Consequences of declining testosterone

Wilykit

Well-known member
I'll admit my eyes glazed over trying to read that report. That said there is a reason I don't feed my kids processed foods and why I avoid plastic containers. No low T soy bois in my house.
 

Arch Dornan

Oh, lovely. They've sent me a mo-ron.
There was an Outer Limits episode that had the opposite of this narrative: apparently, it was a woman-run paradise until a man was woken up from suspended animation -- they all become backstabbing bitches because "male cock alert!" -- although, judging from the Daily Fail story, that was actually pretty realistic, haha.

(Oh, the episode's plot twist? Turns out the "wise" leader of the woman-led government was actually the dude's ex-fiance before he got frozen, but because she's all old and wrinkly and shit now (I think memory loss on his part was a factor, too) he didn't recognize her. She puts him back into suspended animation with tears in her eye "for the greater good", as apparently women can't stop themselves from becoming cock-obsessed when a man is lurking around in an all-female environment).
Women want the cock and men want the cunt. I'm old enough to know that for the majority of us if it's a male or female society.
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
OK, let's try worldbuilding this.

During the 2050s, a bioengineered Plague was released. Its creators had a cure for themselves and to blackmail concessions from their enemies, but the Plague mutated so that didn't work and spread globally.

Symptoms depend upon the infectees' gender. For women, the Plague is essentially the common cold, something common and contagious enough to be impossible to effectively quarantine against, which mutates too much for anyone to ever acquire a lifetime immunity, but which is essentially harmless. For men, the Plague is tuberculosis on steroids, usually fatal even with medical treatment and incapable of burning itself out by killing too fast to spread since it always has comparatively asymptomatic women to serve as an infection reservoir.

This has led to the division of humanity into two factions depending on their preferred method for ensuring the survival of the species and civilization as a whole, the R Bloc and K Bloc.

The K Bloc are an alliance of multiple all-female societies, united by their use of artificial impregnation with genetically identical clone-daughters reproduce. They are all some degree of authoritarian, with the ruling regimes maintaining their power by their control of the technological Means Of Reproduction. Communist states where being allowed a clone-daughter necessitates a high social credit score, ancap states where cloning is deliberately kept obscenely expensive, meaning only the wealthy and powerful can afford it outright and anyone else is essentially enslaved for the rest of their life with unpayable loans, fascist states where only the confirmed pure master race are allowed to procreate, etc. They are descended from the wealthy and powerful First World of the per-Plague era, the countries rich enough for medical experimentation and treatments.

The R Bloc on the other hand, simply reproduce as much as possible, to ensure that statistically, some males are bound to survive long enough to reach adulthood and impregnate a population-sustaining percentage of the female population before the Plague gets them. They are descended from the poor Third World nations of the per-Plague era who were essentially abandoned to die out since they couldn't afford proper medicine, let alone something as experimental as cloning, even before civilization nearly collapsed with the death of over fifty percent of the total human population amidst the Plague and general associated chaos.

The two Blocs hate each other and are only kept from outright war by MAD deterrence. The R Bloc considers the K Bloc states to be oppressive tyrannies whose ancestors left their ancestors to die and were disappointed when they didn't, since it kept them from looting their natural resources unopposed, while the K Bloc wants the R Bloc's natural resources and are disgusted with their disregard for human life, willingly reproducing far beyond the resources they have available and knowing that each generation, fifty percent of their population is going to die horribly, and their perceived sexual immorality. Both are essentially accurate.

The story begins when a scientist unintentionally discovers something which could destabilize the status quo, either an outright cure for the Plague or a transhumanist means of sidestepping the expensive and goverment controlled reproduction infrastructure of the K Bloc and mass male deaths of the R Bloc, whiptail lizard DNA splicing, for example. Unfortunately for them, the scientist was living in the K Bloc so she essentially won the war for the other side and got her Bloc's secret police after her, while the R Bloc's spies want to rescue her, or at least steal the secret.

Cue technothriller shenanigans.
 

