Dear readers,
It has been a while since I’ve offered you an outlandish take, and I have been wading through the waters of this take for quite some time. Nonetheless I’m still not sure how to introduce it to you. I guess I should warn you, that I haven’t really linearized this narrative into a take at all. What is to follow is not a path to a destination, it’s more a Captain Kirk-esque teleportation between worlds. Sure, I can beam you up, but ultimately you steer your ship.
So let’s start at the beginning: This post germinated itself in me when a rather provocative tweet halted my slide down the Timeline, a few weeks ago. The subject of this tweet was an online-subcultural-meme that I was heretofore blissfully unaware of; The High-T Male.
Now for those of you who are thinking, ‘marbl, wtf are you talking about?’ let me provide a little context. Insofar as The H-T (high testosterone) male is expressed as meme, it is not merely a hormonal measurement. A lot more than just carbons and hydrogens have been packed into this molecule. Online discourse has taken this relatively new noun, originally a hormone found in living bodies, and turned it into a whole constellation of behaviors, traits and values. It’s become a lifestyle protocol, it’s become one-up manship, it’s become an idol, and the only reason I even know about it is because it has become a hashtag.
Some portrayals of H-T males are pretty fantastical. H-Ts have purpose, and love discomfort and have a highly attuned perception for what is right. They eat meat and raw eggs, they get sunlight, and their bodies are articulated by mussolini-esque masculine lineaments (this part seems to have no end of details provided).
As far as I can tell a big component of this discussion is developing the idea of ‘cultural castration’. I think this side of things can get a little darker (bear in mind I’ve only been aware of this for over a week). Here I understand the idea as follows; the advance of Globalized Western culture is yielding lower testosterone rates in men and also changing the physiognomy and cultural role of men. It seems like most self-proclaimed H-Ts are attempting to resist this identified shift by keeping their T high, though a set of disciplines and value/mindset shifts. But I actually can’t tell what is seen to come first; the T-levels or the way you are able to embody the H-T idol. Either way it is often remarked that the most extreme qualities of high-Ts are strongly discouraged today, to the point of being criminalized.
Initial reaction:
My limited understanding of testosterone is as a biological signaling compound, which induces a state, whether immediate and felt, or homeostatic and developmental. As far as I can understand it is necessary for health, and for many fundamental biological processes, it is inherent to life far beyond humans, and to define it as “bad” or “good” seems reductionist and un-nuanced.
After these thoughts I had a knee-jerk, first-draft take:
I would like to argue that the emotional, attentional, and physical states that variable testosterone rates, especially high testosterone rates, induce in men (or anyone for that matter) is not innately criminal. I mean how could it be? There’s always a choice, lots of things in the world induce a state; weed, tylenol, exercise, all of which, like testosterone, can be prescribed to change a person’s state in a beneficial manner. So it’s not deterministic. Further, any state change is conditioned by set and setting, the perceptive-active beings that humans are, live inside of a culture wherein criminality is defined and instantiated. Cultural conditions can guide behavioral tendencies, so presumably, different intensive states of an individual can be met within the value-interpretive lens of a culture differently. I think there are different cultural ‘forms’ which may hopefully meet the demonized tendencies of a “Hight-T” individual more constructively than others.
But this dawning interest of mine began to mingle with my other preoccupations. I was also reading Bergson’s Creative Evolution and had begun to think back to one of my favorite books, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization. I started to see the effortless leap—between the discovery and measurement of a hormone, to a mythology of masculinity’s genius loci and trajectory—as less and less disjointed, as well as less and less strictly modern.
And then I was like, oh ya.. Werewolves.
To be continued …
As a high T male I approve this post
Are you aware of how High T your name is? Sam Man, Tha Will Man.