Testocalypse

Over the past couple years the simple, ubiquitous hormone testosterone has become a major front of the culture war, thus hopelessly miring information on the subject in endless distortions online. Now, with the average male clocking in at dramatically lower T levels than his father or grandfather at the same age — an ongoing disaster with all manner of biological and social consequence — it has never been more difficult to find information pertaining to the possible reason, or reasons, let alone any potential solutions to the problem.

Can humanity persist in a world without men? Or, at least, a world without the hormone that makes men masculine? Jordan Castro guests today with the canonical piece on this most divisive, essential hormone.

 
Koro — a name taken from the Malay kuru, meaning how it looks when a turtle’s head retracts into its shell — refers to a well-documented, cross-cultural mass hysteria phenomenon during which large groups of men believe their penises are shrinking, sometimes completely disappearing, which they think will lead to their death. Though relatively unknown, the phenomenon has occurred broadly: in China, men thought it was caused by female fox spirits; in Thailand and Singapore, in the 1960s, by poisoning; in Africa between 1998 and 2005, by black magic, during which time 56 people reported instances of genital “shrinking, disappearance, and snatching.” In one instance in Nigeria, in 2001, men who believed their penises were shrinking accused five men of “penis theft” and killed them. Koro, previously thought to be a culture-dependent psychological problem, is now viewed by some as a universal sociocultural phenomenon that tends to arise in moments of social or political strife.

Συνέχεια  εδώ