LordsFire

Internet Wizard
An interesting concept. The way immune systems and the like actually work, it'd not be anywhere near that effective, and if nothing else natural selection would ensure that subsequent generations were increasingly or exclusively comprised of those whose immune systems could fight the bug off.

There is no such thing as a perfectly transmissible 100% lethal disease.
 

BlackDragon98

Freikorps Kommandant
Banned - Politics
OK, let's try worldbuilding this.

During the 2050s, a bioengineered Plague was released. Its creators had a cure for themselves and to blackmail concessions from their enemies, but the Plague mutated so that didn't work and spread globally.

Symptoms depend upon the infectees' gender. For women, the Plague is essentially the common cold, something common and contagious enough to be impossible to effectively quarantine against, which mutates too much for anyone to ever acquire a lifetime immunity, but which is essentially harmless. For men, the Plague is tuberculosis on steroids, usually fatal even with medical treatment and incapable of burning itself out by killing too fast to spread since it always has comparatively asymptomatic women to serve as an infection reservoir.

This has led to the division of humanity into two factions depending on their preferred method for ensuring the survival of the species and civilization as a whole, the R Bloc and K Bloc.

The K Bloc are an alliance of multiple all-female societies, united by their use of artificial impregnation with genetically identical clone-daughters reproduce. They are all some degree of authoritarian, with the ruling regimes maintaining their power by their control of the technological Means Of Reproduction. Communist states where being allowed a clone-daughter necessitates a high social credit score, ancap states where cloning is deliberately kept obscenely expensive, meaning only the wealthy and powerful can afford it outright and anyone else is essentially enslaved for the rest of their life with unpayable loans, fascist states where only the confirmed pure master race are allowed to procreate, etc. They are descended from the wealthy and powerful First World of the per-Plague era, the countries rich enough for medical experimentation and treatments.

The R Bloc on the other hand, simply reproduce as much as possible, to ensure that statistically, some males are bound to survive long enough to reach adulthood and impregnate a population-sustaining percentage of the female population before the Plague gets them. They are descended from the poor Third World nations of the per-Plague era who were essentially abandoned to die out since they couldn't afford proper medicine, let alone something as experimental as cloning, even before civilization nearly collapsed with the death of over fifty percent of the total human population amidst the Plague and general associated chaos.

The two Blocs hate each other and are only kept from outright war by MAD deterrence. The R Bloc considers the K Bloc states to be oppressive tyrannies whose ancestors left their ancestors to die and were disappointed when they didn't, since it kept them from looting their natural resources unopposed, while the K Bloc wants the R Bloc's natural resources and are disgusted with their disregard for human life, willingly reproducing far beyond the resources they have available and knowing that each generation, fifty percent of their population is going to die horribly, and their perceived sexual immorality. Both are essentially accurate.

The story begins when a scientist unintentionally discovers something which could destabilize the status quo, either an outright cure for the Plague or a transhumanist means of sidestepping the expensive and goverment controlled reproduction infrastructure of the K Bloc and mass male deaths of the R Bloc, whiptail lizard DNA splicing, for example. Unfortunately for them, the scientist was living in the K Bloc so she essentially won the war for the other side and got her Bloc's secret police after her, while the R Bloc's spies want to rescue her, or at least steal the secret.

Cue technothriller shenanigans.
Sounds like "Y the Last Man"
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
Thing is, natural selection isn't dealing with the problem because people are still reproducing despite the Plague, even if only through artificial means in the K Bloc and with the men dying shortly afterwards in the R Bloc. Evolution doesn't select for 'what'll work best' but 'will it kill the host organism before it can create more host organisms'. Here, the selection pressure is for faster maturation in the R Bloc to produce more offspring before inevitable death, and increased loyalty to status quo/decreased free will/possibly some kind of techno-eusociality in the K Bloc, but the point is likely moot, since societal changes move faster than natural selection.

