Mandate Book Club | Testosterone | Session 1

​The Book: For our inaugural meeting, we'll be reading Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis (two social scientists at Barnard and Amherst, respectively). The book is available on Amazon (of course), but I'm gonna grab a copy at the old-fashioned library.

​I've thought a lot about testosterone, not only for its cultural relevance but also the role that hormones played a role in my own story (a few years ago, my doctors discovered a small tumor on my pituitary that's probably played a partial role in my past bedroom issues). Well, Young and Karkazis are here to tell us that pretty much everything we think about the hormone is wrong. 

​From the publisher's page: "Testosterone is a familiar villain, a ready culprit for everything from stock market crashes to the overrepresentation of men in prisons. That's a lot to pin on a simple molecule. But your testosterone level doesn't actually predict your competitive drive, appetite for risk, sex drive, strength, or athletic prowess. It isn't the biological essence of manliness—in fact, it isn't even a male sex hormone. So what is it, and how did we come to endow it with such superhuman powers? This unauthorized biography pries the much-maligned T free from over a century of misconceptions."

​Exercise: Generally, I might offer a question or two for us to think about in future books. However, the beginning of this book opens with a reference to a 2002 episode of This American Life about testosterone. The authors of Testosterone suggest that the story is fatally flawed. I suggest that we listen to the TAL segment, so we have some cultural background and references to contract against what we learn in the book.