Amplify: Untucking the junk science behind Tucker Carlson’s testosterone claims

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Rachel Giese is a deputy national editor at The Globe and Mail.

Testicle tanning.

If you’ve seen the now-viral teasers for Tucker Carlson’s Fox News special The End of Men, featuring shirtless hunks wrestling each other and chopping wood while the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey thunders in the background, that phrase will make some sense. Or at least as much sense as can be made of Carlson’s palpitating anxiety about the demise of masculinity – “the total collapse of testosterone levels in American men” is “one of the biggest stories of our lifetimes,” he says in one teaser – and his guest’s quack recommendation that men beam red light on their naked crotches to turbo boost their testosterone production. It’s apparently called “bromeopathy.” And, no, that’s not a joke.

Carlson’s schtick may be clownish, but the joke is on us if we don’t take the real agenda behind his fear-mongering seriously. In the sweaty media manosphere that Carlson inhabits alongside other moral-panic grifters like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, junk science like meat-only diets and COVID-19 denial are peddled as opening acts to the main event: doomsday threats of a coming culture war.

It’s no coincidence that this preoccupation with masculinity comes at a time when the rights of women and LGBTQ people are increasingly under attack. Whipping up hysteria about a fake war on men is part of an ongoing conservative strategy to set up women and LGBTQ people as the enemy who must be thwarted. In the U.S., lawmakers in several states have recently passed restrictive abortion bans, including in Texas, where private citizens can sue abortion providers. Several states also have put trigger bans in place which will make abortion illegal if Roe v. Wade is overturned or scaled back by the U.S. Supreme Court. Florida recently passed a “don’t say gay” law, which forbids public school teachers from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity with children in kindergarten through Grade 3, while state legislatures across the U.S. have proposed a record 238 bills so far this year that would limit the rights of LGBTQ people.

Ironically, Carlson’s special shares a title with Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book The End of Men which argued that women’s economic power was on the ascent due to the new service economy, which valued their skills. A decade on, many of those gains proved to be precarious. COVID-19 took a particular toll on women’s health, safety and economic security. Rates of gender-based violence skyrocketed during the pandemic and the female-dominated service economy disproportionately drove overall employment losses in Canada, and that, together with women leaving jobs in droves due to caregiving burdens, resulted in what’s been called the she-cession.

But in Carlson’s conspiracy-addled imagination, the real victims right now are men and the proof is in the testosterone – or lack thereof. His claim that there’s been a “total collapse,” however, doesn’t have much scientific basis. One 2021 study did find some decline in the average testosterone levels among samples of American teenaged and young adult men – but no evidence of a drought.

But then Carlson’s alarm about waning testosterone is not really about the hormone or even about men’s health at all. In reality, some of the biggest dangers to boys and men are stereotypically macho behaviours and forms of self harm, such as binge drinking, reckless driving and stifling feelings of vulnerability and sadness. A 2020 health study of the 3.1 million children born in Ontario between 1990 and 2016 found that teenaged boys were far more likely to die than teenaged girls and the leading causes were suicide, accidental poisoning or overdose and vehicle accidents. In the U.S., men are disproportionately both the perpetrators and victims of gun violence, while white middle-aged men are more prone than any other group to suicide.

Of course, Carlson is never going to call for more therapy and fewer guns. Instead he’ll use faux concern for men to rail against perceived threats to what he believes testosterone represents: the most unbridled and oppressive forms of patriarchal power. Those oiled-up dudes doing push-ups in Carlson’s special may seem goofy (and more than a little homoerotic), but to him they’re an army readying to fight an incursion led by the likes of women who wish to control their own bodies, Black female judges, teenage climate activists, transgender children and gay dads.

If there’s anything to panic about it’s this: the continued propagation of bad science and dangerous ideas as a front to repeal the rights and progress of others. So let’s get the junk out of science and out of tanning machines.

What else we’re thinking about:

The series finale of Pamela Adlon’s semi-autobiographical dramedy Better Things aired this week, but it’s not too late to binge all five seasons, as I did this past winter and spring. And as a recently separated and suddenly single mom of a teenager, I often felt Adlon was my life coach, therapist and best friend. Warm, funny and at times deeply weird, Better Things captured all the beautiful, heartbreaking messiness of middle-aged life, of teenage rebellion, complicated exes, up and down careers, beloved friends, difficult parents and aging bodies. At once highly specific and deeply relatable, Better Things is one of the best and most powerful shows on TV.

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