Image Credit: Francois ANCELLET / Contributor / Getty Images 
“Anthropologists just upended our understanding of ‘normal’ testosterone levels,” reads the headline.
“A study published in the American Journal of Human Biology suggests that Western medical standards for male testosterone might not reflect the natural variation found in different environments. Researchers found that among Indigenous Shuar males in the Ecuadorian Amazon, testosterone levels change across the lifespan in ways that differ from patterns seen in high-income nations. These findings imply that what doctors consider a typical hormonal profile is actually a physiological response to specific lifestyle and environmental factors.”
You see studies like this with a fair amount of regularity, and their findings are often used to rubbish claims about important things happening in the West, including supposed crises and “moral panics.”
Calm down, we’re told: you’ve actually got it all wrong.
In this case, the broader target is the very well-founded claim—one of the central claims of my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity—that there is something worrying happening to men and their testosterone levels today. Testosterone levels are suffering a rapid, apparently unprecedented decline: 1% year on year, according to the Massachusetts Male Aging Study (MMAS), which maybe doesn’t sound like much until you release that’s a quarter in just 25 years. Studies from across the Western world, from Finland to Israel, have corroborated the findings of the MMAS, and even suggested the decline may be more severe than first thought.
This precipitous decline isn’t an isolated phenomenon. In fact, it’s part of a broader decline of male reproductive parameters, including sperm counts and sperm quality. Professor Shanna Swan, a world expert on reproductive health, has predicted, on the basis of sperm-count trends, that by the middle of the century the median man will have a sperm count of zero: one half of all men will produce no sperm, the other half will produce so few they’ll never be able to get a woman pregnant.
Humanity, it seems, is staring down the barrel of species-level sterility in less than a generation.
If that isn’t something to be worried about, I don’t know what is.
This kind of logic is something I’m used to from studying anthropology myself, at Cambridge. “Tribe X”—let’s call them the Bunga-Bunga, from the Highlands of Papa New Guinea—”don’t have Western custom Y, therefore custom Y isn’t natural.”
Many anthropologists build entire careers just doing this one trick, over and over again: undermining the claims of Western philosophy, science, reason, imperialism, the patriarchy—all bad words and bad things—by finding exceptions in out-of-the-way places. From personal experience, I can tell you it makes those anthropologists feel pretty good about themselves.
And look, there’s obviously some merit to this approach. If something is treated as natural and therefore a human universal, and then you find an instance of a people who don’t display that belief or practise that custom—well, that belief or practise isn’t natural or a human universal, is it? But as an end in itself, it’s not particularly useful, unless your aim is chaos and inspiring a lack of self-confidence.
Rules often have exceptions—big news!—and the existence of the latter doesn’t undermine the existence of the former. Quite the opposite, in fact: they reinforce each other. A near-universal isn’t universal, but it might as well be. If 99 out of 100 societies do something, and one doesn’t, it’s still the case that 99 societies do do it, and that there may be a good reason—innate programming, evolutionary utility, whatever—to explain why that’s so.
In this particular case, although the new study may deepen our understanding of what testosterone is and how it functions in different kinds of societies, I don’t think it really tells us anything about what’s happening across the Developed World, and increasingly in the Developing World too, to testosterone levels and fertility.
It doesn’t provide any reason not to be worried, or not to try and do something to arrest the decline in male reproductive health in our own societies.
Let’s look at what the study says in a little more depth.
“Theresa E. Gildner, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, led the study… Gildner and her colleagues focused on the Shuar people because they live in a resource-constrained environment in Amazonian Ecuador. Many Shuar individuals continue to rely on traditional gardening, hunting, and foraging while facing high rates of infectious diseases.
“Most research on male hormones has focused on men in wealthy, industrialized nations who are relatively sedentary and have easy access to calorie-rich food. In those populations, testosterone typically peaks in early adulthood and then steadily declines as a man ages or gains body fat. This decline is so common in the West that it is often viewed as a universal part of male aging. Gildner wanted to see if this same pattern would appear in a population living under different ecological pressures.”
So: the Shuar were chosen precisely because their lifestyle is as different from a modern lifestyle as it’s possible to get. The Shuar are hunter-gatherers like man was before the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, beginning about 12,000 years ago in the Near East.
“The research team worked with 104 Shuar males between the ages of 12 and 67 from 11 different communities. To measure hormone levels, the researchers collected saliva samples from each participant twice a day for three consecutive days. They took one sample in the morning before nine o’clock and another in the evening after four o’clock. This allowed the team to see how hormone levels fluctuated from the time a person woke up until the end of the day.
“The researchers also measured the height, weight, and body fat percentage of the participants. They used these measurements to calculate the Body Mass Index of each person. While this index is not a perfect measure of fat, it helps researchers estimate the energy reserves an individual has stored in their body. The team used statistical models to see how age and body fat related to the daily changes in testosterone.”
Now let’s look at the results.
“The analysis revealed that Shuar males generally have lower testosterone levels than men in the United States. On average, the concentration of the hormone at the time of waking was about 401.77 picomoles per liter. The levels then dropped by about 2.1 percent for every hour that passed throughout the day. This daily decline is a standard biological rhythm that helps the body mobilize energy in the morning and rest in the evening.
“Age played a notable role in how high these morning levels were for each participant. Young men in their twenties showed the highest levels of the hormone at the start of the day. Participants in their teens and those over the age of fifty had the lowest waking concentrations. This suggests that the hormone peaks during the years when men are most active in seeking partners and starting families.
