Sex at Dawn

A man who suffered a hormonal disorder that left him with almost no testosterone for four months discussed his experience (anonymously) in a radio interview. Without testosterone, he said, “Everything I identified as being me [was lost]. My ambition, my interest in things, my sense of humor, the inflection of my voice.. The introduction of testosterone returned everything.” Asked whether there had been an upside to being testosterone-free, he said, “There were things that I find offensive about my own personality that were disconnected then. And it was nice to be without them.. I approached people with a humility that I had never displayed before.” But overall, he was glad to have it back, because, “When you have no testosterone, you have no desire.”

Griffin Hansbury, who was born female but underwent a sex change after graduating from college, has another well-informed view of the powers of testosterone. “The world just changes,” he said. “The most overwhelming feeling was the incredible increase in libido and change in the way I perceived women.” Before the hormone treatments, Hansbury said, an attractive woman in the street would provoke an internal narrative: “She’s attractive. I’d like to meet her.” But after the injections, no more narrative. Any attractive quality in a woman, “nice ankles or something,” was enough to “flood my mind with aggressive pornographic images, just one after another.... Everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex.” He concluded, “I felt like a monster a lot of the time. It made me understand men. It made me understand adolescent boys a lot.”

It doesn’t take a sex-change operation to understand that many adolescent boys have a frenzied focus on sex. If you’ve ever tried to teach a class containing more than a few, or tried to raise one, or recall the turbulent desires yourself, you know the phrase testosterone poisoning is not always used ironically. For most adolescent boys, life often seems (and is) violent, hectic, and wild.

Countless studies confirm that testosterone and associated male sex hormones are at high tide from puberty to a man’s mid-twenties. Here we have another massive conflict between what society dictates and biology demands. With every voice in a young man’s body screaming for SEX NOW, many societies insist he ignore these incessant urgings and channel that energy into other pursuits, ranging from sports to homework to military adventure.