It'd slow down evolutionary change in the K Bloc every daughter is essentially a clone of her mother, but the K Bloc regime doesn't want any change, even on evolutionary timescales, they've fond of the current status quo where they run everything and don't want anything that could upset it.
The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh by Greg Cox said:
"but the deflector screens also serve a more important purpose, namely shielding our own carefully constructed DNA from ultraviolet light, cosmic radiation, or anything else that might trigger random mutations." She frowned momentarily at the thought, then shrugged her shoulders. "Obviously, after devoting generations to refining and perfecting our genetic heritage, we can hardly leave ourselves vulnerable to unpredictable factors beyond our control."

"But random, unplanned mutations are how all living species evolve," McCoy objected. "By eliminating chance, you take yourselves out of the elementary process of natural selection." His dour tone and expression made it clear where he stood on the subject. "You're risking total genetic stagnation."

With an expansive sweep of her arm, the regent invoked the prosperous colony below. "We're far from stagnating, Doctor," she chuckled. "In fact, we've evolved more in two generations than Homo sapiens has in two hundred thousand years. Natural evolution has too high a failure rate; as a physician, you must be aware of all that can go wrong when chromosomes mutate."
 

LordsFire

Internet Wizard
Thing is, natural selection isn't dealing with the problem because people are still reproducing despite the Plague, even if only through artificial means in the K Bloc and with the men dying shortly afterwards in the R Bloc. Evolution doesn't select for 'what'll work best' but 'will it kill the host organism before it can create more host organisms'. Here, the selection pressure is for faster maturation in the R Bloc to produce more offspring before inevitable death, and increased loyalty to status quo/decreased free will/possibly some kind of techno-eusociality in the K Bloc, but the point is likely moot, since societal changes move faster than natural selection.

It'd slow down evolutionary change in the K Bloc every daughter is essentially a clone of her mother, but the K Bloc regime doesn't want any change, even on evolutionary timescales, they've fond of the current status quo where they run everything and don't want anything that could upset it.

You misunderstand part of my criticism.

In the first place, there's no transmissible disease that just straight-up ignores the immune system. The ones that come closest are those that attack the immune system, and even HIV/AIDS needs to work in concert with something else to actually kill someone.

Such a virus will not have a 100% fatality rate. And those who survive will clearly have an immune system strong enough against it to give their children good odds of fighting it off too.

Like a lot of sci-fi premises, it relies on exaggerating something past what is actually within the realm of possibility based on observed data. Interesting, but unrealistic.
 

Lazer Raptor

Marxist-Lesbianist
The consequences are obvious: gender accelerationism somehow against all odds proving correct instead of a mere fantasy with little empirical grounding.

In the words of N1x:
It is a widely-known phenomenon that acceleration coincides with feminization on a strict and rigorous biological basis. Even when Sadie Plant wrote Zeros + Ones, it was already known that this was happening. It has been hypothesized that the increased presence of synthetic hormones and chemicals is contributing to the “sexual order [being] chemically scrambled”, (Plant 217) as chemicals interfere with natural hormonal development and feminize males and females (the latter experiencing higher percentages of homosexual tendencies). The need for an increasingly cheap and synthetic world turns human civilization into an increasingly synthetic, and thus feminine one, and this is already tied to the will towards production and speed in capitalism. There is simply no real need in the developed world for people to be physically fit and active, much less hyper-masculine and muscular. It is nothing more than a decidedly humanistic spectacle, being in awe of the relatively unimpressive capabilities and aesthetics of the human body while meanwhile technocapital has fundamentally transformed the planet in innumerable ways. There is, likewise, a strain put on humanity in keeping up with technocapital to adopt cheaper, easier, more artificial lifestyles; high-testosterone foods like meat are a luxury, something rapidly becoming a thing of the past as climate change threatens to make large swathes of the planet uninhabitable and not suited for the large amounts of land required to raise animals for meat. However much it is yet another neo-masculine pseudo-scientific fad, soy products are aligned with this future.
This, however, is only part of the story. Recent studies, most famously one in 200710 and one meta-analysis of 185 studies from a total of almost 43,000 men referenced in a recent GQ article11, show two things. There is without a doubt a staggering decline in testosterone, so much so that within a generation humans may become completely infertile. And in the face of this data, many scientists vindicate G/ACC and Zeros + Ones in hypothesizing that the most likely cause of this species-wide feminization is acceleration and the accompanying changes in diet, exercise and exposure to artificial chemicals. All of these features of life in an increasingly accelerated capitalist world are unbalancing our hormones and tending us towards a future where the desire and ability to reproduce are things of the past.

