Testosterone Trouble

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way – Aristotle

For every woman, there comes a bellwether moment when she realizes that all men are, indeed, created equal. Like it or not, she must face the fact that every male in her life is a walking testament to testosterone. From the time the first manlike creature crawled out of the primordial muck and used his newly developed hands to grab the remote and put up the toilet seat, it’s been the same. The bearers of the Y chromosome, those creatures unable to pick up socks or discard over-used underwear, are doomed to forever repeat hormonal history.

But mothers don’t tell this to daughters. In a conspiracy of silence designed to ensure the survival of the species, they allow girls to grow up blissfully ignorant, thinking their Y guys are different. That’s what I thought, years ago, when I found myself in a restaurant with my father and my new husband. I gazed fondly at these two men in my life. They were polar opposites in personality, and I loved them both.

Then along came a well-endowed woman in a low-cut blouse. As she walked past our table, my men’s heads whipped around in identical fashion and all four ogling eyeballs locked like missile radar on the ta-ta target. Shocked and angry, I attempted to get their attention, finally kicking them under the table.

“That woman could be a nuclear physicist, for all you know,” I said indignantly. “But you’re treating her like a sex object.”

Without missing a beat, my own dear father cracked, “If she’s a nuclear physicist, I’d like to see her reactors.”

Then the man I called Daddy and the man I called Darling made complete, er, boobs of themselves, high-fiving and breaking into loud, obnoxious guffaws.

Although disillusioned, I was determined to go on, and soon, I had a son. Somehow, I was convinced that I could change this boy’s genetic destiny, reverse the macho march of his life with my humanizing influence. And at first, it did seem to be working.

But then he entered puberty, and one day, I got a call from the middle school principal, who told me that the Neanderthal to whom I’d given birth was sitting in detention and whimpering about the agony in his nasal passages. On a dare and apparently trying to impress a nearby group of girls, he had snorted wasabi sauce, then run screaming through the halls swatting at his inflamed nose. This intelligent activity is apparently the highlight of a very popular movie named after a male donkey, which I think pretty much says it all.

Unfortunately, adolescent behavior in the human male extends far beyond the teen years. Take my husband, for example. He decided, after a mere 10 years of consideration, to get a vasectomy. Women can turn to other women for honest opinion and concerned counsel. Men, on the other hand, take great pleasure in throwing their friends into turmoil with derogatory comments designed to undermine a buddy’s manhood. This is a competitive instinct that evolved when primitive hunters had to battle each other for the meatier parts of the mastodon.

When a man undergoes a vasectomy, all his friends will deliver countless cutting remarks about the expected failure of his masculinity, assuring him his life as a he-man is history. My husband fell right into this pattern, but somehow still managed to go under the knife. I gave thanks that it was finally all over.

How wrong I was. The urologist who performed the procedure happened to have a son on the same soccer team as our son. Week after week, this highly educated descendent of Hippocrates would gather the other fathers on the sidelines to exchange jokes about the alteration of my husband’s nether regions, and my spouse would join right in.

They’d all slap each other on the back after every goofy gag and double over in laughter, endlessly amused in the same way that younger males never fail to find humor in their own bodily processes. It took a good year before we could get through a game without some reference to the silly snip and tuck. A woman could give birth to triplets, alone in the woods, with far less hullabaloo.

It was then I came to the estrogen-chilling realization that testosterone will always triumph. Women may be the bedrock of society, but men are the life of the party.

© Jackie Papandrew 2007

About the Author

Jackie Papandrew is an award-winning writer and editor with experience in technical writing and corporate communications, in addition to her humor column. Jackie's humor writing has been featured in books such as Misadventures of Moms and Disasters of Dads and the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, as well as in newspapers such as The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Tampa Tribune and The Oklahoman. She has won awards from American Business Media (including a prestigious Neal Award), Oklahoma Press Association, Parenting Publications of America, America's Funniest Humor Press and the Florida Freelance Writers Association. Jackie is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

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