article: The Masculine Mystique of T[estosterone]

[MatureDJ]

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/06/28/the-masculine-mystique-of-t/

The first injection, he told the crowd, produced “a radical change,” including increased physical stamina, “facility of intellectual labour,” and a markedly longer “jet of urine.” The greatest effect by far was on his “expulsion of fecal matters.”

T “correlates very highly with what we think of as culturally masculine attributes: physical strength, risk-taking, competitiveness, ego and the constant desire to fûck.”

... the uneven distribution of these traits (thanks to higher or lower testosterone levels) is what propels men to the top of the social hierarchy and relegates women to second-class status. Testosterone, in this telling, explains male dominance as a phenomenon entirely determined by T.

immediately after starting T: “Everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex.” And so a “big, shuddering, warm” Xerox machine became erotic, as did a red Mustang convertible that caused a “jolt in my pants, this very physical, visceral, sexual reaction.”

Her narration .. was written very soon after the drug was first administered. She described looking at men as they passed her in an airport, after only two weeks on T: “I wanted to do them all. Men—young and old, thin and heavy, coiffed and shaggy… Not all rated attractive, but I found the idea of sex with each captivating.”

One of the most entertaining of contemporary T stories has been written by the gender theorist Paul B. Preciado, who, in his book Testo Junkie, recorded a year-long experiment of taking T in what he calls “DIY bioterrorism of gender.” ... Preciado wrote, and an “explosion of the desire to ****, walk, go out everywhere in the city.”

And of course, the femynists want "testosterone equality":

What if everyone had access to this “masculinity”? What could this chemical accomplish? What would masculinity even be? Preciado posits that T has the potential to smash the gender binary because it enables the expression of masculinity in bodies assigned female at birth. But as Hansbury also told me about his days as a butch dyke: “Female masculinity does not give you male privilege in our heteronormative, gender-conforming society. It doesn’t lead to a pay raise. Store clerks didn’t want to help me; they avoided me.”