Human reproduction is becoming a quaint, unnecessary and ultimately purely elective act, and further evidence12 suggests that sperm is rapidly decreasing not only in quantity but also in quality, positioning the drive towards reproduction, the utility of reproduction, and the ability to reproduce all on a slope of ruthless decline. This is accelerating such an extent that the flow of the remaining strains of the human race are tending in favor of abandoning these vestigial functions, towards a future where the masculine no longer exists. The human body becomes increasingly more useful purely as a heat sink for inhuman production, and is accordingly cast (almost definitively in first-world countries, and soon in the rest of the world) in roles that aren’t physical.

Perhaps the most damning data point of all for the future of males in particular: The Y-chromosome itself is in a state of decay.13 Estimates put the death of the Y-chromosome entirely at many millions of years in the future, but the effects of it are already apparent in the shortening of telomeres, which continues to put pressure on future generations produced via organic means to prove their fitness for survival. All seems to point towards a horizon where the production of the future is done by a purely feminine, lesbian autoproduction — the inhuman producing the future, producing itself, rather than being subject to the ends of the human and aiding in the reproduction of a human future. And while decelerationist reactionaries and males in general may object to this, while they may kick and scream and beg for the wrath of the feminine to have a place for them in the future, it seems without a doubt that their only hope is to try to hit the brakes.
Unfortunately, it isn’t so simple as putting a stop to some coming catastrophe. The truth is that while humanist reproduction has always put the female at a disadvantage, put her in a primordial state of rape and colonization before the biological duty to bear children, this has all along been nothing more than a long-con. As Sadie Plant says, “Unfortunately for [Darwin’s] theory, females do not necessarily choose males who are fit in Darwinian terms.” Instead, they choose males through “‘virility tests designed to get most males killed through exhaustion, disease and violence purely so that females can tell which males have the best genes.'” (Plant 225) Natural selection in other words is a eugenics program directed by females to find the male that will best carry their genes, and the genes males inherit are therefore not meant to ensure they are the most fit for survival, but rather that they are more likely to have to fight for their survival. Males have always served as a means to the end of what ultimately comes to a head in gender acceleration: The liberation of the female sex by acceleration in general, towards maximizing productive potential under such a time that the male is no longer needed.

In other words, human evolution itself is the primal fable of the war between the sexes that radical feminism places at the foundations of its theory. And it is a war that guerrilla female insurgents have been winning the whole time, something that can’t be prevented without a masculine fascistic species suicide. The drive is always towards the future, towards the feminine, and even hopes of artificial wombs saving men cannot hold up to the simple fact that sperm is always cheaper and easier to replicate than egg cells.
It seems to therefore be the case that as far as the human scope as a whole goes, as far as human evolution and human society’s assimilation into technocapital, human bio-diversity selects for women and queerness. A future without men, where the remaining males are left to die off peacefully, in almost every respect seems to be inevitable. The only hope for men is being able to continually stop acceleration, to continually introduce collapse, and indeed there will be to a very large extent men who will resist gender acceleration. It has long been the case in the erasure of trans women from history and is only recently starting to change. And as the acceleration of technocapital intensifies in the near-future and human society begins to fragment even further, the future of gender politics will start to be very different from a good deal of feminist theory. No doubt, we will soon see the formation of pragmatic feminist strategies for exiting patriarchy.

Fundementally, this is the asssertion that these processes are part and parcel of modern capitalism, are essentially inevitable, and will result in the elimination of men and masculinity in its entirety.

Of course the sane response is that:
a) the assertion that falling testosterone levels is equivalent to feminization is inaccurate and not how biology or gender works
b) this is essentially an unintentional negative externality that may have negative health effects and thus should be the target of broader state environmentalist efforts to reduce the widespread and unecessary usage of plastics even within the framework of capitalist economic theory
c) the fearmongering about soy is hilarious and relies on not knowing basic biochemistry, and should be roundly mocked.

