances that have negative connotations or side effects. I am thinking of botulism/Botox and how people inject toxins into their bodies just for wrinkles. I don’t know how much the thought of athletics and steroids will deter men from taking them.
You are probably right Sarah I hadn’t thought of that, most steroid users who get caught are probably only sorry they got caught! One might think lower testosterone levels in men would be a good thing, less aggression etc, but I doubt if they will ever see it that way (sigh). Its hard know where to draw the line maybe, for drugs to improve the human body in healthy ways and vs. drugs that feed on negative concepts or constructs .. I’m not saying that very well.
Aside from saying really sad things about how we construct masculinity, I think this also says a lot about how we view aging. No one, not men or women, is allowed to just, you know, get older. Since when is middle age a medical condition?