220: Testosterone (2002)
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Welcome W.B. E.C. Chicago and Public Radio International. It's this American life, Amara Glass. And to explain why we're doing this week's show, the way that we're doing it on the subject that we're doing it, I'm joined in the studio by one of our producers, Alex Bloomberg. Hello, Alex. Hello, Ira. Alex? Yes. What's the reason for this week's show? Well, I've been thinking about that. And for me, the reason for today's program goes back to a book I read when I was 15 called The Women's Room. Maybe people listening will remember the women's room. It was a sort of a seminal feminist novel from the '70s. And I first came across the women's room when I was digging through my parents' bookshelves looking for porn, you know, books with naughty parts in them. I mean, like, fear of flying. And so I picked it up and I read it. Because the word "women" was in the title. In lipstick, probably. Or maybe not. Yes. It's incredibly polemical. It describes basically a group of women sort of going from the '50s through the '60s. And they sort of all suffer at the hands of the various men in their lives. And, you know, there's constantly, you know, there's like, you know, women are slowly being driven crazy by their husbands and cis and criticism or they're being called ugly after they get mastectomies or they're being stifled by their husband's emotional shallowness. And I noticed you happen to have brought into the studio with you today a copy of The Women's Room. Yeah, well, I recently reread it just to see. For example, I sort of bookmarked a couple of these things. You know, page 198, the narrator comes in and she says, you know, you think I hate men? I guess I do. And then a little bit further down, she says, my feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew, just released from Dachau, I watched the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach. And I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. And then a little bit later, my hatred is learned from experience. That is not prejudice. I wish it were prejudice. Then, perhaps, I could unlearn it. It's not very much pornographic about that. It's an incredibly strange thing to read this book at that age. Because at that age, I felt like, you know, there's one other woman who sort of comes into play at this point. And that's, that's the, I probably shouldn't say her name. Let's just call her, you know, let's just call her Kelly. And she was like in eighth grade with me and she sent two rows away from me. And, and I remember one time, like, sitting in a homeroom with her and seeing like the, the, you know, like her button down shirt was open a little bit and I could catch the bear sliver for a little training bra. And at, like, and it was like, perhaps the most desire I've ever felt in my life, maybe. I mean, it was just like, it was like all consuming and I couldn't, I mean, I couldn't concentrate for the rest of the day. I remember it to this day. And so at, at the time I was reading this book, I felt like, oh my God, this is what this is like, I could see myself becoming the people that she was describing, the men she was describing. And it was really terrifying. My testosterone and how it affects me and how I react to it, I think about on a daily basis all the time. It often feels like there's a, there's a, there's something in my body giving me instructions that I probably shouldn't follow. Okay, which brings us to today's program. A while back, Alex tried to convince all of us who work on the radio show that we should do an entire program about testosterone. And I have to say none of us were really buying it, especially the women who found the subject dull, even though, as Alex tried to point out to them, women have testosterone and it affects them pretty much exactly the same way that it affects men. I think all of us were fearing a kind of men are from Mars, women are from Venus sort of thing. How hormones make men be all aggressive and women are non aggressive in very stereotyped ways, which all seem kind of reductionistic and dumb headed. And then Alex started reading and calling people. And one of the people that he called was this guy who wrote an article for GQ magazine about what happened to him when, because of medical reasons, he stopped producing testosterone.
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