“The study also looked at the ratio between morning and evening hormone levels to see how the daily rhythm changed over time. As men got older, the difference between their morning peak and evening low became less pronounced. This specific finding suggests that some aspects of hormonal aging might be consistent across different cultures. It may happen because the brain becomes less sensitive to energetic signals as the body gets older.”
Here’s the really interesting stuff.
“A clear interaction was found between age and body fat that challenged common Western assumptions. In men with lower levels of body fat, the researchers observed an inverted U-shaped pattern for testosterone over the lifespan. These lean men had lower hormone levels in their youth, which then rose to a peak in middle age before declining slightly in their later years. This differs from the Western pattern where levels tend to drop continuously after early adulthood.
“For participants with higher levels of body fat, the pattern looked more like what is typically seen in the United States. In these individuals, the highest hormone levels were seen in younger men, followed by a steady decrease as they aged. This suggests that having more stored energy in the form of fat allows the body to maintain higher hormone levels earlier in life. When energy is limited, the body may delay its peak hormone production until middle age.
“The researchers also looked at how social factors influenced these biological markers. Men who were living with a partner or wife had notably lower morning testosterone levels than single men. This association suggests that the body may lower hormone production once a man has successfully found a partner. Shifting energy away from the pursuit of mates may allow a man to invest more in his current family and household.”
The findings in the last paragraph have been replicated in modern societies—it’s been shown, for example, that men in stable relationships have lower testosterone levels, and that breaking up with a wife or girlfriend provides a significant testosterone boost, presumably to enhance libido and the motivation to compete for a new mate—but the findings in the other two paragraphs are more noteworthy. They suggest that, contrary to the general wisdom, testosterone levels don’t universally decline after “early adulthood” in men; 30 years old is the age that’s generally given for the start of this long decline among men.
Instead, at least among lean Shuar men, there’s a U-shaped trend, as levels actually increase from youth towards middle age and then decline at a later date. It’s only Shuar men with higher levels of bodyfat who show the “typical” pattern seen in Western societies like the US: a peak in early adulthood, followed by decline.
This study isn’t actually the first to suggest there may be variations in testosterone levels between modern and pre-modern societies. There’s a study of Bolivian peasants in which testosterone levels don’t decrease with age at all. The study showed no statistical differences in the testosterone levels of the oldest and youngest males. If I remember correctly, the researchers believed the hardship of life as a Bolivian peasant could offer some protective effects against decline in later life. Testosterone levels plummeted in winter, when food was scarce, temperatures were low, and it was difficult to get sufficient sleep, and then rebounded in the spring and summer.
It’s worth saying, though, that seasonal variations in testosterone have also been demonstrated in the Developed World. A South Korean study showed significant changes across the year, with the lowest levels of testosterone recorded in May, and the highest levels in January. In that study, at least, testosterone levels appear to be inversely related to daylight duration and outdoor temperature—which seems to be more or less the opposite of what the Bolivian study suggested. Again, we don’t know why. More research is needed.
Nevertheless, researchers have established a very clear series of patterns across the Western world, and what’s more, they fit with everything else we know about the progression of ill health to the status of an epidemic in recent decades. Even if you wanted to pick holes in the major testosterone studies like the MMAS, and for argument’s sake put them to one side, you’d still have to address all the other data on chronic disease. Significant testosterone decline is exactly what we’d expect to see in a male population that is fatter, more sedentary, suffers more chronic ailments—everything from autism to severe gut dysbiosis—and is exposed to a greater number and variety of harmful chemicals almost all of which have been shown to possess endocrine-disrupting—i.e. hormone-altering—properties. And, of course, you’ve got collapsing sperm counts and sperm quality to contend with as well, which directly points to radical testicular dysfunction on a large scale—the testes being the primary source of testosterone production.
As something of an anthropologist still, I’d be the first to say studies of the hormone levels of South American tribes are interesting and worthwhile. For one thing, they provide comparative material, and they can also help us reconstruct what the hormonal profile of our ancestors was like before the dawn of complex societies.
But it’s my contention, and it stands to obvious reason, that the hormonal environment of the modern world is different because the modern world is so obviously, stunningly different from the Stone Age. Saying that male hunter-gatherers have a different hormonal profile from men in Kansas or Ohio is simply a restatement of a fact we should have anticipated long before anthropologists ever proved it by going to the jungles of South America. It isn’t an explanation of anything, and it certainly isn’t a refutation of anything either.
Data from the Amazon shouldn’t be used to obfuscate the nature of the crisis facing the Developed World today. Whether we’re talking about maybe ten million hikikomori—extreme social recluses—in Japan, whom studies have shown are more likely than normal men to have low testosterone, or the millions of young American men who have simply dropped out of work and social life and now spend their days eating junk food, playing video games and watching porn, with little hope of ever pursuing a meaningful existence, biological changes are a clear driving force. It’s not simply a case of telling men to clean their rooms or creating a culture that values men and their contribution and doesn’t henpeck them and tell them everything they are and want to do is wrong. Obviously those things matter too, and we need to do something about our gynocratic culture that squashes men from childhood, but we wont get very far if we don’t appreciate that men literally can’t be men without testosterone; without it, men don’t even want to be men in the first place.
Raw Egg Nationalist’s new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, is available now in hardcover, Kindle and audiobook formats from Amazon and all good bookstores.
