Contact: Jed@MenAlive.com
Web: www.MenAlive.com
We live in a time where many believe that “bigger is better,” that going fast beats
going slow. We never seem satisfied with what we have. I have a client who has an
addictive personality. He’s had problems with everything from alcohol to drugs, from
gambling to sex addiction, from overwork to overeating. He tells me, “My drug of
choice is more.” Living in the world we live in, it is not difficult to get caught up in what
It shouldn’t surprise us to find that this often applies to testosterone as well. If high T
is good, well higher T must be even better, and why not go for the highest T possible. In
fact this seemed to be the attitude of many men in a study conducted by Robert S. Tan,
M.D. He asked the men this question—“If the doctor told you that your testosterone
levels were normal, would you still want a testosterone shot?” Tan said he was surprised
by their response. “Almost half (48%) said YES, implying that there is never too much
of a good thing!”
Given all that I have said about the benefits of testosterone you may wonder why I
would suggest that lower may be better. Well, in our high speed, high tech world of big
business where we are told that the latest pharmaceutical is just what we need, it may turn
out that we shouldn’t mess with father-nature. It may not be an accident that young men
often have testosterone levels exceeding 1000ng/dl. while men in their 80s average
200ng/dl.
Look at it from an evolutionary perspective. Young men need all that testosterone to
be able to compete with other testosterone driven males for the right to mate with the
most attractive females. The joke about men thinking with our penises serves the
evolutionary mandate to reproduce. After menopause women can not reproduce.
I’ve heard many post-menopausal women say that they are happy to be out of the
“mating game” where every minute of every day some man is looking at her and thinking
“I’d sure like to have sex with that one.” The woman’s focus shifts in new directions.
Although many men don’t want to admit it, we too are glad to be driven less by our
one-eyed friend. “It’s nice not to be led around by my cock,” one 60 year-old man told
me. “It seems that my whole life has been driven by my need to succeed so that I could
get an attractive woman to pay attention to me. Once I had one, I felt I had to keep
driving myself to prove to her I was worthy of her attention. Meanwhile I was always
being drawn like a magnet to younger and prettier women. I know it may seem unmanly
to say it, but I’m happy to feel less sexually driven. I can finally think about what I
Science seems to back up this view that there are considerable advantages to having
lower testosterone. One of the top researchers in the field is Dr. James McBride Dabbs,
Georgia State University. For over two decades he has conducted cutting-edge research
on the effects of testosterone on the lives of males and females. According to writer
now and speculates about what we may learn in the future in his highly informative book,
normal levels of testosterone. “Frank Sinatra sang, ‘I did it my way,’ and the Beatles
sang ‘I get by with a little help from my friends,’” Dabbs reminds us. “These are the
ways in which high- and low-testosterone people approach the world. Sinatra’s song is
the self-congratulatory, high testosterone way. They are opposing strategies, one based
When I think of higher T and lower T, I often think of the Rolling Stones and the
Beatles. They started at about the same time, dominated the music world, and will leave
a lasting legacy. In contrasting the two groups writer Tom Wolfe said, “The Beatles Want
to Hold Your Hand. But The Stones Want to Burn Your Town.” Can you guess which
Frank Sinatra wasn’t a better singer than John Lennon and The Beatles weren’t a
better band than the Rolling Stones. They are just different. Some people tend to prefer
one over the other. I don’t suppose anyone has taken blood samples of Beatles fans and
compared them with blood samples from Stones fans, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they
people. “High-testosterone people seem to be unhappy when they are alone and happy
when they are with people…Low-testosterone people, on the other hand, seem to be less
compulsively social.”
We can see this in the testosterone levels of various professions. Dabbs and his team
professors, ministers, and actors. He found that ministers, as a group, had the lowest
testosterone levels, actors the highest, and the other groups in between. My father was an
actor and in the early years of his career he was a very ambitious, highly sexual, very
social, and often irritable. “Actors want to be stars,” Dabbs says, “while ministers want
to help.”i I chose not to follow in my fathers footsteps and went into the helping
professions. (I must say, though, that when I toured for my book and did my first major
Even though high T people are very social, they can also be more irritable and
confrontational. “On the average, high-testosterone individuals are tougher, and low-
This difference may have evolutionary advantages in how we reproduce and raise
testosterone may be better for being a good parent and caregiver. Dabbs in fact found
that married men are lower in testosterone than single men and that testosterone levels
dropped when men get married and go up when they get divorced. He also found that
men have higher levels of prolactin and lower levels of testosterone immediately after
they become fathers. “Perhaps these hormonal changes set them up for the gentler