#cis men

[rentarabatqueen]

I unfortunately do not have a source for this because I read it in an academic anthropology paper many years ago, but... This is why I will never worry about my cis-male partner's testosterone levels, and I hope that others read this and start questioning why "high testosterone" in cis men is considered a good thing.

The paper in question noted that older adult men have lower testosterone than their teen and young adult counterparts. It freely admitted this.

But it attributed the phenomenon to a net gain for humanity, and I still believe the arguement made:

Lower testosterone is an evolutionary requirement for the continuation of our species.

The paper correlated lower testosterone primarily with men who had children. (Older men without children generally had higher testosterone levels than their fatherly counterparts, though still lower than younger men.)

The author argued that, much like babies looking like their sperm donor is one piece of species preservation, so is a biological imperative to reduce testosterone levels: because first, men who believe that a child is theirs will be more likely to stay and protect them (rather than fight unnecessarily or seek another sexual partner) and then because men with lower testosterone will make fewer reckless decisions and be more even-tempered for child-rearing years.

Now obviously this isn't universal, and my relaying of the original article has many gaps in it due to the intermittent years slowly stealing my specific memories of what I read, but the overwhelming feeling I still have when I think of that paper is this:

It was--and still is--an evolutionary advantage to our species for men to naturally decrease their testosterone levels as they grew older. Coupled with emotional growth, it can help men trend more towards rationality and well-considered opinions. Men with lower testosterone feel safer to those around them and tend to be more diplomatic.

So why do so many herbal supplement and snake oil companies (and now the freaking government) want men to take testosterone regulators?

Well, for one, most of those products are actually bad for any cis women who come into consistent direct contact with a man on snake oil. Supplemental testosterone oozes from your pores and can cause health problems for your afab partner. And two... they don't want you to think. They want you to feel constantly emasculated and defensive at your so-called "low testosterone" because then you are easier to control. In the case of snake oil companies, they can control you into buying more products. In the case of the current military testosterone kerfuffle...

Let's just say it doesn't look good from where I am sitting.

Anyways, the point of all of this is that I hope cis men worry less about low testosterone and worry more about other aspects of their emotional, mental, and physical health, and particularly about the health of our society.

We don't need you to be macho. We need you to be good people.

[secularsasquatch]

[tobyandahalf]

I wish more people knew and cared about how the patriarchy neglects and hurts men :/

[epistolaryfairy]

Boy i’d feel like a real scumbag if i hadn’t realized what was pretty obviously happening, I mean, unless I just saw it as an opportunity to be an even bigger scumbag

[ohtobearottinglog]

"that man is the most lesbian cis man I've ever met"

[yuki494282]

How sensitive do you guys think my clit is?

[infernalis-crypture]

Likely a hot take. I've been sick as fuck and my brain is mush, so if this is messy I'll probably redo it later.

I saw a post earlier that took a study on self-identified sexual aggressors and turned it into a "cis men suck/cis men dni" generalization. Then another about a cis intersex man who was castrated at birth by a female surgeon who just hated men/boys that much. It got me thinking.

I've met and dated shitty cis men. I've also met wonderful ones. Same with cis women and queer people; some have been just as harmful (or more). Generalizing entire groups like this is harmful. In my experience, it doesn't reduce harm; it makes those groups more defensive and escalates everything into a vicious cycle that hurts people who don't deserve it.

Most boys/men grow up with rigid, damaging messaging: "man up," don't cry, don't show weakness, your worth is in what you provide or achieve, suppress needs for help, take risks, etc. Those scripts absolutely damage men's mental health, relationships, perception of women and other men, and even lifespans. The stats are clear: men die by suicide at much higher rates, die younger on average, make up the vast majority of workplace deaths and homelessness, and often face real barriers around emotional expression, custody, or asking for help without seeming "less masculine."

Rigid sex-role expectations and cultural norms hurt everyone; they just distribute the costs and benefits differently. Men get certain social permissions and advantages at the high end (leadership, risk tolerance paying off for some), but they pay with higher variance: more men at both the extreme top and the extreme bottom. The "privilege" narrative often ignores the parts where the system chews men up and discards them; especially working-class, POC, neurodivergent, or non-conforming men.

It's the same with women internalizing harmful stuff under the same pressures. We can acknowledge real patterns and average differences without sliding into "therefore all members of group X are bad/oppressors."

The "cis men suck" rhetoric slides very easily into "all men suck" because the underlying logic is often essentialist: treating maleness or masculinity itself as tainted or inherently dangerous, rather than specific behaviors or cultural patterns. Once that frame is normalized, transmasc and trans men get pulled under the umbrella whether they like it or not ("you're socialized as male," "male energy," etc.). Trans women catch it from the other side: suddenly their birth sex is the only thing that matters and they're framed as infiltrators or predators.

I've already experienced this flip-flopping with intersex stuff: people weaponizing whichever gender lens hurts most in the moment. It's especially frustrating when people in transmasc/trans male spaces echo "all men are trash" rhetoric for clout or solidarity, then act shocked when it gets reflected back at them. You can't spend years calling masculinity suspect and then expect everyone to magically exempt your masculinity when it's convenient. That inconsistency erodes trust inside communities and hands outsiders easy ammo.

I've seen firsthand how bodies and histories don't fit the neat oppressor/oppressed scripts a lot of online discourse demands. Generalizing "men" (cis, trans, or otherwise) as a monolith doesn't protect anyone; it just trains people to sort each other into threat categories instead of dealing with individuals.

It's okay to want better socialization for boys and men without hating men as a category. And it's okay to push back when your own community imports rhetoric that eventually bites them (and you) in the ass.

Individual people still get to be judged on how they actually treat others. Some of my friends being decent cis men doesn't erase the shitty ones I've met, and the shitty ones don't erase them either.