893: Testosterone
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
From WBZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Okay, so maybe you saw on the news that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered everybody in the armed services over 30 years old to have their testosterone levels tested. That's men and women both.
Why did This American Life revisit testosterone testing after Pete Hegseth's order?
And then anybody who wants to get special shots to get a testosterone boost, they can get them. The goal here, Hegseth's social media post about this was titled, The High T, High Testosterone, Department of War. And maybe you saw people had all kinds of reactions to this, including lots of people joking about how Hegseth was suddenly embracing gender-affirming care. I personally had a strong reaction to the idea of testing everybody's testosterone levels in a workplace, which was, I've lived through that here at my job, at This American Life. We did that back in 2002. We did a show where we talked about testosterone and the personality traits that supposedly go along with higher testosterone levels.
And as part of that show, all of us on staff got our testosterone levels tested to see who had the highest. And then before the results came back, we all sat down and discussed who we thought might have the highest, and then we revealed the results. Anyway, today, as a cautionary tale to the men and women of the armed services about what it's like for an entire workplace to test their testosterone, we are rerunning that old show. Our staff experiment you'll hear comes up a little ways into the show. It's act two. But the original episode started with one of our producers at the time, Alex Bloomberg. Joining me in the studio to explain why we took up the subject in the first place back in 2002. 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 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. You know, 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. Like it, it describes basically a group of women, um, sort of going from the fifties through the sixties. And, uh, they sort of all suffer at the hands of the various men in their lives. And, you know, there's, there's constantly, you know, there's like, you know, women are slowly being driven crazy by their husband's incessant criticism, or they're being called ugly after they get mastectomies, or they're being stifled by their husband's emotional shallowness. um, And I noticed you happened to have brought into the studio with you today a copy of The Woman'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, uh... My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch 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. There'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... 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 sat two rows away from me. And I remember one time, like, sitting in homeroom with her and seeing, like, her button-down shirt was open a little bit, and I could catch the barest sliver of her little training bra.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:15
2
Why did This American Life revisit testosterone testing after Pete Hegseth's order?
0:15–9:21
3
How did Alex Blumberg's teenage experiences spark the show's interest in testosterone?
9:21–49:08
4
What immediate physical and psychological effects did Griffin Hansberry feel after testosterone injections?
49:08–1:00:06
5
How did Griffin describe changes in libido, perception, and emotion on testosterone?
1:00:06–1:01:06