Or we could fantasize about an all female lesbian future, I'm certainly not opposed to that course of action, even if it is just that, a fantasy.
 

LordsFire

Internet Wizard
Anyone who says no one needs to be muscular in the modern world is a sheltered person who has never had to work for a living.

Never had to do physical work. There are a fair number of jobs that are not at all physically demanding, but are honest jobs that provide society with useful things.

However, many jobs, even jobs that people don't think of as particularly physical, require physical strength. I worked for ~5 years as a baker, and moving upwards of fifty pounds of dough, moving that much dough inside of bowls that way 30+ pounds by themselves...

Yeah, you build some upper body strength, and that's nothing on jobs like construction or logging.
 

Lazer Raptor

Marxist-Lesbianist
If you aren't muscular and physically fit you are disrespecting yourself.

Low T outside of medical disorders is a symptom of weakness in character.

Soy boys shouldn't be treated as anything other than prey animals.
This is pure idiocy. Testosterone levels are not equivalent to physical fitness or vice versa, it's a single hormone, not a substitute for muscle mass, exercise, etc, and individual levels of testosterone can be quite varied. There is no one size fits all amount of testosterone you want in your body, and having too much testosterone can in fact be harmful. Ultimately hormone levels don't give a shit about your "character", that's not how biology functions, they are a function of your body's internal regulation, consumption, and overall environment.

I also need to emphasize that eating soy does not feminize you and that all healthy men have some level of estrogen in their system, just like all healthy women have some level of androgens such as testosterones. The hysteria over "soy boys" is utterly hilarious in this light, and ultimately more a sign of people's insecurity than a legitimate public health concern.
 

Cherico

Well-known member
Never had to do physical work. There are a fair number of jobs that are not at all physically demanding, but are honest jobs that provide society with useful things.

However, many jobs, even jobs that people don't think of as particularly physical, require physical strength. I worked for ~5 years as a baker, and moving upwards of fifty pounds of dough, moving that much dough inside of bowls that way 30+ pounds by themselves...

Yeah, you build some upper body strength, and that's nothing on jobs like construction or logging.

I thank god for our construction workers with out them civilization would not be possible.
 

LordsFire

Internet Wizard
This is pure idiocy. Testosterone levels are not equivalent to physical fitness or vice versa, it's a single hormone, not a substitute for muscle mass, exercise, etc, and individual levels of testosterone can be quite varied. There is no one size fits all amount of testosterone you want in your body, and having too much testosterone can in fact be harmful. Ultimately hormone levels don't give a shit about your "character", that's not how biology functions, they are a function of your body's internal regulation, consumption, and overall environment.

I also need to emphasize that eating soy does not feminize you and that all healthy men have some level of estrogen in their system, just like all healthy women have some level of androgens such as testosterones. The hysteria over "soy boys" is utterly hilarious in this light, and ultimately more a sign of people's insecurity than a legitimate public health concern.

You may be taking a caricaturized view of others stance on the issue.

Last I checked, high levels of physical exertion and diets heavier in meats are correlated to higher testosterone levels. It's not that they are the same thing, but they are connected things, and if your testosterone levels are low as a man, odds are good you aren't keeping physically fit.

Also, while I'm sure there are a few fringe people who don't know anything much about hormones who would freak out discovering that the two genders each have lesser amounts of the hormone most closely associated with the other, I've never seen any kind of widespread 'hysteria' over the issue.

Also, 'soy boy' isn't something I can say I've ever heard used hysterically, I've heard it used contemptuously. Maybe you've had different experiences than me there. There was also the thing about at least one of the well-known hard-left internet media outlets (I think it was Vox?) took testosterone tests after some article they reported touched on the issue, and it was discovered that every single man who worked there was well below-average on testosterone. There's a whole thing there, with 'soy boys' and their 'soy lattes' jokingly and sometimes not so jokingly being associated with the left.
 

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